Learning with Land; Country as Curriculum

The Learning with the Land partnership brings together an international network of art educators to explore how artists and arts-based researchers are taking up the concept of reciprocity to critically engage with the land upon which they live, learn, teach, and create. This partnership focuses on how the arts might help challenge Western-Euro-centric understandings of land and provoke meaningful dialogue and action towards decolonising education and research practices. This partnership responds to the urgent need for innovative models of learning, teaching, and scholarship that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression grounded in movement of thought (theory) and body (practices) by drawing on a transnational coalition of scholars, students, artists, and writers in education. This partnership simultaneously sees this research as a response to the calls to action from the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (UN IPCC) that urges the use of scientific, local, and Indigenous Knowledge for adaptation and mitigation to the ongoing climate crisis (UN, 2021). This partnership is of utmost importance because, despite institutional policy commitments towards decolonisation: “There is a real need for academics to move toward concrete conversations about the Land to significantly reshape settler consciousness” (Ray, Cormier & Desmoulins, 2019, p.81).