Summary

The divide between us and the rest of nature has been attributed to various root causes: the growing disenchantment of the world, the loss of direct experience and lately the replacement of the real with simulations of it. Modernity's move away from the natural world has also generated countervailing movements, beginning with the Romantics and leading up to the manifold forms of environmental education in our times. When we seek to reconnect to the natural world through an open-ended artistic process, what happens? In this thesis, Jan van Boeckel explores the kind of learning that takes place through arts-based environmental education.