Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Furman, Anne
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
Lifeworlds is a series of three workshops/dialogical art pieces that explores how performance can be used as intervention in family-based environmental education. Each of the three workshops (“Listening with Bats,” “Passing Time with Trees,” and “Breathing with Sturgeon”) uses a combination of narrative, dialogue, and physical activity to create opportunities for participants to imagine the embodied experiences of another being (respectively bats, trees, and sturgeon) in their daily lives. The workshop outlines for Lifeworlds are designed to be adapted for a variety of geographic locations and easily replicated by educators with little or no performance training background. The methodologies of conversation and imagination used to develop Lifeworlds come from the spheres of both applied theatre and environmental education pedagogy, as informed by my dual experiences in these fields. From the realm of applied theatre, I draw heavily on the framing and participant engagement methods of dialogical art as explained by Grant Kester, while from the realm of environmental education, I draw on Abigail Housen’s Visual Thinking Strategies and the multispecies ways of experiencing influenced by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt. Lifeworlds provides one possible pathway for knitting these two fields together through experiential, site-specific play and dialogue. Lifeworlds asks how performance-based methodologies can be applied to environmental education facilitation such that this workshop structure will invite future facilitators and participants to ask how imagining other beings’ ways of experiencing their environment can help us humans in creating healthier multispecies spaces.
LIFEWORLDS: INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS FOR DISCOVERING HOW NON-HUMAN BEINGS EXPERIENCE THEIR WORLDS by Anne Furman B.A., Dartmouth College, 2019 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) November 2024 © Anne Furman, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Lifeworlds: Interactive Workshops for Discovering How Non-Human Beings Experience Their Worlds submitted by Anne Furman in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts . Denise Kenney, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Co-Supervisor Greg Garrard, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Co-Supervisor Jodey Castricano, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Astrida Neimanis, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner iii Abstract Lifeworlds is a series of three workshops/dialogical art pieces that explores how performance can be used as intervention in family-based environmental education. Each of the three workshops (“Listening with Bats,” “Passing Time with Trees,” and “Breathing with Sturgeon”) uses a combination of narrative, dialogue, and physical activity to create opportunities for participants to imagine the embodied experiences of another being (respectively bats, trees, and sturgeon) in their daily lives. The workshop outlines for Lifeworlds are designed to be adapted for a variety of geographic locations and easily replicated by educators with little or no performance training background. The methodologies of conversation and imagination used to develop Lifeworlds come from the spheres of both applied theatre and environmental education pedagogy, as informed by my dual experiences in these fields. From the realm of applied theatre, I draw heavily on the framing and participant engagement methods of dialogical art as explained by Grant Kester, while from the realm of environmental education, I draw on Abigail Housen’s Visual Thinking Strategies and the multispecies ways of experiencing influenced by Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt. Lifeworlds provides one possible pathway for knitting these two fields together through experiential, site-specific play and dialogue. Lifeworlds asks how performance-based methodologies can be applied to environmental education facilitation such that this workshop structure will invite future facilitators and participants to ask how imagining other beings’ ways of experiencing their environment can help us humans in creating healthier multispecies spaces. iv Lay Summary Lifeworlds is a series of three workshops/dialogical art pieces that explores how performance can be used as intervention in family-based environmental education. It uses a combination of narrative, dialogue, and physical activity to create opportunities for participants to imagine the lived experiences of bats, trees, and sturgeon. The outlines that form the core of Lifeworlds are designed to be adapted for various settings and easily replicated by facilitators with no performance background. Drawing from the designer’s dual backgrounds in theatre and environmental education, Lifeworlds uses activities rooted in conversation and imagination to provide one possible strategy for slipping performance methodologies into facilitators’ toolkits as means of encouraging participants to consider the more-than-human world around them. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Anne Furman. The photo used in the handout Appendix D was taken by Louise Ritson and used with the photographer’s permission. The photo used in the poster in Appendix E was taken by the author, and the poster was created by the author. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in any aspects of this work. vi Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ........................................................................................................................... iv Preface....................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................. viii Dedication ................................................................................................................................. x Introduction: On Walking ......................................................................................................... 1 I. The Pigeon in My Backpack ................................................................................................. 4 II. First Trail Sign ...................................................................................................................... 6 III. Listening with Bats ............................................................................................................. 8 IV. Conversations in Motion ..................................................................................................... 9 V. CAUTION: Uneven Terrain Ahead .................................................................................... 12 VI. Second Trail Sign .............................................................................................................. 13 VII. Similar Trails Include... ................................................................................................... 15 VIII. Continental Drift ............................................................................................................ 17 IX. River Crossings, River Immersions .................................................................................. 19 X. Third Trail Sign .................................................................................................................. 20 XI. What Do You Notice Here? .............................................................................................. 23 XII. Trail Snacks ..................................................................................................................... 26 XIII. Outflows ......................................................................................................................... 28 XIV. Passing Time with Trees ................................................................................................. 29 XV. Other Paths to Wander ..................................................................................................... 31 XVI. Packing List for Next Time ............................................................................................ 32 Conclusion: On Arrivals ......................................................................................................... 34 Works Cited............................................................................................................................. 36 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 38 vii Appendix A: “Listening with Bats” Workshop Outline .......................................................... 42 Appendix B: “Passing Time with Trees” Workshop Outline .................................................. 47 Appendix C: “Breathing with Sturgeon” Workshop Outline .................................................. 52 Appendix D: Lifeworlds One-Sheet as Presented to Committee ............................................ 57 Appendix E: Lifeworlds Trial Workshops Poster .................................................................... 59 viii Acknowledgments A thesis is very much like a tree. Thank you to the syilx/Okanagan people, on whose ancestral, unceded land I work and play and draw inspiration from. Their ongoing care of these lands on which I developed and trialed Lifeworlds made this work possible. Thank you as well to the Haudenosaunee and Abenaki peoples, on whose ancestral, unceded lands I was working when the seed for this thesis was planted. Thank you to my supervisors Denise Kenney and Greg Garrard, and thank you to my committee members Astrida Neimanis and Jodey Castricano, for helping the roots of this tree reach out further. Thank you to the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies staff—especially Shauna Oddleifson, Joanne Gervais, Sam Neal, and Frances Brouse—for their continuous support and assistance. Thank you to Chantal Bilodeau, for giving a sapling some much-needed direction. Thank you to all those who attended Lifeworlds workshop development sessions for volunteering your time, enthusiasm, and willingness to play. Thank you to Ronan Fraser for the conversational fertilizer and Dill for—well, for meowing ix at the squirrels in the branches, I suppose. And thank you to all the real trees and those who live in and around them who made the creation of Lifeworlds possible. Some of their stories are written in the pages of this paper. x Dedication For Herbie and Liv Thank you for leading me through your worlds and teaching me to live better in mine. 1 Introduction: On Walking Herbie has a tendency to stop and point out other beings on our walks together. Like me