Arts educational responses to current life-forgetfulness

In this section, we outline three arts-based educational responses to contemporary predicaments, aiming to identify potential life-friendly practices.Footnote ⁴ We suggest these to examine the intentions, reactions and potential outcomes of various arts educational practices (presented in subsequent sections) that might dislodge normalised practices, thus fostering life-friendly relationships with life (Illeris & Paulsen, Reference Illeris, Paulsen, Østern, Illeris, Jusslin, Holdhus and Knudsen2024; Illeris, Reference Illeris2012a; Nørreklit & Paulsen, Reference Nørreklit, Paulsen, Paulsen, jagodzinski and Hawke2022). The three responses we want to speculate with are these:

1. (1) The Modern Compensatory Response. This response attempts to compensate for the violence and control inherent in dominant modes of human existence within the contemporary precarious situation (Jukes, Reference Jukes2023). In education, this might involve taking students into nature (e.g., a forest) for less structured activities — a temporary break from the classroom setting. Students might engage in nature-inspired art, creating a contrast to the pressures and limitations of conventional education (Roy, Reference Roy2003). Such a response, however, may reinforce binary oppositions such as culture/nature, indoor/outdoor, standard/exceptional education and may reinforce a view of nature as something external to culture, available for human use (Illeris et al., Reference Illeris, Paulsen, Østern, Illeris, Jusslin, Holdhus and Knudsen2024; Illeris, Reference Illeris2012b).

2. (2) The Critical-Disillusional Response. This response critiques the nature/culture dichotomy, recognising that we live in the Anthropocene, where human activity profoundly impacts all life within the life-critical zone (Paulsen, Jagodzinski & Hawke Reference Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022). The concept of pure, untouched nature is obsolete; human influence now pervades all life. Consequently, this response focuses on the impact of human actions on the environment. In arts education, this might involve creating art that reflects the “wasteland” resulting from human dominance (Illeris et al., Reference Illeris, Paulsen, Østern, Illeris, Jusslin, Holdhus and Knudsen2024; Illeris, Reference Illeris2012a). Yet, the drawback of this response is that it overemphasises human influence. It fails to recognise that more-than-human life creates new life beyond human impacts, but also penetrates everything human beings do (because everything they do can only be done because they are living beings in a living world).

3. (3) The Life-Opening Response. This response engages with emerging more-than-human life, acknowledging its transformative power. It seeks to support and align with self-emerging life, potentially contributing to a deconstruction of the Anthropocene (Illeris et al., Reference Illeris, Paulsen, Østern, Illeris, Jusslin, Holdhus and Knudsen2024; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen2023). Arts educational practices might involve attending to life’s own powers, even in seemingly damaged or impacted environments (e.g., a landfill). The aim is to foster co-flourishing with diverse life forms, recognising that creative potential is not solely a human attribute but inherent in life itself (Bergson, Reference Bergson1998). In arts education, this might involve fostering unpredictable arts practices that rewild education, aiming for a future where life is nurtured. Such practices aim to disrupt established norms, fostering alternative ways of being in the world (Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022). This response moves beyond simply critiquing human impact to actively support life’s flourishing.

The following sections will explore three specific arts educational practices. In each case, we will draw on the outlined art educational responses to discuss to what extent the practices can be twisted in more or less life-friendly directions. By twisting we mean altering the framing of a particular practice, without making it into a totally different practice. Using a post-qualitative lens (St. Pierre, Reference St Pierre2021; Malone & Crinall, Reference Malone and Crinall2024), we speculate how twisting each practice might promote life-friendly education and foster new relationships with the living world. Our focus lies not on exhaustive documentation, but on imaginative exploration and exemplification of pathways.

Practice # 1: Poetry and nature writing

Writing is a central educational concern. Even before formal schooling, writing served as a meaningful human practice, a means of engaging with the world through language (Ingold, Reference Ingold2022a; Reference Ingold2022b). On the other hand, writing can be seen as a form of distancing from the living world that contributes to its forgetfulness (Abram, Reference Abram1997), especially when it privileges abstract and disembodied forms. However, we can hypothesise that certain writing practices could be twisted in order to promote a different kind of experience, towards life-opening forms of relationships between the subjects and the living word. Creative writing, in particular, occupies a unique space within education, bridging linguistic education, arts education, and broader pedagogical approaches. This section explores creative writing practices — specifically, poetry — that emphasise the dynamics of relationships with nature and places (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024; Sobel, Reference Sobel2004). These practices provide different opportunities for teachers and students to engage in generative dialogues with these places and they acknowledge nature’s inherent educational agency (Ford & Blenkinsop, Reference Ford and Blenkinsop2018; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Morse and Jensen2018; Quay & Jensen, Reference Quay and Jensen2018).

