Conference Agenda

This research aims to explore the interfaces of Philosophy for/with children method (e.g., Murris et al., 2017) and artistic sustainability project. In the era of polycrisis, novel ways of knowing and being are acutely required. The decline of democracies, the erosion of human rights, and the exacerbation of climate change pose serious challenges to education and societies: how to foster a more sustainable future? This research investigates the potential of combining the Philosophy for/with children method, artistic practices, and sustainability education to foster democratic methodology and collectively explore novel ways of knowing beyond traditional Euro-, West-, and adult-centric knowledge.

Our transdisciplinary research project Art of knowing through (un)learning (2025-2028) combines dance art, educational sciences, and philosophy. In our experimental approach, we conduct nature and dance workshops with children and adults across different age groups in forests. Utilising ethnography and philosophical workshops, we explore what following children, play, and trees do to our knowing, being and (un)learning. The project explores and extends embodied qualitative methodology (Ellingson, 2017) and embodied knowing. It aims to foster caring, playful and imaginative ways of being amid the socio-ecological crises.

Philosophy for/with children (Murris et al., 2017) has been an influential global movement that takes children’s perspectives seriously and engages children in philosophy and careful thinking. Although the movement is not fully unified, it has often emphasised learning through rational deliberation and argumentation. While this is important in our era of spreading disinformation and decline of democracies, we seek to complement and experiment the philosophy for/with children in an embodied and informal way, carried out in forests and cultivating embodied, interconnected and relational ways of being, knowing and observing.

The theoretical framework of this paper draws on feminist new materialism (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2023), care ethics (Tronto, 1993) and theorising of imagination and play (Murdoch, 1992; Joseph, 2024; Vygotsky, 2004; Ferholt et al., 2023). These are combined with an investigation of the possibilities of moral imagination and loving attention, which are approached through the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch and decolonial feminism of Maria Lugones (e.g., Lugones, 2010). Our theoretical framework combines typically distinct fields in a novel way, striving to envision more just and sustainable futures. Attentiveness to injustices and more-than-human perspectives are important thread in our approach. Concerning children, this research resists structural discrimination against children (e.g., childism, Adami, 2023) which typically leads to neglecting children’s views. Here, especially the research on playworlds (Ferholt et al., 2023; Rainio et al., in press) is used to theorise and practice ways for joint action and collaborative creative inquiry across generations and age groups.

Our work is carried out in Finland and the United States, but the results bear significance to European and global audiences, as the global crises we face require joint action across borders. In this presentation, we focus on the preliminary results of the workshops in Finland. In science, transdisciplinarity and especially art (Rouhiainen, 2017) offer perspectives to interrupt our usual ways of doing research and knowledge, which have not hitherto been able to stop us from acting in unsustainable ways. Hence, we suggest novel and perhaps risky ways of trying to establish different ways of doing.

By focusing on school students' experiences of art museums' teaching in eco art, we have investigated how art museums engage with nature, climate crises, biodiversity, and sustainability, and how students become engaged in understanding nature. In a museum teaching about eco art, the student does not necessarily have direct or widespread contact with nature itself, as in land art and similar practices. In the institutional framework and space of the museum, on the other hand, there is a special and slightly more distanced relationship to nature, for example, through the aesthetic presentation, thematization, and choice of materials, which provides a different and interesting opportunity to sense nature's beauty, complexity and extension in time and space (Sattrup & Knudsen, 2025). We have thus been concerned with investigating how school students, through experiences of eco art in art museums, are engaged in understanding nature.

‘Eco art’, ‘Ecological art’ and ‘Environmental art’ stem from a common idea of ​​describing nature and people’s relationship to the environment through varying degrees of involvement in climate issues and thereby addressing and to varying degrees increasing public awareness and qualification of the various natural crises we face (Weintraub, 2012; Brown, 2014). Under the collective name ‘eco art’, this art form is increasingly appearing in art museums, which has inspired schoolteachers who visit exhibitions to teach about nature from an artistic perspective (Inwood, 2008). ‘Eco art’ (Eng. ecological art) is an artistic movement or genre that thematizes nature’s intrinsic value, expression, and significance for humans (Kagan, 2015).

