Palmén Colloquium: Art and empathy in the classroom – decolonizing climate mobility education in primary schools by Vilhelmiina Vainikka
Art and empathy in the classroom – decolonizing climate mobility education in primary schools
Friday 21 FEB 2025, 1 pm – 2 pm
I would like to welcome researchers, teacher educators and teachers to discuss climate change education in primary schools. In this talk, I will argue why climate mobilities education should be included in the Finnish (and other) primary school curriculum (Kallio et al. 2023). And how art-based methods and decolonizing empathy would fit into this education. We have conducted ethnographic research in Finnish and Greek primary schools with 4th grade students in the spring of 2024. We tested different kinds of art-based methods and teaching materials to learn more about learning in primary school climate mobilities education. This talk will present some of our results with the art created during our interventions in multi-cultural classes.
We have learned that multimodal arts-based methods provide opportunities for children to engage, focus, and work with agency on issues that might otherwise seem distant, abstract, or challenging. Practicing empathy for the absent others elsewhere in the world offers opportunities for empathetic engagement in the classroom as well. Decolonizing our understanding of the world for a more relational understanding of our own positionalities challenges the "us" and "them" positions often taken.
Children are exposed to the topic and phenomena of climate change even before it is discussed in school. Some of them may have already experienced forced mobility. This educational pilot, which combines different subjects and methods, opens up possibilities for understanding the complexities of human relations as well as human-environment relations. Our observations support the benefits of bringing climate mobility education into primary schools in order to learn to live with climate mobilities.
Live at Tieteiden talo, room BORG. Also in Teams (link below)
Dr. Vilhelmiina Vainikka, HUMANE-CLIMATE -project, Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University
The Palmén colloquium is an event organized by the Geographical Society of Finland – www.geography.fi
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Microsoft Teams
Meeting ID: 354 091 634 465
Code: cZ3nT9jw