Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Environmental Education Research

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

School

School of Education / Centre for People, Place and Planet / Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA)

RAS ID

35998

Funders

Edith Cowan University - Open Access Support Scheme 2021

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant, Canada

Comments

Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., & Rooney, T. (2021). Weather bodies: Experimenting with dance improvisation in environmental education in the early years. Environmental Education Research, 27(8), 1141-1151. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434

Abstract

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning about weather as a separate phenomenon happening outside the classroom. Dance, as an intervention, helps to de-stabilise binary human-nature relations and reveals how children might come to understand their (human) selves as also weather bodies. New ways to understand humans’ entanglements with current weather events are also articulated, offering educators and researchers strategies for considering how the practice of dance improvisation might be integrated into early years education as an innovative approach to environmental learning.

DOI

10.1080/13504622.2021.1926434

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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