In this project, we have focused on how children experience this art genre through museum media, and whether the genre and media support them in looking curiously and wonderingly at nature and humanity's relationship to it. Art, in itself, has the potential to stimulate the imagination by presenting the world from certain perspectives and, at times, in disharmonious forms, thereby providing emotional and cognitive space for imagining the world differently, a process that may be reinforced by our own aesthetic or discursive expression of the experience of art (Biesta, 2017). In addition, we know that art pedagogy and aesthetic approaches to teaching can arouse engagement, curiosity and motivation when, in museum education, students are invited to participate on their own terms and enter into dialogue with each other and the works (Illeris, 2009; Davis, 2018; Sunassee et al., 2021; Sattrup & Knudsen, 2024a,b,c).

Research in art education indicates that students engage with climate and sustainability when instruction moves beyond the school setting and when they are given opportunities to express themselves through artistic forms of work (Da-vis, 2018). A review of research on eco-art education (Eng.: ‘Eco-art education’) shows that teaching, which draws on elements of outdoor education, climate education, and practical music, plays an important role in sustainability themes across social programs and education (Sunassee et al., 2021). Eco-art education creates opportunities for students to both strengthen their knowledge of and empathy for the environment through work with visual forms of expression.

To understand student engagement, we take the concept of aesthetic resonance as our starting point. Aesthetic resonance builds on Hartmut Rosa's understanding of resonance (2016, 2020), Böhme's idea of ​​atmosphere (2016), and Bennett's concept of enchantment (2001), as well as Heidegger's (1978) and Trout's (2008) understanding of attunement. Together, they describe how engagement is created and arises relationally through sensory experiences, which we have used to analyze student engagement in nature in connection with teaching eco art at an art museum.

In this contribution we present on-going research that aims at developing the principles of an art education which fosters the capacities for resonance, responsiveness and responsibility and thereby also contributes to nurturing sustainable ways of being-in-the-world, which might offer a response to dealing with the ecological crisis in education. Conducted in collaboration with an international consortium of European universities, elementary schools and educational-artistic NGOs, this study further examines how educators can bring their pedagogical interactions into closer alignment with values of sustainability and inclusion, and how arts-based didactic models may support this alignment within concrete educational practices.

The project starts from the observation that too often contemporary education for sustainable development continues to emphasise solutions, skills, and competencies, commonly framed within technocratic or instrumental paradigms.. Against this background, the present study positions arts education as a particularly fertile domain for engaging with these dimensions, given its potential to cultivate imagination, sensibility, and embodied forms of knowing. Rather than approaching the environment as an object to be analysed or managed, sustainability is understood here as a relational question: how humans encounter, respond to, and care for a shared world.

The theoretical framework is grounded in contemporary educational philosophy and social theory that foreground relationality and world-centredness. A central point of reference is Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance (Rosa, 2016; Lijster & Celikates, 2019)which describes a mode of relating to the world characterised by openness, responsiveness, and the possibility of mutual transformation, in contrast to relations based on control or domination. From this perspective, sustainability is not primarily about mastering nature, but about cultivating the capacity to listen and respond to what the world addresses to us (Brosette & Bieling, 2025) Education, in turn, is understood as a practice of presenting the world as meaningful and addressable, inviting learners into forms of responsible participation rather than extractive engagement.

This orientation dovetails with broader critiques of strongly student-centred or outcome-driven educational models, which often privilege efficiency, individual achievement, and measurable outputs. Drawing on the work of educational theorists such as Gert Biesta (2017;2022) the study adopts a world-centred educational perspective in which the guiding question shifts from “What does the learner want or need?” to “What is the world asking of us?” (Vansieleghem, 2021). Within arts education, this shift has far-reaching didactic consequences: materials, artistic processes, and pedagogical gestures function as implicit carriers of values and worldviews. The research therefore pays close attention to the tension between educators’ espoused theories and their theories-in-use, following Argyris and Schön (1978) highlighting how commitments to sustainability may be articulated at the level of discourse while remaining insufficiently realised in everyday practice.

Methodologically and conceptually, the study is further informed by arts-based and practice-oriented research traditions (cf. Manning, 2017; cf. Jamouchi, 2024). Didactic design is not approached as the linear application of predefined principles, but as a creative, situated, and reflexive process. The resulting ART-ECO didactic model is deliberately non-prescriptive and exploratory. Conceived as a cartographic tool, it is intended to support educators in critically reflecting on and reconfiguring their practices. By engaging with local materials, ecological contexts, and collaborative artistic processes, the research investigates how arts education can enact sustainability as a lived and relational experience, rather than as an abstract or external theme.

In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates on education for sustainable development by articulating and empirically exploring a world-centred, arts-based theoretical framework. It argues that meaningful responses to the climate crisis require not only new forms of knowledge and skill, but also transformed relationships to the world—relationships that arts education is particularly well positioned to cultivate.