Climate change and sustainability education in India and the place for arts-based practice: reflections from East Kolkata Wetlands

Climate change and sustainable education

During the 1990s, educators around the world became increasingly aware and concerned about the impact of economic development on the environment (Jickling and Wals, 2012). As this work developed and became known more widely as ‘education for sustainable development’, education began to be integrated into global policy initiatives (UNESCO, 2005; Aikens et al., 2016). In 2004, the UN launched their Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2005), which highlighted the belief that education for sustainable development should be integrated into both formal and informal education in order to develop the knowledge and attitudes required for a sustainable global society (Aikens et al., 2016; Salas-Zapata et al., 2018). In 2015, the UN, now at the end of their decade of education for sustainable development, adopted 17 SDGs. These not only reflected broad social and economic issues, but also demonstrated – through SDG 4 – the need for quality education. Hallinger and Chatpinyakoop (2019) consider education for sustainable development to be the most fundamental element of the 17 SDGs, as it looks to harness sustainable behaviours, attitudes and values among global citizens and at all levels of education. However, the implementation of CCSE has been, and continues to be, variable. For the purpose of this article, the focus will be on how CCSE has been implemented.

Climate change education and sustainability in India

Traditionally, CCSE in India has been the responsibility of the science teacher, with only student teachers of biology having subject knowledge relating to CCSE as part of their curriculum. In the 1990s, India’s education system was reviewed in the Learning Without Burden report (Yashpal Committee, 1993). Science curriculum load, as with other subjects, was taught through authorised textbooks, with the view that the curriculum was a ‘bag of facts’ to deliver. Such pedagogy robbed learners of agency, and expert knowledge was celebrated over local (Takker and Ramchand, 2022). In 2009, major education reforms were witnessed across the country with the introduction of the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCTE, 2009). Within this, teacher education was recommended to build student teachers’ ability to construct knowledge, using pedagogic expertise to meet the needs of children in diverse contexts. By 2014, the two-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) programme integrated ‘knowledge about the learner, the subject and the societal context’ (NCTE, 2014: 15). The Government of India (2020: 37) suggested that this shift in policy was the key ‘to empower learners to become aware of and understand global issues and to become active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable societies’.

India’s revised curriculum begins to make links between disciplines, and highlights the complexity of overlapping issues and processes. However, implementing these curriculum reforms has challenges. While subjects are reconceived around environmental issues, they do not engage with immediate issues of climate change and sustainability (Sarang, 2021). Instead, Indian curricula, and its teacher training, continue to centre on the transfer of information about environmental law, wildlife protection and Supreme Court decisions relating to issues such as the species of grasses grown in India.

Those areas of India that follow systems implemented by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE, 2019: 9) are expected to:

strive to promote conservation of environment on their campus through rain water harvesting, segregation of waste at source, recycling of organic waste, proper disposal of waste including electronic waste, use of energy saving and energy efficient electrical equipment, greening of campus, use of solar energy, education and awareness amongst children on environmental conservation and cleanliness, etc.

However, Ramchand (2022) identifies that inadequate resources and state investment is a critical obstacle for successful CCSE. Teachers and student teachers have little access to quality resources while training and when qualified. In addition, the Affiliation Bye-Laws (CBSE, 2019) state that it is mandatory for schools to set up Eco-clubs and ensure participation of learners across all school ages. While such policies provide curriculum and extra-curricular opportunities to engage with CCSE, this is not consistent across India. This article relates to schools in West Bengal who follow the West Bengal Board of Education (WBBE). Teachers in our study spoke of how the implementation of CCSE is context dependent. While there are Eco-clubs in many settings, teachers spoke of ‘high tier’ schools (with plenty of resources) more easily managing to source and deploy dedicated resources for CCSE. In middle and lower tier schools, CCSE was reported to still be the responsibility of geography or science teachers. Further challenges include teacher education programmes entrenched in ritual-like practices (Government of India, 2012, 2020) and student teachers tending not to view activities and resources as teaching tools to enable co-constructed, dialogic learning (Ramchand, 2016).

