This fall, our graduate program curriculum includes a new course: Art, Science, and Climate Justice Education. The course is co-taught by IslandWood Graduate Program faculty, Renée Comesotti and University of Washington faculty, Charles Peck. Renée shares more about the course below!

What is the idea behind the Art, Science, and Climate Justice Education course?

It’s a studio course – very little lecture, more working in groups, and more of an experiential time where we focus on doing/making. Our idea is to examine “experiences” in which we explore the methods of both science and art as tools that can help us see the world around us in new ways. Our intention is to become more aware and more skillful in using these tools to engage some of the challenges of our climate future, and to learn to use these tools with the children our grads lead in our School Overnight Program.

We begin each four-hour class with a forest walk. During the walk, grads reflect upon that week’s prompt in connection with their experience of the more-than-human world outdoors. We follow this with a period for making, in which students respond aesthetically to their experience and emerging ideas and questions. This is followed by studio critique and discussion. Our guiding question throughout is, “What are we learning and how are we learning it?”

Why did we add the course to the grad curriculum?

None of us can fully anticipate the problems we’ll need to solve for in the climate future we face together. So in this sense, we are all students of a future that is unfolding around us. Our challenge as educators, then, is not just to learn but to figure out what we need to learn, and perhaps most important, to learn how to learn in new ways. IslandWood has always held a commitment to art integration  as an element of the School Overnight Program curriculum. This course invites grads to investigate what can happen if we merge ways of thinking – not just art in the service of science, as it were, but art and science together, as equal participants in the creative act of generating new knowledge.

What is your ultimate goal with this course?

As educators we have a responsibility to prepare ourselves for the work of supporting children and youth to understand what is happening around them, and to engage our climate future from a hopeful and creative stance. Our ultimate aim is to cultivate deeper connections to the world and our own experience, and deeper understandings of what learning is and how it happens. In this way, we lay groundwork for imagining and enacting new visions of our shared future.

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Learn more about our graduate program in partnership with the University of Washinton here.

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