This study employed place-based writing (PBW) practices within an upper secondary school in north-eastern Italy. Using a participatory action research framework (Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon Reference Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon2014), a research group comprising three literature teachers (L1) and three outdoor educators, coordinated by Tommaso Reato, conducted the project.

PBW encompasses diverse educational practices situated at the intersection of place-based education and writing pedagogies (Jacobs, Reference Jacobs2011; Montgomery & Montgomery, Reference Montgomery and Montgomery2024). PBW has been widely used to foster student connections with their communities, developing place attachment and civic skills (Brooke, Reference Brooke2003; Donovan, Reference Donovan2016; Esposito, Reference Esposito2012). Creative PBW has been studied theoretically (Case, Reference Case2017; Harper, Reference Harper2024), regarding the development of linguistic skills (Neville et al., Reference Neville, Petrass and Ben2023) and in relation to wild pedagogies (Jickling & Morse, Reference Jickling and Morse2022). The process of attuning with places through creative linguistic practices is also explored in some relevant studies about indigenous ways of knowing and researching (Arnold et al, Reference Arnold, Atchison and McKnight2023; Poelina et al, Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2024).

The theoretical underpinnings of this practice draw on Ricoeur’s (Reference Ricoeur2020) work on metaphor. The French thinker, starting from a hermeneutic approach, attributes a referential capacity to metaphor that emerges as an authentic way of knowledge. Guardini (Reference Guardini1995) further emphasises poetry’s role in giving voice to human encounters with the living world, mirroring humanity’s earliest experiences with nature (Guardini, Reference Guardini1995, p. 25).

The PBW practices included diverse indoor and outdoor, theoretical and experiential activities. Settings included a school garden, city parks, and an educational farm. Activities involved embodied experiences, writing experiments, and group reading and reflection. These practices engage with arts education in two ways: (1) formally, integrating with language curricula and exploring disciplinary content (e.g., poetic form and rhetorical figures); and (2) broadly, fostering life-friendly relationships between students, humans and more-than-humans, thereby cultivating life-friendly perspectives within the school system (Paulsen, Reference Paulsen2023).

Practice # 2: Propositions

In Southern Norway, at the faculty of fine arts of the University of Agder (UiA) I, Helene Illeris, has experimented with the practice of propositions as part of Bachelor- and Master’s courses in arts education together with my colleagues Tormod W. Anundsen and Lisbet Skregelid (Illeris & Anundsen, Reference Illeris, Anundsen, Paulsen and Tække2024; Illeris & Skregelid, Reference Illeris, Skregelid, Østern, Illeris, Knudsen, Jusslin and Holdhus2024). “Propositions” as a form of pedagogical practice was originally proposed by the American process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1978), who defined the proposition as “a hybrid between pure potentialities and actualities (pp. 185-186).

Inspired by Whitehead and by the use of propositions by the Canadian philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (Reference Manning, Massumi, Faber, Halewood and Davies2020), we have involved our students as research partners in case studies, adopting methodological approaches from participatory action research similar to those employed in practice # 1 above (Kemmis et al., Reference Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon2014; Illeris & Skregelid, Reference Illeris, Skregelid, Østern, Illeris, Knudsen, Jusslin and Holdhus2024). We introduced the task to the students by presenting them with the following introduction to the concept of propositions (also quoted in Illeris, Reference Illeris, Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022:187):

• A proposition is as an open invitation that someone/something offers to you

• It is not an assignment but an occasion to open your worldviews and let them develop in new and unexpected directions

• Instead of explaining and simplifying, a proposition maintains and explores complexity

• A proposition works from a premise of equality instead of hierarchy

• A proposition is an occasion to experience sensuous knowledge in the making

• A proposition is a practice, meaning that you can only create propositions by practicing them yourself before you offer them to others

We ask the students to elaborate propositions to each other in pairs through different forms of practice and in relation to a theme. Examples of themes that we have been working with have included: “paradoxes in society,” “‘sensuous sustainability education” and “resonance in the Anthropocene.” The students experiment with propositional practices as a form of relational art (Bourriaud, Reference Bourriaud2002), meaning that the sensuous, aesthetic and provocative qualities that characterise contemporary art forms are to be found within the relationships to the world created by the propositions. Whitehead (Reference Whitehead1978: 187) writes: “A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for feeling, and when admitted into feeling it constitutes what is felt.” (Italics in original).