The need for alternative approaches to CCSE

In this context of multiple challenges, Sarang (2021) calls for practical knowledge about CCSE to be shared with and among children, enabling them to co-create their understanding and link environmental issues with their lives and futures, thus motivating young eco-citizens to conceive of solutions. The need for such holistic pedagogy (which for the purpose of this article relates to the activities teachers use) is not limited to India alone.

Szczepankiewicz et al. (2021) present a conceptual model for a systematic approach to CCSE that has three elements: cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural learning. This model recognises the need for a holistic approach to CCSE, noting that teacher education is essential and requires exploration. However, as with pockets within the Indian context (such as schools in the EKW area), this model provides no detail as to what this teacher education and associated pedagogies might look like, or how this might be achieved in different contexts. Szczepankiewicz et al. (2021) call for work to develop these insights. While the content of CCSE is recognised as science based, the format by which this is communicated through effective pedagogy has been left to be explored. We will consider this in the context of student teacher needs, appropriate pedagogies in EKW and the transferability of such a framework to other areas of ecological fragility and in spaces of financial insecurity.

East Kolkata Wetlands, India

The world’s waterways have 80 per cent of all human-produced untreated wastewater discharged into them. This creates health, environmental and climate-related hazards – significantly contributing to greenhouse gas emissions (IWA, 2018). The EKW is spread over 12,500 hectares and lies on the eastern fringes of Kolkata, India (see Figure 1). It is the largest stretch of sewage-fed wetlands in the world, and an internationally renowned Ramsar site. Ramsar sites are wetlands designated to be of international importance under the Convention on Wetlands (Matthews, 1993) – an intergovernmental environmental treaty. This is a peri-urban landscape, inhabited by about 150,000 people.

Figure 1

The East Kolkata Wetlands in relation to Kolkata, India (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

This community views wastewater as a nutrient to be preserved, using it to facilitate their livelihoods, treating the sewage from the city through paddy cultivation, vegetable farming, animal husbandry and fish farming. These practices produce 15,000 tonnes of fish per year (Dey, 2015), 10.5 million tonnes of rice per year (Dey and Banerjee, 2016) and 150 tonnes of vegetables per day (Prusty, 2017). They treat sewage and help with drainage. The EKW is thus critical to Kolkata's sustainability. The rich biodiversity of the area further adds to this, and helps to maintain the city’s ecological balance.

While of major benefit to the area the EKW is under severe threat. The growing urban centre, far from acknowledging the EKW’s role in maintaining ecological balance, views the area as real estate in waiting (Bunting et al., 2010). As such, the area is highly susceptible to illegal filling, encroachment and environmentally unsustainable development schemes (Bhattacharya, 2017). Local waste is often dumped into the water bodies of the region, and the cascading effects of climate change are disrupting the acidification of freshwater systems and threatening the biodiversity (Roy-Basu et al., 2020).

All these factors make EKW extremely important as a context for CCSE – in terms of both needs and assets. The rich ecology, unique landscape and biodiversity must be preserved as much as the embedded traditional knowledge and contextual wisdom of the area. For local students, the EKW could be used as a fertile learning ground in their overall development to become responsible eco-citizens and stewards of sustainability for their local context. However, such a task brings with it challenges for the student teacher to negotiate.

Climate change and sustainable education through arts-based practice

The teachers we spoke to (see Table 1) about how they were prepared to teach CCSE in the EKW were in consensus: training for the teaching of CCSE had been predominantly restricted to the teachers and student teachers of science (in particular, biology). Pedagogies learnt in training for the purpose of communicating CCSE were knowledge transfer based. In schools that had equipment, this could be supported through the use of interactive whiteboards where videos could be shown. However, many schools, especially in the EKW, are without such resources. This calls for an exploration of more holistic approaches to CCSE alternative pedagogies, through and with different subjects that student teachers can explore.

It has been argued that art has a critical role to play in CCSE, as it can create hope at a time of crisis, and encourage responsibility and care for the local and global (Ryan, 2016). Bentz (2020) notes that combining arts-based methods and climate education can serve to expand young people’s imagination, and so empower them to co-create new futures through transformative change. Such a pedagogy sits in contrast to the traditional pedagogies with which student teachers are familiar in WBBE, and it forms the basis of activities presented in this article.