halting mid-sentence in an outdoor workshop on bats to point out a barred owl ghosting by, he halts mid-stride and asks that I acknowledge the dandelions pushing through the gravel, or the downy woodpecker plucking seeds from mullein, or the dozen baby quail rustling in the bushes, or the coyote slinking up behind us with ears pricked toward the aforementioned baby quail. Only once we have acknowledged these other beings and their daily lives playing out around us does he let us move on. It surprises me more than it should when we round a corner in late July on Luxmore Trail, out on the fringes of Myra-Bellevue Provincial Park, and come face-to-face with a male black bear some fifty feet in front of us. "You couldn't have warned me about that?" I say loudly as we back way. I continue berating Herbie for failing to give me a heads up about the bear, not out of anger, but because it's a convenient script for making noise. With the bear out of sight around the corner again, I try putting myself in his clawed paws. He's headed downhill, early enough in the morning that it hasn't yet reached the 35°C it's forecast to hit later. He's on one of the narrow side trails that zig-zags back and forth across Luxmore Trail proper, a trail that Herbie has previously shown me leads down to a small stand of saskatoons, then down again to a well-shaded creekbed. If I were looking to grab a snack before finding somewhere to settle down for the afternoon where the sun won't bake my black fur... "Come on, he's probably gone now," I say, and sure enough, the black bear has vanished when Herbie and I turn the corner again. We have acknowledged the bear, and now 2 we can continue on our way. "You knew he wasn't going to do anything, didn't you?" Herbie drops his head and snags a mouthful of grass from the very spot the bear emerged from the woods. Herbie, I should mention, is a horse. He was born on ancestral, unceded Nlaka'pamux land near Merritt, BC in 2017, but after a little less than two years roaming free in the sagebrush, he started letting himself into local tame horse paddocks. I can only imagine that wildfires in the area had some bearing on his decision. One day, he simply chose not to leave when humans tried shooing him back to the wild, and he's been living with humans ever since. I first met Herbie five years after he opted to be a "tame" wildie. Picture a stout oak barrel like the ones used for aging Okanagan wine, put it on legs, add a mane and tail with golden highlights that would cost you a small fortune at any Kelowna salon, and you have a fairly good image of him. (Or, if you're familiar with horses, picture a 13.3h liver chestnut gelding.) "He's very opinionated," said the woman who first introduced us. "He knows which trails he wants to take, and good luck if you want to go the other way." This is only fair, as he knows this landscape much better than I do. Even if we're not in Merritt anymore, he's still much more familiar with the flora and fauna of the Okanagan than I am, his bumbling grad student companion from upstate New York. He's a wonderful interpreter as we roam through Myra-Bellevue. Every time we stop to look at a plant, every time I follow his ears and try to fit my hiking boots in the sandy prints of his hoofs, he intervenes just a little in the way I experience relationships with the beings around me. I wonder aloud to him what a Herbie-inspired approach to environmental education in 3 public parks might look like. In response, he chases a garter snake off the trail with a ferocity that takes me by surprise. What is it that makes walks with Herbie so pivotal in the way I engage with other beings? Is it the way I habitually pair a creative, performance-based lens of looking at interactions with his embodied experience of a place? Is it a mindful approach to cross-species ways of knowing? Is it how we bring play into the way we engage with the places we find ourselves in? And how on earth do I fit any of that into something I could actually offer another human as a teaching resource? I walk, because that's what Herbie does when something piques his curiosity. Herbie walks half a step to my right. This paper is also a walk. It is a walk at Herbie's pace, somewhat meandering and occasionally sidetracked by something unseen rustling in the bushes. It is a walk that tries to arrive at an answer to the questions I've asked myself, but as with most walks I've been on, I suspect the answers won't be found at the end, but rather in all the little moments when we stop and grab a bite of dandelion leaves along the way. 4 I. The Pigeon in My Backpack Before there was Herbie, there was Liv. I think it's important to acknowledge that the hand I hold the lead rope with that connects me to Herbie still carries the touch-memory of Liv's broken-toed feet perched on it, marching back and forth in search of a small green pea. Liv was not a horse. Liv, sometimes also known as Livia or Livy, was a pigeon of indeterminate sex with a great fondness for peas. A protein deficiency, possibly from eating an unbalanced diet as a young bird, made the keratin in their beak and toes weak and liable to bend or break. Thus, Liv was hired on as a full-time, live-in ambassador at a nature center in New York's Adirondack State Park. I was hired on by the same nature center to facilitate programming