Reducing inequalities among species through an arts-based inquiry in early childhood teacher education

Abstract

This article is based on a study in outdoor arts-based education with Norwegian early childhood teacher students. Their teachers of drama and art & crafts (also the researchers and authors of this article) facilitated the specific arts-based learning environments and posed the following question: Which qualities of arts-based learning environments can challenge students to seek toward reduction of inequalities between themselves and more-than-human others? Four narratives were constructed from four of the students’ visual, verbal and audio presentations of their experiences from the outdoor places they engaged with. The students described their processes of connecting to the more-than-human inhabitants of those places, and more-less explicitly expressed changes in their attitudes toward the inhabitants and materials encountered at the places. The narratives, and their analysis, make visible how the students’ arts-based engagements challenged their anthropocentric values and could potentially lead to reduction of inequalities between themselves and the more-than-humans they met at the places. The discussions at the end of the article focus on the first part of the research question and sum up four qualities of the arts-based environments that were present in the four narratives. These qualities are imagination, self-initiated actions, emphatic connections, and time for aesthetic engagement.