“Which Voices Are Heard? Who Is Silenced?”: Learning from Young People About the Climate Emergency Using Artivism as a Sustainable Pedagogy

This article reports on an international project involving higher education institutions working in partnership with third sector organizations, to explore facilitating children and young people in expressing their concerns and ideas about climate change directly to decision-makers. Children and young people were invited to engaged in ‘artivism’ (the use of art for activism) to create exhibitions for policymakers and business leaders in Scotland, Kenya and Nigeria. Through co-creation, underpinned by the principles of sustainable pedagogies, the project team created spaces and research methods exploring how artivism for climate action can be supported and enacted. The focus of this article is on the role of adults as local facilitators, educators, research team members, and exhibition attendees in facilitating, listening to, and engaging with children and young people as they express themselves and generate climate action through their artivism. It illustrates how adults enacting sustainable pedagogies, care and compassion are critical, and how arts-based education for sustainability involves pedagogies of collaboration and co-creation which entangle us with people, places, ideas, languages, materials and environments beyond our immediate educational settings.