Nordic Connections: Interdisciplinary and Intergenerational Approaches to Transformative Sustainability in Arctic Island Communities

The environmental, social, cultural, and economic changes occurring in the North are charged with far reaching geopolitical consequences alongside human and environmental impact and require urgent attention. Urgency of radical social transformation to sustainability underscores the necessity of alternative approaches which communities can learn about, relate to and collaboratively act for sustainability in a local context (Trott et al., 2020). This text considers our experience of bringing interactive media together with natural science and socially engaged art through the collaborative project Nordic Connections: learning from the past to shape the future. This project explored some issues that threaten our landscapes and our contemporary society — the fear of environmental pollution and climate change, and fear of nuclear disaster. The project involved online dialogue and practical scientific and creative inquiry by young people, university researchers, partner organisations and individual members of two island communities in Scotland and Norway. Online meetings were used to share history, ideas, and experience to create both physical and digital exhibitions content around the themes.

Whitin an interdisciplinary context, the theme marine pollution was introduced online to convey knowledge about the topic and showed how the arts can create impact and achieve societal change. It also included a practical approach in the laboratory where pupils explored the use of plastics in clothes and cosmetics, and they made drawings about their thoughts about marine pollution using pastel chalk. Pupils made exhibitions and short movies introducing themselves and their community to each other and contributed to local beach cleaning projects making eco-art exhibitions from the materials.
In Shetland pupils explored the Cold War environment from its physical presence in the landscape and invisible legacies. The radome, a form of Cold War architecture familiar to northern and Arctic communities in NATO’s early defence warning system, formed the basis for the creation of a prototype model incorporating material created during the project like historical facts and interviews, and combined with the use of a games engine to produce an online interactive exhibition. A digital platform was used to share pupil`s work, movies, pictures, art works and lectures.

The empirical material from this casus study consists of participatory observations from university staff, interviews from participating teachers about their experiences from the project and analyses of pupil’s artistic expressions and work from the common digital platform.

Preliminary results indicate that the interdisciplinary and place-based approach together with shared focus on common challenges in these rural communities were important for pupil`s engagement. Pupils and teachers expressed joy in online meetings with their peers and found that they had much in common. The artistic approach facilitated attention and discussion on the topics in the respective local communities. We suggest that this form of teaching through hands on experiments and field work, engaging in and interacting with local communities, dialogue and creative, artistic expressions contributed to pupils transformative learning about challenging topics.


References
Trott, C.D., Even, T.L. & Frame, S.M. (2020). Merging the arts and sciences for collaborative sustainability action: a methodological framework. Sustainability Science, 15, 1067–1085. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00798-7