This year, in addition to the enabler funding, the CRF has approved four grants for CRF members working with graduated PhD – Post Doctoral researchers – to support the building of a further track record in preparation for Post Doctoral funding. The Centre has supported 8 projects to the value of $19,477 over 2024.
Projects
Being in blue space – places for learning in the early years – Llewellyn Wishart and Lis Rouse.
This project was granted $2,958.50.
Project summary: Engaging in immersive play in natural environments has become part of the lexicon of early childhood education in Australia (Hughes et al., 2022) exemplified by the bush kindergarten concept. Accordingly, research has followed these trends (Campbell & Speldewinde, 2022; Christiansen et al., 2018). Less examined by research are programs providing children with learning experiences in and around blue spaces (coast, rivers and wetlands). This study aims to fill this gap, exploring how blue space programs support children’s learning and wellbeing in the early years through phenomenological, relational and slow research methodological lenses.
Arts – Well-being in Schools – Shelley Hannigan, Jo Raphael, Jo-Anne Brim, Kate Jaskolski.
This project was granted $3,000.
Project summary: Following on from the arts-wellbeing schools project we conducted in 2023, where teachers and leaders in one school were interviewed, we are seeking funding to help with analysing data and potentially developing an additional literature review from this analysis.
Material sharing (sustainable arts practices) – Katie Lee.
This project was granted $3,000.
Project summary: Building on the work completed with the first enabler funds, I now seek
support of a research assistant to help further this work, with a focus on
making contact, establishing relationships and identifying a list of possible
partnerships and funding opportunities. Sustainability Victoria (SV) and
The National Association for Visual Arts (NAVA) have both expressed
interest, but further work is required to develop a proposal for these peak bodies. Therefore, this enabler grant will work to collate and prepare a
staged outreach and application strategy, with broader aims to secure Linkage and ARC funding.
Exposing PR – critique, disturbance and the making of climate change denialism – Kristin Demetrious.
This project was granted $1,815.
Project summary: This book focuses on popular culture critiques of public relations (PR) from the 1970s onwards, in tandem with the rapid expansion of capital and industry through globalisation. It traces key individuals and influential texts (books, websites, blogs) that tabled ‘PR’ and ‘spin’ as an ethical subject and sought to resist and expose anti-environmental practices. Arguing that this political struggle has not been sufficiently recognised, this book redraws historical narratives about the profound effect PR has had in making ‘climate change denialism’, and the forms of resistance that were mounted in its wake.
CRF Post-Doctoral Support
Supporting transboundary online peer-to-peer youth environmental engagement through co-design – Peta White, Joe Ferguson, and Michael Chew.
This project was granted $2,345.
Project summary: This research project responds to the critical issue of sustaining youth
environmental engagement after the conclusion of formal education
programs. It fosters trans-boundary online youth environmental capacity-building through innovative peer-to-peer approaches. This participatory action research will engage youth co-designers from the Asia-Pacific region in online workshops whose focus will be on co-designing grassroots peer-to-peer approaches for youth environmental engagement and capacity-building for community-based research. Participants will be supported to both prototype their peer-to-peer engagement methods and perform basic evaluations of their effectiveness. Outputs will include a journal article analysing the effectiveness of these approaches from relational agency perspectives, and a youth co-created online resource to document and share the peer-to-peer engagement methods with their own communities. Outcomes include increasing participating youth agency through building their co-design and research capacity, enhancing environmental awareness of participating youth and their broader communities, and fostering transboundary youth cooperation and learning for environmental engagement.
Doing climate education justice – Eve Mayes.
Project summary: There is an emerging consensus that information-centred approaches that emphasise scientific and technocratic dimensions of climate change alone do not correlate with student engagement and long-term action (UNESCO & MECCE, 2024; White et al., 2024). Climate change educational researchers have argued that formal education needs to inspire young people to ‘act to create a more just and resilient future’ (White et al., 2024, p. 119), through engaging in ‘multi-directional’ dialogical exchanges (Neas, 2023, p. 3) that do not ‘shield young people from unsettling information’ (Trott, 2024, p. 4). Education, it is argued, should directly centre young people’s responses to climate change with multiple intersecting social injustices (Ojala, 2016; Vamvalis, 2023; Verlie, 2022), and encourage collective efficacy and action (Neas, 2023; Trott, 2024). Yet, educators can be cautious about using the language of ‘justice’ in mainstream education: educators may feel unsure about the boundaries of what constitutes a ‘controversial issue’ or perceived ‘political indoctrination’ in relation to climate change (Bleazby et al., 2023; Brennan et al., 2022), and may feel pressure to pedagogically prioritise ‘assessable “facts” in crowded and time-stretched classrooms over ‘issues of debate and contestation’ (Dunlop et al., 2021, p. 3).