The process of the students (in pairs) goes like this: First they sketch some lines that could be used for a proposition. As inspiration, each of them has brought an image from home that represents how they relate affectively to the theme, e.g., of the Anthropocene. For example, the two master students Ingvild and Veslemøy worked with the following proposition (shortened version):

The practice was then to try out how the proposition could be experienced and if and how it could eventually be changed, before handing it over to someone else. For example, the above proposition might turn into something simpler like: “Go out in nature. Find a man-made object that does not belong here. Relate to it” — or even the simplest proposition that has been created by our students so far: “Make a difference.”

In the second part of the assignment, the proposition is given to one of the other pairs — like a gift, with no explanations, maybe in the form of a letter. The receivers then will practice and experience the proposition their way.

At the end of the workshop (occurring over 2–3 days), the pairs present their work to each other — both how they developed their own proposition and how they enacted and experienced the proposition that was given to them.

Practice #3: Minor experiences

Becoming friends with life is not easy, but which genuine friendships are easy anyway? To find ways, Jane Bennett suggests, in our interpretation, that it might be helpful to cultivate ourselves to become open to and co-create minor experiences, consisting of moments of enchantments, from which attachments to life and love for the world can flow (Bennett, Reference Bennett2001; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen2022). Such moments can be cultivated and intensified by artful means, as an uneasy combination of artifice and spontaneity (Bennett, Reference Bennett2001:10). In accord with Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1986), minor experiences indicate moments that break off, and open up to alternative worlds, but are discarded, ignored, suppressed, marginalised, rejected or made irrelevant by dominating norms and structures, not least in modern mainstream techno-bureaucratic education (Roy, Reference Roy2003).

The wonder of some minor experiences — and the artificial ways to cultivate and create such — can be shared here, gathered through three post-qualitative speculative experiments (St. Pierre, Reference St Pierre2021) that correspond with Jane Bennett (Reference Bennett2020), Eric Nelson (Reference Nelson2020) and Bron Taylor (Reference Taylor2009) respectively. The three experiments have been caried out four times, in each case making up “a life-friendly walk” conducted and iterated by me, Michael Paulsen, together with different people (ten to sixty, age 0–80) and more-than-human life between 2022 and 2024, in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Italy.Footnote ⁶

Discussion of minor experiences

Experiments with minor experiences seem to foster momentary life communities and what the educational researcher Mathilda Brückner calls collective glowing moments and living we-stories (Brückner, Reference Brückner, Lysgaard, Reid and Elf2025). Like in the poems shared by Riccardo and Marco in practice # 1 and the propositions created and enacted by Ingvild and Veslemøy, minor experiences facilitate moments of wonder, life-friendly attunement and micro-care. Sharing minor experiences, building trust and courage, finding the words to express shared feelings, and creating space for vulnerable conversations about what matters — how we relate to the world — appears to cultivate life-friendly and life-caring communities that include both humans and more-than-humans. Through consistent engagement with onto-sympathies, doing-nothing and zoë-memories, this may gradually give rise to what Bennett describes as a kaleidoscopic shift in everything we see, hear, smell, touch, taste and think (Bennett, Reference Bennett2017a).

However, these experiments also highlight the potential for regressions. If minor experiences are viewed merely as brief respites from modern life — escapist excursions into nature — they might reinforce the modern compensatory response and the nature-culture divide, contributing to romanticisation. To counter this, one could focus the search for onto-sympathies, doing-nothing and zoë-memories on deconstructing such artificial divisions. Onto-sympathies can arise from encounters with all vibrant materialities, and doing-nothing is a mode of being applicable in any context. To avoid regression towards the compensatory response, we might also adjust the timeframe. Instead of brief doing-nothing exercises (e.g., 15 minutes), we could incorporate wuwei strategies within longer-term educational initiatives. An example might be digging waterholes in human-damaged landscapes and then observing how the living world itself may re-habituate and heal the area (see photo below). The same can be said about PBW: if it remains an episodic initiative and not a part of ordinary schooling, its educational meaning could be misinterpreted as a compensatory response.