Some arts-based practices in schools in Kolkata and the EKW are being developed. The Arts Integration Programme is followed by the CBSE, but not by the WBBE. Under this programme, the CBSE link all curriculum areas with arts. This requires two subject specialists and the support of the art teacher. As one teacher (T02) commented, ‘the value of this initiative is high, as art definitely helps address the gap between subject and context’. However, due to the different education boards of India, the manner in which arts-based practice and the potential CCSE engagement are implemented is patchy.

Arts-based CCSE can be delivered in three ways: in, with and through art (Bentz, 2020). To use art in or with CCSE reduces art to creating more aesthetic ways of communicating complex issues, and thus relinquishes its potential to contribute to seeing climate change and sustainability in new ways. CCSE through art invites a more embodied experience, one where the senses are connected with new perspectives to stimulate social reflection. It is this latter delivery path around which activities in this study were planned.

The process of engagement foremost encouraged situated learning from the students’ lived experience through three main avenues:

• learning from the context: an immersion in a locale

• learning by doing: an assimilation of knowledge through activities, individual or collective

• learning to observe, innovate and disseminate: a process that does not create distinctions between knowing and sharing, between learning and teaching, between assimilation and dissemination.

Being by nature holistic and interdisciplinary, the pedagogies of arts-based practices enable discussions on intangible issues (for example, identity, security and confidence) essential to understanding and making sense of CCSE. Activities situated in the young people’s lived experience were developed, which focused on three concepts: developing community understandings of the locality (relating to SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities, and bringing context to Szczepankiewicz et al.’s [2021] conceptual model), understanding biodiversity (SDG 14 and 15: Life below water, and Life on land) and the use of finite resources (SDG 12, Responsible production and consumption).

The context of learning reported here is one where classrooms do not usually follow an integrated arts approach, and are without resources such as interactive whiteboards and access to the internet. This can be a challenge for student teachers. Pedagogies cannot rely on showing films, or using computer-based quizzes or internet research; in the EKW, alternative pedagogies needed to be explored that were innovative in their use of resources, relying on dialogue and group work for critical thinking to engage and enable CCSE that works towards eco-citizenship.

Method

This study is situated in the qualitative, participatory paradigm, and it comes in response to calls for more participatory approaches to research for marginalised groups – including those from rural areas, young people and the Global South (Alminde and Warming, 2020). In attempting to identify how pedagogies can support learners’ local knowledge and enhance engagement with issues surrounding CCSE, and how student teachers in India can be better prepared for the challenges of teaching CCSE, we developed three workshops and delivered these to two schools located in the EKW (see Table 2 for information regarding participation).

Participation and inclusivity were at the root of our approach. This enabled discussions and concerns regarding the environment and sustainability to be heard. Students were seen as active agents at the centre of their own learning and cultural formation (Hedegaard, 2020). This approach relinquished the control of the teacher/researcher and provided opportunity for unpredictability and the space for new ideas to emerge (Walters, 2020). Three workshops were designed, which are outlined below.

Ethics

Ethical consent was gained from the university’s ethics committee following British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2018) guidelines. Consent was then gained from head teachers, parents, teachers and students. At the start of each workshop, the research was re-explained to participants, and verbal consent was confirmed.

Data collection and analysis

All participants and schools were coded to support anonymity (school, participant). Interviews were recorded, transcribed and then coded using content analysis, as defined by Patton (2002: 43). During the workshops, photographs were taken, both of activities and creative products. Photographs were taken for a variety of purposes, including to showcase work in later exhibition spaces, and as a representation of the experiences and issues relating to the particular activities and where they took place. Pink (2021) notes that this walking through and photographing a place can invite the viewer to follow a narrative of the journey (or, in this case, activity) and explore the visual text as an empathetic and experiential one. Due to limitations of space, and our ethical responsibility not to include identifiable individuals within this publication, we have included only a limited number of images in this article. We hope this provides a taste of experiences, and we will explore this visual narrative making for CCSE elsewhere.

