ABSTRACT
Eco-Capabilities is an AHRC-funded project situated at the intersection of three issues: a concern with children’s wellbeing; their disconnect with nature; and a lack of engagement with the arts in school curricula. It builds on human capabilities as a proxy for wellbeing, developing the term eco-capabilities to describe how children define what they need to live a fully good human life through environmental sustainability, social justice and future economic wellbeing. Children are significant stakeholders in their environment with an equitable right to participate in its development, and yet frequently experience frustration about the state of the local environment and powerless to effect changes. Seeing this as crucial to the wellbeing of people and planet, Eco-Capabilities seeks to overcome this issue using arts-in-nature practice, under the assumption that art education is well-situated to address environmental problems that emerge at the point of contact between nature and social life. Children aged seven to ten from schools in areas of high deprivation participated in nine days of artist-led sessions, described by the Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI) charity as artscaping. The study drew on arts-based research methodologies, providing an inclusive approach to engaging disenfranchised perspectives, such as those of children. Children were asked to identify places within their school grounds which they feel disconnected from and were then supported to engage creatively with these spaces through artscaping. This chapter explores children’s developing relationship with these places, considering how they became sites of wonder and curiosity, as well as places through which they developed agency to belong and protect, both individually and collectively. It finishes by drawing out implications for practice which support both pro-environmental behaviour and children’s wellbeing.