with and help care for their ambassador animals. I will confess, until I met Liv, I shared the view of that 1960s New York City parks commissioner who first called pigeons "rats with wings" (Soniak). It only took a few interactions with Liv for that to change. Eventually, I took on the task of teaching Liv the skills they'd need to come out in front of a live audience and shake some of their preconceived notions of pigeons loose. This was relatively straightforward and largely consisted of teaching Liv to step up onto my flattened palm and fly to a variety of targets in exchange for a shiny green pea. The harder part was trying to come up with a script that some future educator could use to distill the months of pigeon life lessons I was learning from Liv into something meaningful for a group of visitors who'd only have a few minutes to experience Liv's thundering wings (and, in all honesty, who'd probably come up from New York City and would much rather be looking at a peregrine falcon or one of the kestrels instead of their 5 familiar "rat with wings"). How to convince people that this common street bird was something worth looking twice at? Something we ought to have compassion for? Educators cannot, alas, transform their audiences into different beings to experience life in a new form, à la Merlin turning a not-yet-king Arthur into various critters in T.H. White's The Once and Future King. Neither is it possible (practically or ethically) to pair every interested visitor with a pigeon for weeks on end. It was while I was researching pigeon navigation senses that I first stumbled across German biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his concept of umwelt, used to signify the unique perceptual worlds of different beings (Schroer 132). As someone who landed in environmental education by way of theatre, a creative field that arises from and revolves around embodied experiences where actors use real and imagined sensory perceptions to tell a story, umwelt fascinated me. The question I had been circling as Liv hopped on and off my hand was how to convey an appreciation for a pigeon's umwelt to visitors--and how to come up with a script that other educators with less time on their hands to contemplate the intricacies of pigeon umwelt and dialogical performance methodologies could easily pick up and incorporate into their existing programming. Spoiler alert: I left the Adirondacks to start grad school at the University of British Columbia Okanagan before I finished writing my pigeon program. But I took my notes with me, which eventually took two different branches down the creative evolutionary tree to become "Dear Friend" (a short story playing with perspective and setting to talk about pigeon navigational skills and climate solutions, forthcoming in Solarpunk Magazine in 2025) and Lifeworlds, a series of outlines and instructions for three environmental education workshops that use embodied practices to invite participants into an exploration of other beings' 6 umwelten. Let's call this imaginary path we're wandering down in this paper Lifeworlds, as that's the work I'll be discussing. So with horse as hiking partner and pigeon as navigator, into the woods we go. II. First Trail Sign Lifeworlds runs through the crossroads of "Performance," "Education," and "Art." It is a series of family-friendly, interactive workshops for discovering how non-human beings experience their worlds, and it is an application of creative methodologies derived from performance practice to intervene in the already "performative" space of environmental education to improve the experience of participants. I gave demonstrations of how these workshops might be facilitated at Woodhaven EcoCulture Centre from July 17-19, 2024. These workshops were free and open to the public and were attended by graduate students, local bat educators, professors, and several children. Lifeworlds is also the series of outlines for these workshops, which are attached in full as Appendices A-C to this paper. These outlines are intended to function as a "fill-in-the-blank" for educators in public parks or nature centers--I've provided activities and suggested discussion topics that follow a loose narrative arc, and educators may apply their own site-specific knowledge and programming interests to shape their workshop delivery. (For example, when I facilitated "Listening with Bats," I spoke specifically on the little brown bat and framed the workshop around using the experience of sound to signify home--a different educator might take the same outline and use it to talk about the pallid bat and frame their workshop around narratives of noise pollution in their area). Finally, Lifeworlds is also a 7 strategy for intervention in existing environmental education programming. It's a theatre-maker and creative writer's way of looking at the uses of dialogical art in climate communications and packaging it to slip into the toolkits of environmental educators without arts backgrounds. These three workshop outlines (“Listening with Bats,” “Passing Time with Trees,” and “Breathing with Sturgeon”) all follow roughly the same format. They begin with introductory context for potential users (materials needed, learning outcomes, and suggested discussion topics to research specific to the facilitator’s area), in addition to a