We adapted Clark and Moss’s (2011) method of learning walks with students. While learners were drawing at their desks or along riverbanks, and while they created their herb gardens or costumes from waste, we walked round them, asking questions and discussing activities in order to clarify meaning. Using student-centred techniques of data collection allowed non-threatening insight into thinking and learning about the issues they were exploring. These activities and insights were later written up in our research diaries, and they helped us in making sense of the photographs when further analysis was undertaken after the session.

We followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) five-step system as a thematic approach to qualitative data analysis. This involved: (re)reading and becoming familiar with the data; generating initial codes; searching for themes; reviewing the themes; refining the themes; and looking for commonalities and complexities. Overarching themes identified were: use of space, resources, and links to locality (social and environmental). We triangulated themes between the data sets, and these were reviewed by a second member of the research team in order to verify the domains.

Findings

Workshop 1: Building community understanding (SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities)

Activity 1: role play

Students co-constructed their understandings of the local geography, as recorded in research diary entries:

A group enacted fishing and the relationship to water. The girls at the front mimicked swans which are very commonly seen here. Other girls in the back mimicked different fishes in the water. Within this landscape, a boat with fishermen (depicted by boys) is out to catch the fish. Interesting to note how all of the boys act as the fishermen, even though no such gender roles were assigned.

Another group enacted the scene of a busy haat in the East Kolkata Wetlands. [The haat is a market that gets set up periodically in a pre-decided place.] Haats in the EKW are usually agglomerations of various kinds of local produce, traditional craft-based objects and commonly consumed items. These usually cater to the immediate communities, and items are available at very affordable prices.

In the students’ enactment various stalls were set up. On the left was the puchka [a very common, cheap and famous street food of Kolkata] seller serving her various customers. In the middle, a girl was trying to depict a vegetable/small goods seller. On the right a fish shop was depicted. There was a general chatter accompanied by sounds of haggling and bargaining by the participants, which mirrored the real haat.

Role play provided a space for students to reflect on what their locale was like, and through their depictions they began to critically question who had what role, why they had those roles and what the consequences of those roles were for the community and ecosystem. Students were constructing their knowledge from each other with support from the teacher.

Activity 2: collaborative visual representation

Through both our diaries and image analysis, gender was a consistent theme through Activity 1 and Activity 2’s role play and drawing (for example, female market sellers and male fishermen), while environmental protest was considered an action of both males and females. A deeper understanding of the wetlands became visible through these outputs:

Students represented the links between human life and the life of things around, specifically flora [see Figure 2]. It showed both the activities of nurturing as well as harming of the existing flora. In the background children’s placards say – ‘ bachao, praan bachao' [save plants, save lives] and ‘jalabhumi bachiye rakhar sochetonota chai’ [we need increased awareness to protect the wetlands].

Interesting to note that the river in all depictions is blue and looks clean – this does not reflect the reality, but perhaps the idealised version of the locale. In this image, children are in some sort of a school uniform, holding up the placards of protest. When questioned, the makers said that they wanted to highlight the role of students and education in being the ambassadors of awareness and positive transformation. (Research diary entries)

Figure 2

Student collaborative artwork (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

Figure 3 is a powerful representation of the haat ambience with a special emphasis on the puchka seller. Elements of the EKW landscape are indicatively present. The standalone sketch showed a chicken seller with his wares. A poem accompanies the image, roughly translated as:

In the distance, is a haat – a place where many streets lead,

A place where people meander to, a place where they meet,

This one day, people all come together in laughter, joy and celebration

So many things are found – it defies comparison!

Different people sit, shoulders together, sharing space –

The tea stall sees a gathered crowd.

Someone shouts – ‘Be careful, there’s a baby –

He might get hurt amidst the crowd!’

And there’s people, novel food –

Amongst other things, the puchkas are good. (Research diary entry)

The open-ended nature of this activity allowed students to respond to the task in whatever creative form they chose, allowing for both drawing and poetry to emerge. Not restricted by a model of teacher delivering knowledge and student receiving it, students were able to co-create complex understandings of systems through their talk and interaction with the teacher and their creative pieces. The reliance of local people on the ecosystem could be explored through both image and metaphor: the lone fisherman of increasingly polluted waters; the desire for students to care for the environment and a young baby (in the poem) getting ‘hurt amidst the crowd’. This intergenerational representation allowed for discussion of who and what is in danger and from whom.

