This chapter outlines an exercise in which students are invited to imagine various aspects of life in the future and then collaboratively co-create poems about these futures. The chapter promotes and values the use of creative writing to promote futures thinking capabilities. 

This article presents results from a study where applied drama interventions were deployed in four different groups to build capacities to re-imagine economics. Participants were interviewed or entered dialogue with each other after completing the drama work. Through a close reading of one of the conversations that stands out as glowing in the research material and with inspiration from rhizomatic analysis, we identify four nodes that point to drama as a hopeful practice during insecure times. The dramatic arts have historically facilitated the navigation of localized political and economic tensions, but research and practice has not seemingly addressed the transitions to more holistic forms of development embedded within the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 8: Decent Work and Inclusive Economic Growth. Conceptualizing this transition as liminal, we argue for the use of drama(tic) arts to navigate this state. The node Space for emotions articulates drama as a possibility to embrace and integrate difficult emotions. The node Openings and invitations – a new learning experience describes drama as an unconventional form of teaching that opens for creativity and new understandings. The third node Pretending towards new realities points to how the imaginative aspects of drama can give experiences of new pretended states beyond the liminal. Finally, the node Discomfort and its reinterpretations shows how challenging aspects of drama can be understood as in itself creating a liminal state where the unexpected can emerge. Findings echo the transformatory potential of drama(tic) arts in prior environmental and sustainability education research but extend it in the specific context of navigating and re-imagining economic growth (SDG8), and point to specific qualities of drama when trying to move towards sustainability in difficult times.

This article describes the use of clowning in explorations of sustainability and economics. It analyzes the author’s own clown work through an autoethnographic study, and in relation to the field of transgressive learning. The analysis shows how clowning was a resource to overcome fear in facing difficult issues and to process sustainability with devotion, vulnerability, and joy. The clowning clarified important aspects of sustainability learning and the research points to the clown as an inspiration to imaginative and embodied ways of learning with the aim of transgressing unsustainable norms and transforming ourselves, as well as our societies.

The arts encompass a broad and diverse landscape of interrelated creative practices and professions, including performance arts (including music, dance, drama, and theatre), literary arts (including literature, story, and poetry), and the visual arts (including painting, design, film) (see UNESCO 2006). They have been explicitly linked to sustainable development in higher education at a global level through UNESCO’s Road Map for Arts Education (UNESCO 2006) and The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education (UNESCO 2010). Specifically, the arts have been deployed to promoting human rights, enhancing education, promoting cultural diversity, enhancing well-being, and, most broadly, “resolving the social and cultural challenges facing today’s world” (UNESCO 2010: 8).

The rock art of indigenous communities from 20,000 years ago have been interpreted as early indications of how humans have connected performance, in a broad sense, with the health and well-being of their communities (Fleischer and Grehan, 2016). Now, at a global level, there is increasing recognition that drama and theatre can facilitate a variety of health and wellbeing outcomes for an extensive range of groups, not pre-determined by affluence or socioeconomic status (APPG, 2017). In a broad sense, drama and theatre are a constellation of arts based practices, processes, and spaces, which intentionally work with more or less fictive characters, roles, relationships, and plots, in order to generate a wide range of experiences or outcomes (Wall, Österlind and Fries, 2018, forthcoming). Indeed, theatre and drama have been described as “the most integrative of all the arts: they include singing, dancing, painting, sculpture, storytelling, music, puppetry, poetry and the art of acting” (British Medical Association, 2011, p 10), which can help people to understand and then change how they relate to and then live out their own world.

The connections between art, art making, education, and responsibility in relation to the wider natural and social world have been given increasing attention over the last thirty years. For example, there have been a variety of journal special issues dedicated to art, education, and: ecology (Krug, 1997), social justice and social change (Bolin, 1999), community and responsibility (Carpenter, 2004), ecology and responsibility (Stout 2007), health and wellbeing (Haywood Rolling 2017), and human rights (Kraehe 2017). Such a rise has been linked to trends in the human search for meaning and significance amongst (and resistance against) globalisation, domination of market forces, and an increasingly complex and chaotic environment (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009)...

I paperpresentationen Estetiska ämnen och inslag i lärarutbildningen – smörgåsbord eller smulor? ger Österlind (2016) en bild av stor variation och brister i kursutbudet gällande estetiska läroprocesser på svenska lärosäten. I denna workshop tar vi avstamp i detta, men också i våra egna upplevelser som yrkesverksamma. Vi delar erfarenheter kring hur utrymmet för estetiska lärprocesser på svenska lärosäten och i svensk skola påverkar oss i vårt arbete. Vi visionerar kring hur vi skulle vilja ha det och undersöker vägar framåt. Vilka strategier tror vi på och hur kan vi stötta varandra? Kan vi gå från splittring till gemensam aktion för att göra skillnad? Vi tar hjälp av metoder från dramapedagogiken för att gestalta och praktiskt undersöka temat. Att arbeta med drama innebär att involvera flera delar av oss själva, att mötas i grupp och arbeta kreativt tillsammans, vilket oftast gör arbetet lösningsfokuserat och lustfyllt. Frivillighet och trygghet i gruppen är den grund på vilket allt dramaarbete vilar.