brief list of three to four suggested resources. These resources include a mix of scientific research and artistic projects that dig into the umwelten of bats/trees/sturgeon. From there, the outlines for the workshops proper begin with an activity intended to draw participants’ attention to a particular human sensory bias in how we experience the world around us and/or to highlight the particular sensory experience the workshop will be focused on. Suggested discussion topics introduce some overarching questions that emerge from these activities (i.e., “what is echolocation?” or “how do sturgeon breathe?”). The next activity narrows in on further putting participants in the wings/roots/fins of the workshop being and imagining this other being’s experience in navigating their environment (i.e., “what sounds do you hear, and how might those impact our local little brown bats?” or “how long does a Douglas-fir live compared to a human, and how do environmental factors influence its growth?”). The workshops then pivot to an invitation for participants to use their imaginations to connect what they have been exploring about different ways of experiencing the world around them to how another being may be experiencing climate change (i.e., “how can we tell the age of this tree, and what events has it experienced over its lifetime?” or “how does noise and light 8 pollution impact both bats and humans at night?”). Workshops conclude with an invitation for participants to reflect on their experiences via a creative writing prompt asking them to adopt the voice of a bat/tree/sturgeon. The facilitator is encouraged to conclude with a brief discussion of why it can be useful for humans to try experiencing the world around them from another point of view and one small, tangible thing participants can do in their community to improve their lives and the lives of the bats/trees/sturgeon they’ve been imagining. III. Listening with Bats Growing up in suburban Upstate New York in the early 2000s, I very much wanted to see one of the little brown bats my parents told me stories about. The branches of my backyard maple should have been the cheapest seats in the house to the evening bat show. On summer evenings, I hauled myself up into its branches after dinner and waited for the show to start. But there were no bats. In 2006, a fungal disease called white nose syndrome (WNS) was documented for the first time in a little brown bat colony in Scoharie County, about 30 miles from me and my maple tree (Foley 224). Pseudogymnoascus desctructans is a fungus that grows in bare patches on bats' skin (i.e. around the nose) and causes behavioral changes that usually result in death for the affected individual. Most notably, WNS makes bats wake up from hibernation prematurely, causing them to go through large reserves of stored calories and essentially starve to death. How the fungus came to be in a Scohaire County cave is still a mystery, but the disease quickly spread from bat to bat, aided by humans tracking it between hibernacula while spelunking (Blehert 227). 9 By the time I was on the lookout for bats, WNS had wiped out 90% of little brown bats in North America (Cheng 1586). The best way I had to explore how bats might experience night in my hometown was to perform some small aspect of bat-ness myself, hooking my knees over a sturdy branch and hanging upside-down until I eventually grew bored of the experiment and let the jazzy notes of "The Entertainer" lure me down from my roost just in time to intercept the ice cream truck. In hindsight, this was probably the closest my neighborhood got in those years to a nightly performance of bats--a cloud of children listening intently to their surroundings at dusk, using a specific frequency sound to pinpoint when the ice cream truck would turn down our dead-end street and timing ourselves to fly in on an intercept course. In playing at a bat's umwelt, I inadvertently started learning more about the soundscapes that made up my home. IV. Conversations in Motion [We round a bend and find two people walking ahead of us. They are in the middle of an animated conversation. Let's call the first person, who wears a shirt emblazoned with the logo of a local university's theater department, PERFORMER #1. The second person, carrying a backpack with patches from a local conservation organization, can be PERFORMER #2.] PERFORMER #1: Okay, but "performance" isn't just like Broadway and Shakespeare and things. PERFORMER #2: What is it, then? Like, I'm not sure the higher-ups will buy this. 10 P1: There's this art historian guy, Grant Kester, and in Conservation Pieces--it's a book, I'll lend you my copy when we get back if you want--and he talks about how discourses within and between communities can be framed as a type of contemporary performance. P2: Talking is art. P1: Conversing is art. It's about setting up places for people to gather and talk about things as an art form. In the theater world we call it "dialogical art." Because there are some conversations that are really hard to have--like about climate, or anthropocentrism, or things--where sometimes people are more likely to come to the table if they're looking at it as art they're participating in and not like some government-mandated forum. Remember that George Lakoff article about framing we read last semester? P2: Yeah? P1: It's like that. We're framing the conversation as art, and talking about it as art, so people walk into it making different associations that help them be more willing to collaborate, or less confrontational, or more likely to think outside the box about solutions. P2: Okay I do remember Lakoff, but does that actually work? P1: Kester has a bunch of examples of this. There's this Austrian arts collective, WochenKlausur, that created a gathering space on a boat in Zurich to get people of diverse backgrounds talking about addiction/homelessness/prostitution in the city, and they actually came up with housing solutions through it. Or like the Routes project in Northern Ireland, where artists had conversations with bus drivers to memorialize their role crossing sectarian lines during the Troubles, and then they presented the art generated from those conversations as an ongoing dialogue for the public to learn strategies for co-existence and cooperation (Kester 1-8). 11 P2: I'm still not totally clear on the artwork you're producing here. Like do you go in with a script? P1: Hang on, I've got a quote somewhere in my notes. (rummages in pocket and eventually pulls out a phone) Okay, so Kester says that, "While it is common for a work of art to provoke dialogue among viewers, this typically occurs in response to a finished object. In these projects, on the other hand, conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict" (8). P2: So it's like improv? P1: Ish? But a bit more structure. And audience involvement is key. The artist has to build a collaborative relationship with them, and as that happens the audience becomes participants, and the performance couldn't happen without them. P2: I swear I remember some prof saying art's role in addressing social issues is to shock people out of complacency. Like An Inconvenient Truth, or those paintings and things they had at COP21, or even like N.K. Jemisin's cli-fi novels. This doesn't sound shocking. P1: It's not supposed to be. Dialogical art asks if it's also possible to talk audiences out of complacency, and lead them gently along to new understandings. It's why I think it's important to pair dialogical performance art with environmental education. It's like what we were talking about yesterday, that just giving people shocking statistics about glacial collapse or parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere doesn't have as much of an impact on people when it comes across as didactic or heavy-handed. Having conversations with people--talking with them and listening to them, not just talking at them--is the art. 12 P2: So you're not so much proposing something new here as like a tweak to what's already happening. P1: An intervention. P2: Sort of acknowledging the performativity that already happens in an educational setting and melding it with performance. P1: Exactly. P2: So how do you see that fitting in with educators and facilitators who don't have a performance background? Who might be intimidated by calling something they're doing a performance? P1: Oh, we just don't tell them that it comes from theater and performance. Because... P2: Framing. P1: Framing. Exactly. [We pass PERFORMER #1 and PERFORMER #2 as they stop for a snack break.] V. CAUTION: Uneven Terrain Ahead GOAL: Can you (20-something-year-old education fellow at a non-profit nature center) work climate solutions into every conversation you have with a visitor? OBSTACLE: You are based in a solidly conservative part of the state where less than a third of the nearby town is vaccinated against COVID-19 and Elise Stefanik (Representative for New York's 21st District and noted Trump supporter) marches in local winter festival parades. 13 OBSTACLE: Many of your visitors are children, and you're already working on a novel dealing with the injustice of expecting young children to solve problems created by older generations, leading to higher rates of anxiety and depression among youths (Hickman e863). You don't want to be a hypocrite. OBSTACLE: It's exhausting for you to keep talking about the places you love changing and the beings you love vanishing in front of your eyes. You made a ritual of walking down to the river every morning to take a photo for your time-lapse of winter's arrival. You're almost glad you'll be in a different country next year so you won't have to face the prospect of doing it again and seeing what's changed. Who's not coming home. STRATEGY?: You find a little brown bat roosting in a closed sun umbrella on your morning rounds one day. You remember waiting up at night for bats that never came. You talk with a man with a red-flag number of American flags on his jacket about the bat, and the lack of bats, and the mosquitoes, and all the bright lights in town at night, and the electric bill through the roof this winter, and he's nodding, and you haven't said the words "climate change" or "climate solutions" once, but you've had a conversation, and you're just a 20-something-year-old education fellow--what else can you do? VI. Second Trail Sign When designing Lifeworlds, I conceptualized it as a piece of contemporary dialogical art. The point of these replicable performances is to have a conversation with participants about 14 how other beings experience the place they live in--an experience that is shifting as humans continue