Figure 3

Student collaborative artwork and poetry (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

Activity 3: freeze frame

Students dressed up and then built a backstory for each of their family characters. This illustrated generational transformation in gender roles, economic activity, connection to the locality and future hopes for greater environmental stewardship through eco-citizenship:

The children started by introducing the grandparents of the family – seen in a saree, and wearing a lungi, with a gamcha wrapped around his torso. This was followed by the father of the family wearing a shirt and his wife in a kurti. Finally, the two daughters of the household wore a dress and a t-shirt respectively.

When asked if the dressing of this family has been appropriate, the students replied yes it was of a ‘typical style’.

The student dressed as the grandfather in the second group introduced himself as a labourer working in the building industry. He wore a lungi, with a gamcha wrapped around his torso. The grandmother, wearing a saree, identified her work being primarily within the house, taking care of the household and family members. The father, in a shirt with trousers and with an identity card hanging round his neck, said he was a security guard. His wife, with a dupatta thrown over her torso, took care of the household. The younger generation of the family were college students and all wore dresses.

There was a gender divide in where people worked. There was also a shifting of the professions through the generations. While the grandfather worked in and around the community, the son works as a security guard in the city. The daughters were studying in college so they would most probably have a future that takes them out of the EKW. (Research diary entries)

Workshop 2: Understanding biodiversity (SDG 14 and 15: Life below water, and Life on land)

Students were encouraged to identify the value of the ecological wealth of the EKW as they walked along the water. For many, this gave a sense of pride and new respect for their environment as growing eco-citizens. The children helped each other identify the species they had collected. Students took the time to explain how certain leaves and fruits are used at home to treat common ailments:

There were numerous discussions whilst making the Wetland Nature Journal [see Figure 4], sharing key information and facts about species. These sheets of information were further worked on by the students at home where family added recipes that involved the use of specimens. Samples were also collected for the Wetland Nature Archive. The archive is not only useful as a documentation of local knowledge, but is also critical in the process of dissemination to a wider audience through its exhibition and giving real purpose to CCSE that the children experienced. (Research diary entry)

Figure 4

Nature journal (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

Workshop 3: Understanding finite resources (SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production)

Activity 1: herbal gardens in discarded plastic bottles

The workshop saw children coming up with bright and colourful transformations of bottles (see Figure 5).

We asked each of the participants to take home the planters and take care of them and help the plants thrive. What was most heartening to us was seeing the children add to these planters by making their own. Even today, as we roam in the surroundings around the children’s homes one can find recycled bottle planters and small kitchen gardens many months since the workshop. Thus, this workshop demonstrates how the arts and community can come together to transform an object seen as waste to something of value. (Research diary entry)

This simple activity had little cost, yet it inspired children and families to develop ideas and actions that sustain a growth in eco-citizenship.

Figure 5

Herb gardens (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

Activity 2: costume designing with local inorganic domestic waste

Throughout this activity, discussion of why waste is created and how it might be reduced were critically considered and guided by the children. Reflection on what would usually happen to the waste and original sources were discussed. The use of waste chart paper from the classroom and newspaper (donated from home) provided interesting forms as children experimented with joining and structure [see Figure 6]. The activity culminated in a display of work to share ideas and disseminate knowledge with others – this display proved to be a great motivation and gave the children purpose. (Research diary entry)

This activity built on the work the children had been doing on reusing domestic waste, and it helped further unlock the creativity of the group to imagine waste in different forms. The culmination of these waste minimisation activities, along with other activities (including making musical instruments from domestic waste with the help of invited expert musicians, and making paper from banana plant waste), provided a central element of the children’s performance at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity in a performance, titled ‘We can save our wetlands together!’

Figure 6

Costume design (Source: Disappearing Dialogues Collective)

Research ethics statement

The authors declare that research ethics approval for this article was provided by the University of the West of England, Bristol, ACE ethics board.

Consent for publication statement

The authors declare that research participants’ informed consent to publication of findings – including photos, videos and any personal or identifiable information – was secured prior to publication.

Conflicts of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the authors during peer review of this article have been made. The authors declare no further conflicts with this article.