Codename Seedling: An Arts Educational Toolbox for Climate Youth Work

Why this toolbox?
This toolbox was created during the Erasmus+ project ‘Codename Seedling: An Arts Educational and Climate Justice Approach to Youth Work’. The project aimed to innovate climate youth work by learning from arts education. To develop the methods, we gathered practitioners from Belgium, Denmark, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom who work at the intersection of arts, youth engagement, and non ­formal education. Together, we explored how different artistic media (such as storytelling, visual media, digital arts, and performance) could be used for working on ecological topics with youth.
With the climate crisis visibly unfolding around us, educators across the world search for ways to help young people understand what’s happening and how they can respond to it. Whereas schools tend to focus on scientific literacy, research shows that teaching content remains limited in effectively engaging and activating young people. To bridge the gap between the ‘talk’ and the ‘walk’, climate education must also invest in approaches based on feeling, doing, and being, and by integrating methods from activism and youth work. As such, the call rises to develop educational strategies that can creatively and informally lead to deep engagement with young people and provides them with the ability to adapt to a changing environment.

Why this approach?
This toolbox recognises the ‘cultural dimension’ of climate change, e.g. people’s values and behaviour. One thing is to develop climate ‘solutions’; another is to see the importance of such solutions and implement them. The dimension of people’s beliefs and actions is said to be crucial to develop a more sustainable future for Earth. As your belief system creates your reality, it can change ́ your behaviour. To tend to the cultural dimension of climate change, this toolbox offers methods centring values of care ­ for nature (biospheric values) and for others (altruistic values) ­ as people who hold such values are more likely to engage in climate­ conscious behaviour and climate just approaches.
To cultivate values of care in climate learning, arts­-based approaches are particularly well­ suited as they make climate change meaningful to people through accessible storytelling, stimulate connection to climate issues, and offer a space for perspective-­taking and collective imagination. Our toolbox focuses on embodied and playful arts approaches to awaken people’s awareness, grow their sense of connection to the various species and environments they are surrounded by, and activate their capacity of worldmaking.