altering these environments. As I state in the introduction to each outline, I assume any facilitator potentially incorporating these into existing programs already has a working knowledge of their local bat/tree/sturgeon species already or has the resources to educate themself. The art that I offer to other educators with Lifeworlds isn't a script based on species- and site-specific information--it's the performance structure for presenting non-human lifeworlds to participants, as illustrated by the activities and suggested discussion topics paired with them. By giving participants a series of shared experiences in imaging how other beings experience place (i.e. actively listening to nocturnal noises in "Listening with Bats," with the goal of thinking about how bats might interact with these noises), participants are engaged in two layers of performance. One as the dialogical art with the facilitator; one as our collective, embodied, imagined experience of a sliver of another being's umwelt. (I'm simply framing it to participants as a workshop rather than a performance, because "participatory workshop" is less intimidating and more easily explainable than "participatory performance.") These conversations and imaginations about other ways of experiencing the world around us don't necessarily end with the workshop either. For example, after the trial "Listening with Bats" workshop on July 17th, I went off to record bats with one of the BEEPS (Bat Education and Ecological Protection Society) members I met there. While mucking paddocks at my barn the following morning, I overheard conversations between some of the children who'd been in attendance wondering if their ponies could hear bats flying around overnight. As a piece of dialogical art, Lifeworlds also falls under the umbrella of applied 15 theater. Applied theater is what happens when a group of people working in community use the techniques of drama and theatre to address an issue of social concern. Those participating in the activities have a vested interest in said social issue. Applied Theatre focuses on questioning, discussing, and addressing the issue, as opposed to focusing on creating a public performance. Participants come together to use various techniques such as role-playing, improvisation, tableaux work, Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, and other interactive methods in order to inspire dialogue, foster education, and enact change (Theatre Development Fund). Dialogue-based workshops like Lifeworlds have the potential to create little bubbles of community. Or, if you'll excuse the bat metaphor, to create a sort of conversational echolocation. I, the artist-facilitator, am sending out a signal that this topic is important to me. I'm listening to the sounds reflected back at me by participants to determine if it's bounced off anyone interested in engaging further. VII. Similar Trails Include... Another source of inspiration for this model of performance was Chantal Bilodeau's Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), a biannual climate theatre festival that commissions 50 playwrights from around the world to write 5-minute plays about climate change. During the four months of the festival, these plays are distributed free for production, with the request that performances be paired with some sort of climate action in the producer's community. These productions can be anything from a full staging with sets/costumes/lighting/etc. to informal readings with friends around a kitchen table and everything in between. The conversations generated through performances are crucial to the artwork, as are the practical or political actions (regardless of scale) that may emerge from them (Climate Change Theatre 16 Action). As one of the commissioned playwrights for the 2023 cycle (contributing a short play entitled "Duet" about mindfulness, climate anxiety, and finding space to take action), I was energized by the success of free, publicly available scripts in generating climate conversations, which could be tailored to the needs of specific communities. I also noted, though, the risks that didactic scripts could be off-putting to potential producers and plays rooted in an overly specific setting were less likely to be performed elsewhere. Another success of CCTA that informs Lifeworlds is the co-opting of a pre-established community gathering (the experience of going to a theatrical performance in the case of CCTA; gathering for a naturalist talk for Lifeworlds) as a methodology in facilitating climate dialogue. While Lifeworlds may not be billed explicitly as a series of "climate solutions" workshops, climate change reflections and solutions are woven into all three workshop outlines. After participants have embodied some small aspect of how another being experiences their environment, the final activities of each workshop are intended to create space for conversations about how these beings are experiencing climate change (i.e. creating visual representations of local noise pollution, or playing at being a sturgeon trying to find food in a polluted/dammed watershed). When I trialed these workshops, I framed them to participants as opportunities to try experiencing our environment as another being does, so we humans might better understand how to have positive impacts on both other beings' lives