How to practice life-friendly education?:Theoretical reflections and practice experiences from art education, in Denmark and in Italy

The climatically increasingly unstable times we are living in have been defined Anthropocene to describe an epoch in earth’s history in which human activities have become dominant, with negative effects on all strata of the life-critical zone slightly below and above the surface of the earth (Latour, 2017; Ellis, 2018). For over a century there have been authors who have explored the problematic relationship with the living world, that is typical of modernity, described as an era of separation between nature and humanity (Guardini, 1993) and of exile from the living (Benasayag & Cany, 2022). A condition of earth and life forgetfulness (Paulsen, 2022) which from an educational point of view requires complex responses and not the simple adaptation of strategies that are part of the problem (Nørreklit & Paulsen, 2022). In this direction, live friendly education may be seen as a life-disclosing practice: grounded in a profound “openness” to life. This paradigm challenges traditional delineations, such as indoor vs. outdoor and human vs. non-human. It suggests that life seamlessly intertwines with all human endeavors. Opposing modernity’s inclination to establish societal structures based on life-forgetfulness, it advocates educational models that 1) refrain from domineering and controlling stances, and 2) unveil life’s self-creative and regenerative essence (Nørreklit and Paulsen, 2023). Art education seems to be a meaningful practice in order to embrace a life-friendly education: the different languages of art tend to give values to other ways of knowledge and learning, not only rationalist or technical, to be open to the embodied dimension of human existence in the world, to develop processes out of the logic of control and in emergent ways. Art seems to be a form of relation between humans and other than humans, but we have to consider the different approaches that can shape this relation. In this paper we suggest a distinction between at least 3 approaches: The first approach ‘the compensatory modern’ uses more-than-human landscapes as ‘inspiration’ for artistic production as re- presentation e.g. in painting or sculpture. The second approach ‘the anthropocene disillusional’ uses art to criticize human activities and how they transform the environment. The third approach ‘the life-centric open’ uses art to open up relationships with life and the living world, otherwise neglected or closed-off. From an educational point of view, such artistic events can frame educational experience where the subject is fostered to be in dialogue with the world (Biesta, 2017). After the exploration of the theoretical framework of life-friendly education in the context of art education, the paper discusses two practices. The first practice has been experimented in Denmark, in the context of informal art education in civil society. It involves both young people, and adults, who are invited to experiment with their relationship toward a specific place, but also share memories together about significant life experiences in their past. The experiment is framed by ideas coming from new Daoism and environmental philosophy (Nelson, 2020), around the concept wuwei (literally meaning doing-nothing) as a strategy to become open to and attuned to ziran (meaning life, in this context). The sharing of memories of past life experiences around a fire, focus on what Bron Taylor has named eye-to-eye-epiphanies (Taylor, 2010). The two exercises form an artistic practice and educational event 57as well, where non-controlling relationships with the living world are aimed for. In the paper we discuss how the different participants respond to such invitations that goes beyond standard techno-bureaucratic mainstream education (Roy, 2003). The second one has been implemented in Italy, in the context of upper secondary school. It involves adolescent male and female students in place-based creative writings practice, connected to the curriculum of language education. Teachers explore different places of the neighborhood as living educational contexts, where experiment observation and nature writing, in narrative and poetic forms. The texts written by the students and their perceptions explored by focus groups and interviews have been analyzed. In this paper we describe the educational practice and report the main research findings: the entanglement between embodied and verbal dimensions of experience, a deeper sense of attention, a sense of freedom from institutional schooling time and space. Key results of the analyzed practices are: 1) They make participants potentially aware of the value and importance of the more-than-human living world and life as such; 2) They cultivate non-dominating and non-controlling attitudes towards life and the living world, 3) They disrupt and go beyond standard modern ways of schooling and institutionalization, 4) they can lead to deeper attentiveness and perhaps also ‘peaceful’ states of being-in-the-world, 5) they can open up artistic practices that are inclusive and goes beyond modern artistic practices like looking at paintings on a museum. In contrast to these ‘positive’ findings, we also speculate that it might be difficult to integrate such practices on larger scales into formal education to transform the educational system more radically to become ‘life-friendly education’. Keywords Life-friendly Education; Arts Education; Outdoor Education; Place-based Writing. References: Benasayag & Cany (2022). Il ritorno dall’esilio. Ripensare il senso comune. Vita e Pensiero. Biesta, G. (2017). Letting art teach. Art EZ Press. Ellis, E. C. (2018). Anthropocene: a very short introduction (Vol. 558). Oxford University Press. Guardini, R. (1993). Lettere dal lago di Como: la tecnica e l’uomo. Morcelliana. Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons Nelson, E. S. (2020). Daoism and environmental philosophy: Nourishing life. Routledge. Nørreklit, L., & Paulsen, M. (2022). To Love and Be Loved in Return: Toward a Post-Anthropocene Pedagogy and Humanity. In Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth(pp. 217-240). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Nørreklit, L., & Paulsen, M. (2023). Life-friendly: who we are and who we want to be. Journal of Pragmatic Constructivism, 13(1), 9-22. Paulsen, M. (2022). From Onto-sympathy and Ecological Awareness to Ethico-sympathy and Zoëlogical Interaction, Embodied Beings, and Pedagogy in an Anthropocene Age. Futures of Education, Culture and Nature - Learning to Become, 1, 224-239.Paulsen, Roy, K. (2003). Teachers in nomadic spaces: Deleuze and curriculum. Peter Lang. Taylor, B. R. (2010). Dark green religion: Nature spirituality and the planetary future. Univ of California Press.

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