Arts-based Collaborative Digital Eco-Pedagogies for Teaching about the Climate Crisis and Intersecting Global Challenges in Higher and Distance Education

• Project Team: Maria NitaYoseph Araya
• Subject Discipline: Social Sciences and Global Studies
• Theme: Multisensory/multimodal learningOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Enables more students to achieve their study goalsEnhances employability and career progressionImproves and enhance the learning experience of studentsPromotes equality diversity and inclusion including reduction of degree awarding gap
• Status: Complete
• Date: January 2022 to October 2023

The project aims to start a cross-faculty conversation about the current use of novel reflective, digital, public engagement and teaching methodologies in Higher and distance education (Cooke, Araya, Bacon, et al. 2021; Walsh and Powell, 2019). The emphasis of the project will be distance education, given that it will foster crossfaculty dialogue between Open University academics on how new creative pedagogies can address complex global challenges connected with the climate crisis, such as the rapid decline in biodiversity, food security, human and environmental health – in conjunction with emotional and cultural aspects that are simply not being addressed by current pedagogies.  

Research shows that new arts-based methodologies have the potential to address issues of sustainability in much more holistic and transformative ways, whilst addressing issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion (see Nita, 2020; Seal, 2019; Sengupta and Blessinger, 2019). Scholarship suggests that the emotional aspects of learning about such overwhelming contemporary global challenges as climate change include a growing ‘ecoanxiety’ among young people, understood as significant distress about the ecological crisis – which new creative, performative methodologies may have the possibility to constructively alleviate and thus improve mental health and wellbeing (Lehtonen and Pihkala, 2021).   

The main aim of the proposed scholarship project is to investigate how can we and how do we presently engage – as well as what are the benefits of engaging – OU students, as well the wider public/ local community more generally, with key subject areas that introduce global challenges, across the social and natural sciences, via creative and culturally relevant, arts-based collaborative digital methodologies. The project will therefore gather evidence of the creative, arts-based methodologies used at the Open University (since these are increasingly deployed in Higher Education extra-curricular and public engagement activities) and investigate the effect of these pedagogies, their role in providing spaces for reflection and deep engagement for participants with respect to a range of global challenges connected with the climate crisis.   

The project has three key objectives:  

1. To examine current creative arts-based digital teaching methodologies in the Higher Education sector which are deployed when teaching about global challenges connected with the climate crisis, in conjunction with fostering equality, diversity and inclusion.   

1. To investigate current opportunities and challenges in the usage of creative, arts-based, digital public engagement methodologies for educational purposes at the Open University.  

1. To provide a set of tools, methodologies and digital resources that can engage both external publics and students with global challenges and the climate crisis, in Higher Education settings, and specifically in the context of distance education.