Hidden Utopias and critical engagement in climate change education through arts-based approaches – Jo Raphael, Robin Bellingham, with Michelle Tourbier (Post-doc researcher applicant).
This project was awarded $2345.
Project summary: I propose to extend the theoretical concept of ‘hidden utopias’ developed in my thesis to an applied setting using arts-based methodologies. Specifically, I aspire to apply this concept to Deakin University’s Centre for Regenerating Futures (CRF) ‘Artifacts of the Future’ and ‘Time to Act’ projects in order to help young people critically engage with climate change discourses and creatively envision a more hopeful and sustainable future. I draw my definition of utopia from Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), who conceptualises utopia as the desire for a better world, which he says emerges out of the gap between what it is in the world and what is perceived to be missing or ‘not yet’ in the world. For Bloch, this desire becomes infused in a diversity of human cultural expressions from daydreams to fairy tales, novels, fashion, music, visual art, movies, television, videogames, advertising, political discourse, social experiments, education policy, etc. I further draw inspiration from Michèl Foucault’s theories (1926-1984) that all discourse carries with it implicit and/or explicit histories of the present, which function to defend a certain conception of ‘society’ against those imagined to exist outside this history. I suggest that Foucault’s theories can be extended to utopian discourses and that such problematizations can be used to unveil possibilities as to how the future might be conceptualised otherwise. From Ruth Levitas (1949-present), I draw the idea that utopia can be used as a method of social analysis for excavating the past, revealing ontologies and architecturally seeking to imagine new futures which would, in turn, need to be subjected to critique.
My contribution is to bring these theories together while proposing that
utopian discourses are increasingly a crucial way in which power is
produced and reproduced in society by political opportunists. By calling
utopias ‘hidden’, my aim is to help draw attention to what is often hiding in
plain sight, to critically engage with such discourses and to creatively
imagine a more hopeful and sustainable future. In sum, I believe the project is perfectly suited to extend the creative work of the centre and my own research. I hope that the work will lead to a co-publication and that
arts-based methodologies are the most appropriate method for pursuing
this research.
Published work:
Tourbier, M.C. (2024). The Council of Europe’s Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture: Hope for democracy or an allusive Utopia? [Doctoral dissertation, Durham University]. Durham University Research Repository. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/15328/
Tourbier, M. (2021). A Crisis of Hidden Utopias. Dewey Studies Journal, 5(2), 564-578.
http://www.johndeweysociety.org/dewey-studies/files/2022/06/DS-5.2-36-T ourbier.pdf
Tourbier, M. (2020). The Council of Europe’s competences for democratic
culture: Employing Badiou and Plato to move beyond tensions in the values
it promotes. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(1), 22-33.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1585803
Generating resources to support pre-service teachers’ understanding of student-led disaster risk reduction and climate change education – Joe Ferguson, Peta White, with Briony Towers (Post-doc researcher applicant).
This project was awarded $2345.
Project summary: This project, led by Briony Towers and Joe Ferguson, working with Peta White, will involve the creation of a resource that draws on Dr Towers’ work on student participation in school emergency management (https://www.leadrrr.org/s/Towers-Kuligowski-Haworth-2024-Student-participation-in-school-bushfire-planning.pdf). This resource will provide pre-service teachers in ESS741 with an opportunity to engage with the theory, concepts, and practices of student-led disaster risk reduction and develop their skills for designing and implementing a whole-of-school risk-reduction activities. The resource will be built around a case study of student participation in school bushfire planning at Upwey High School in the Dandenong Ranges, where Dr Towers has been conducting participatory action research with students, school staff, and local emergency management personnel. An academic publication will also be written that calls for the need for pre-service teachers to have opportunities to engage with such case studies as part of their DRR and CCE professional development.