Imagination and Creativity in Ecological Education
The publications showcased in this month’s issue of Scholarly Impact emphasize that there has never been a greater need for imaginative and empathetic education about the natural world. Arguably, fact-based, classroom-bound education about the environment may not be effective—a view given greater urgency in the face of record-breaking heat, flooding, and wildfires in British Columbia and worsening climate crises worldwide. SFU Faculty of Education professors Sean Blenkinsop, Mark Fettes, Gillian Judson, and Celeste Snowber call for empathetic, even visceral, ways of learning to increase awareness about our intricate connections with ecological health and our role as educators and researchers in preserving the natural world.
Imagine a public school without walls, desks, blackboards, or buildings of any kind. When children arrive, they follow a dirt path down to a small clearing, surrounded by Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, and Red Cedar. Steam rises from rain-soaked trunks as water drips onto Salal and Huckleberry leaves. A few hundred feet away, a shallow River chortles and washes over gray stones.
The opening words of this introduction to Sean Blenkinsop and Estella C. Kuchta’s book (2024) take us into the heart of an “ecologizing school” on the edge of the Alouette River. As a philosopher of education, Dr. Blenkinsop has focused his research and teaching on a range of areas that intersect with ecologizing education—notably the role of imagination in teaching and learning, ecology, theories of place, and experiential and outdoor education. With these commitments in mind, Drs. Blenkinsop and Kuchta emphasize that this book “resides on the premise that there is a moral imperative to do what we can to change and heal this alienated and rapacious cultural relationship to the earth and to seek greater balance.”
Mainstream education contributes to the “Capitalocene”—a dichotomous, instrumental relation with nature that has alienated “wealthy societies of the Global North from the living world.” This concern grounds Mark Fettes’s and Sean Blenkinsop’s co-authored book (2023), which calls for “a radical transformation of education to focus on the mutual flourishing of human societies with the rest of life on Earth.” Describing the changes needed to Western culture and recommending “stances” and practices for educators to enable an “ethos of change,” this book also provides a broad context for the 2024 article “.” Here, Drs. Fettes and Blenkinsop, with third author Lindsay Cole, call for a systemic change in educational practices, a "transformative design” to engage with the more-than-human world and foster eco-social change.
Toward that end, the authors present six design “prompts” for transformative environmental education practice: relationality and reciprocity, reflectivity, willingness to embrace uncertainty, community belonging, integrating past wisdom with future-oriented education, and embracing ambiguity—even conflict. With new tools and perspectives for engaging with the environment, educators may be better prepared for the urgent task of “finding a way out of the Capitalocene.”
For Gillian Judson, emotional and imaginative engagement with the natural world is also essential: merely being outdoors isn’t enough. Dr. Judson has authored and co-authored a wide range of publications focusing on the role of imagination in education and cognition, including the development of “walking curricula.” Early in her teaching career, Dr. Judson noticed how “disaffected” her students seemed about climate issues. This prompted her to research how imagination and emotion forge connections to nature and place.
In “” (2024), Dr. Judson proposes Imaginative Ecological Education (IEE)—an “emerging pedagogical approach” that seeks to address the limitations of place-based learning. With IEE, learning develops not only ecological understanding but also imagination, which is essential for learning and for empathy. In that way, IEE holds the promise of being transformative—able to support “an ontological shift, a new understanding of human being.”
For Celeste Snowber, “being a child raised on the edge of the sea and schooled in the curriculum of nature” fostered a lifelong creative and physical involvement with the natural environment. In her book (2022), she describes how arts-based research, curriculum theory, and embodied ways of inquiry inspired not only her work as a place-based performance artist but her approach as an arts educator who sees place as pedagogy—a physical embodiment of inquiry, learning, and knowing.
Dr. Snowber exemplifies this approach in “” (2024), which explores the interrelationships of sea, land, and ecology through several textual poems and one “video-danced” poem. Through these media, she seeks to expand our ways of knowing and learning in a range of fields, from curriculum theory to poetic inquiry, through engaging the body. The poems embody a “visceral intimacy” with ecology and the climate crisis as a way to shift our relationship to the ecology and climate crisis. Perhaps, as Dr. Snowber hopes, “paying attention to what we care for now will lead us into a future we desire.”
References:
Blenkinsop, S., & Kuchta, E. (2024). Ecologizing education: Nature-centered teaching for cultural change. Cornell University Press.
Fettes, M., & Blenkinsop, S. (2023). Education as the practice of eco-social-cultural change. Palgrave Macmillan.
Fettes, M., Cole, L., & Blenkinsop, S. (2024). Prompts for eco-social transformation: What environmental education can learn from transformative design. The Journal of Environmental Education, 55(2), 125–137.
Judson, G. (2024, January 30). Imaginative ecological education: Evolution of a theory and practice. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved 20 Mar. 2025, from
Snowber, C. N. (2022). Dance, place, and poetics: Site-specific performance as a portal to knowing. Palgrave Macmillan.
Snowber, C. N. (2024). A poetics of the sea. World Futures Review, 16(1–2), 86–89. (Original work published 2024)