Explorative Inter-Action in Higher Education for Sustainability

Higher education on sustainable development is mostly taught through communicating scientific facts.

This is despite a recognised need to engage with emotional and normative aspects of sustainability, which raises moral dilemmas, anxieties about existential risk and challenging tradeoffs between rights, responsibilities and values at the individual and planetary scale.

Theatre and arts-based educational methods have an untapped potential to help higher education teachers and students to engage with the emotional content of sustainability science.This proposal for two workshops will support the exploration, application and evaluation of applied theatre and drama methods for sustainability education.

A network of higher-education teachers will assemble to explore embodied theatre-based methods for sustainability education.

These will range from more commonly-used methods such as role play and outdoor experience to forum play, process drama and invisible theatre, which have scarcely been explored in higher education settings.Following the initial workshop, the participants will experiment with the methods at their own home universities, and record and reflect on these experiences according to an agreed framework of common concepts.

At the second workshop the participants will synthesise their reflections and evaluation of the applied methods, develop publications to disseminate findings amongst higher education practitioners and develop research proposal.