Another example could involve allowing more-than-human life the opportunity each day to act pedagogically first, setting the stage for what we will explore and learn with and from it (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024). When sharing zoë-memories, a different approach could be to focus on memories where more-than-human life is significant, but not necessarily in a romanticised way. For instance, Val Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012) recounts her memory of nearly being eaten by a crocodile. What would happen if we began the search for zoë-memories with such examples?

Furthermore, these experiments might elicit critical-disillusioned responses. For example, we might find that what appears to be pristine nature is, in fact, a colonised or human-managed environment (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024). This underscores the importance of decolonising practices while cautioning against an overly critical stance that overlooks the enduring presence of life beyond human control.

Finally, across all three experiments and also in PBW practice, we observed a dynamic interplay between collective gathering, individual engagement with the environment, and subsequent sharing. This cyclical process reflects the rhythms of life — breathing, the heartbeat, a dance between singularities and the wider living world.

Conclusion: Life-friendly twisting-with-more-than-humans as a diffracted way forward or a thousand minor side steps?

In this article we have tried to show and discuss numerous ways that life-friendly practices can open opportunities to come to know, understand and care for the world around us. More specifically, we have described three sets of arts educational practices and encounters with the more-than-human world that go beyond contemporary, standard, mainstream classroom teaching and education (Anundsen et al., Reference Anundsen, Illeris, Østern and Knudsen2019; Roy, Reference Roy2003). Of course, other activities and experiments might also transcend these bounds. Likewise, all three could regress into mainstream formats of classroom teaching. What we find important is that the framing around minor experiences, propositions and nature poetry writings can be twisted — in partnership and inspired by more-than-humans — in multiple, infinite ways that allow for degrees of divergence from mainstream education. What matters is that such twisting — when approached cautiously (Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022b, Reference Paulsen2023) — might create opportunities for imagining and experiencing life-friendly comportments, where life is opened up, and the world may then become wondrous, loveable and something we care for (Bennett, Reference Bennett2001). As demonstrated, the three arts educational responses outlined in the article can be used as a first step to elaborate on important “vectors of twisting” towards life-friendly comportments: If, for instance, a practice turns out to only respond in a modern-compensatory way, one might work out how the practice can be twisted towards a critical-disillusional and even life-opening way, to become more life-friendly by fully including more-than-human perspectives, voices and possibilities of participation.

Thus, as authors of this paper, we feel that what has been genuinely opened up for us by putting our arts educational practices together, in dialogue with each other and the more-than-human world, is a meta-awareness of opportunities for speculative twisting-with-more-than-humans. What matters is not just to carry out education through nature writing, propositions and minor experiences. What matters is to co-develop practices where playful twisting-together-with-more-than-humans becomes possible, allowed and intended, in ways that might be life-friendly. That said, we acknowledge that we have only sketched “twisting” as something that could use further research: what does it mean, more precisely? How can it be conducted in multiple ways, together with more-than-humans? And with what benefits could it be developed methodologically?

The three responses we have outlined at the start of this paper might help to clarify, nuance and work with such twisting and considerations along the way. In that sense, it might be helpful to think of rewilding educational practice as an ongoing experiment about how much twisting-together-with-more-than-humans is actually possible, and how much the practice allows for the opening up of life for the participants engaged in doing so in life-friendly ways. Thus, the practices we have considered in the paper might function as inspiration for how to rewild pedagogical life further and differently, where one embraces the idea of continuing with twisting nature writing, propositions, and minor experiences and/or other play spaces (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022). However, it can also mean beginning to or continuing to twist one’s own and other existing practices in diverse directions, aiming to open them up for life, and in each step, considering whether other twists and turns might also be needed to liberate life and become a friend to life, understood as an infinite desire and process rather than as an end result or state of being.

Figure 1. Place-based writing, individual and group sessions. Italy 2022.

Figure 2. Example of how a proposition was handed over to other students — like a letter with no further explanations. (Translated into English, the proposition reads “Go outside for ca. 5-10 minutes. Find a site and make a construction without talking to each other”).

Figure 3. Found object hidden, discovered and removed. Pictures by Ingvild Haugen and Veslemøy Olsen.

Figure 4. Participants searching for onto-sympathies, at Himmelbjerget in Denmark, 2024.

Figure 5. Stone. Photo and words by Helene Waage, Norway, 2022.

Figure 6. A participant finding a position to “do nothing” from. Italy 2024.

Figure 7. Sharing life experiences, Italy, 2024 and Norway, 2022.

Figure 8. A rewilding project, Milesov, the Czech Republic, an area eco-damaged in the The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics occupation era.