Multimodal artistic recreations of the ecological university in the Global South

ABSTRACT

This article describes how a group of language undergraduates in a local university in the periphery in the Global South conceptualised and enacted the notion of the ‘ecological university’. Theoretically grounded in critical and post-humanist perspectives on education, and language education in particular, and notions of the ecological and the measured university, this qualitative study was conducted in 2018–19. Students created artistic multimodal works to portray their visions of the ecological university prompted by a language course syllabus and an arts-based methodology. They complemented their creations with concrete activism in their social milieu to contribute to making their university ecological. Combining discourse, content and post-qualitative analyses, findings show that the students envisioned three essential elements to enact the transformative role of their university: a) love for and commitment to others; b) a human rights education foundation; and c) a basis in local activism. Implications for pedagogy are considered, centred on the significance of arts-based pedagogies and methodologies to challenge predominant characterisations of the accountable university in the setting and foster student activism.

KEYWORDS:

• The ecological university
• the measured university
• self and social transformation
• arts-based methods
• post-humanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I am aware there are ethical issues involved, concerned for instance with the fact that I generated the data, that different prompts could have been designed to do so, and that how these issues are discussed and negotiated with students influences the research. Importantly too, there are ethical issues when research is generated about the institution one works in. Moreover, my role as both researcher and teacher of the course means I had to identify, understand, and negotiate my subjective experiences and positionality in the data generation process. There are also power issues involved. Due to space limitations, I do not address these issues here.

2. Considering that the corpus comprised 53 multimodal recreations, it is not possible to include in Figure 2 an image of all student artefacts in the whole collage with legible text and images. This is why I prefer to name this figure as a ‘partial sketch’ of the actual collage.