Phase 2: What’s in our own backyard?

Activities

As a class, spend at least an hour connecting and interacting with a local natural environment. What this looks like will depend on your ages/abilities, the local environments available to you, and whether you are able to spend time with a local Traditional Owner. Some suggested activities are below. Whichever activities you do, take photos throughout of things/places/activities that interest you and/or that show problems, needs, or opportunities.

Examples

Acknowledging Country

• If you are with a Traditional Owner, be guided by their practices of Acknowledging Country. Otherwise, spend time mindfully engaging with the environment:
  • On your own, observe and connect with the environment around you. Pay attention to:
    • Your five senses – what can you see? Hear? Smell? Touch? (Safely) taste?
    • Your emotional and spiritual responses to nature.
  • As a class, discuss:
    • The difference between ‘country’ and ‘Country’.
    • Why we acknowledge Traditional Owners.
    • What it means to pay respects to Elders past, present, and future.
    • The responsibilities we all have to look after Country.

Warming-up

• Check out the warm-ups for a suitable activity depending on your chosen Caring for Country task. Collective Action (Keepie-uppie) is a simple but effective activity that will suit most contexts.

Caring for Country

Complete some or all of the following activities, or develop your own ideas as a class to help care for the Country that you are on.

• Learn from First Nations’ knowledges about understanding and caring for Country/Place. This might include:
  • A local species of plant or animal
  • A specific place
  • Cyclical changes (e.g., phases of the moon, connections between lunar cycles and ocean tides, local calendars, seasonal changes)
  • Ways of managing Country (e.g., fire management practices)
• Help to take care of Country. This might include:
  • Cleaning up rubbish
  • Planting trees
  • Removing exotic weeds
• In small groups, create a sustainable artwork using materials found lying on the ground.
  • Don’t plan your artwork or talk during the creative process. Instead, have one person make an ‘offer’, then add onto this offer one at a time. Interact through facial expressions and gestures rather than words.
  • When your group is satisfied with your artwork (shown through silent agreement), verbally share your artistic ideas and intentions.
  • Observe other groups’ artworks. What connections to the environment are represented? What knowledges about Country/Place?
  • Afterwards, dismantle your artworks and return everything to how you found it. If your artworks contain found non-natural materials (e.g., plastic), dispose of these appropriately.

Embodying relationships

• As a class, brainstorm words to describe the place where you live and the values that shape it.
• In pairs, create a freezeframe showing this relationship between place and values. One person embodies a word that describes the place. The other person embodies a value word. Use your bodies to show how the physical world and human values interconnect. What do you notice about this relationship?
• As a class, brainstorm values, concepts, and practices associated with sustainability.
• In pairs, return to your freezeframe. Consider futures of this place and human influences on those futures.
  • What human values might negatively influence the place? How might the place change?
  • What would change about the place in a more sustainable future? How would the human values change?
  • Embody these changes. You should now have three freezeframes: one of the place as it is now, one of a future where humans negatively affect place, and one of a sustainable future.
  • Share these freezeframes with another group. What problems, needs, and opportunities do you observe in their performance?

Visually representing futures

• Choose one of the photos that you took outdoors. Using digital or physical media, alter the photograph to represent two possible futures, one showing negative anthropogenic change, the other a more sustainable relationship.
  • Sustainable possibilities you might like to consider and/or learn more about include:
    • Rewilding
    • Community connections
    • Collaborative action
    • Interspecies empathy
    • Sustainable transport
    • Passive architecture

Reflecting

• Individually, reflect in your journals on your experiences in Phase 2 using the prompts from Phase 1. What has changed in your reflections? What has stayed the same?