and our own. I'd recommend any other future facilitators try framing them in a similar way. 17 VIII. Continental Drift "Talk to people about what they're interested in" is one of the major aphorisms of environmental education. If you want visitors to engage with you, you need to hook their attention. Children often make this mission easy to accomplish. They walk into a nature center with their interests writ plain in the NASA logo on their shirt, or the battered wolf plushie peeking out of a bag, or a dinosaur backpack on their shoulders. I've always had a fondness for the dinosaur kids, having once been one of them myself. Not the Jurassic Park type, though. More the Mary Anning kind, less interested in how dinosaurs and humans might (disastrously) co-habit and more interested in how dinosaurs co-existed with each other. I've spent much of my life in the shadow of the Helderberg Escarpment, a rock formation that towers some 700 feet above the Hudson River Valley and holds countless fossils pressed into its limestone. Undoubtedly, I owe a portion of my own interest in environmental education to the crinoid stems I dug for in stream beds as a kid--those final impressions of 300-million-year-old sea lilies that now resemble rusty bolts. My fossil-hunting days give me an advantage when I hold the power of the globe in my hands, standing under a six-foot sphere suspended from the ceiling of a darkened room that is illuminated by four projectors mapping models of the Earth’s tectonic movements on its surface, dragging my finger across a smooth iPad screen to smash the continents back together, then rip them apart and push them down under shallow seas. You are here, 400 million years ago. 400 million years ago is also here with us, now. Wild, isn't it, that I can go down to the dry streambed, flip over a rock, and hold the shadow of something that experienced this same place, so very long ago? 18 (There were a surprising number of visitors who struck up conversations with me where it became apparent they had never heard of plate tectonics before. Sitting in the lunchroom with my colleagues one day, it dawned on me that these visitors--many likely the grandparents of the kids with dinosaur backpacks--pre-dated the theory of plate tectonics, which was only widely accepted in the 1960s (National Geographic). Wild, isn't it, the timescales our conversations can span?) There's a melancholy to dragging the continents to their current positions. Often, I halt the model before it starts projecting into the future and showing predictions of melting ice caps and rising sea levels. New York City returned to its shallow seas, much of Florida gone the same way, Antarctica's fossil record finally laid bare, all before the continents have even twitched. Maybe it's wrong, that I tell the kids around me about the past but not the future, but I have the power of the globe in my hands. Is it wrong to give them time to imagine the view looking down from a brontosaurus' eyes before worrying about who's going extinct right now? "We have some dinosaurs here," I say. Surely that's more interesting than, Hey kids, did you know there are currently one million species at risk of extinction? (Burakoff). The little Mary Annings and John Hammonds roll their eyes. Yeah yeah, the theropod dinosaurs who became birds. (Never mind that I'm only fifteen years older than them, and dinosaurs have already been redesigned from my books. Lots more feathers now.) "Oh, I don't mean the birds. A pigeon isn't a velociraptor. There's someone here whose ancestors were swimming with ichthyosaurs and still looks pretty much the same today." The two resident lake sturgeon lurk at the bottom of their tank. It's elevated off the 19 floor by a promontory of fake rock, which puts the sturgeon just below my eye level. They do look ancient, don't they, with their matte grey scales and their pointed noses and that slight hint of amber in their eyes, like they're seeing things trapped in time? You want to know what this place was like? When there were dinosaurs here, and woolly mammoths, and your grandparents? Ask a sturgeon, they ought to know better than almost anybody. IX. River Crossings, River Immersions An excerpt from the latest draft of Albany Beef, a play that might have been my thesis if New York State had an MFA Interdisciplinary Studies program: Hi! Hello, I know we haven't met before, so this might be a little weird, but that rock next to you -- yes, that one, there -- have you seen the crinoid stems in it? There's some really excellent examples of crinoid stems here. They're these things, right here, that look sort of like an old rusty bolt. Honestly, the first time I saw one, I was like "oh great, more stray bolts from the terminal rail yard just lying around," but they're actually the remains of a plant that used to grow here when this whole place was underwater, like millions and millions of years ago. Sea lilies. Can you imagine sitting here, in cool, crystal blue waters, with a field of sea lilies bobbing feathered flowers around you? I wonder who else might have swum with them. 20 And then, you know, BOOM, Great Dying, CO2 off the charts, temperatures soaring, ocean acidification, all that. Lovely way to start an afternoon. Sorry. I feel like people go looking for fossils and they want to find, like, a megalodon tooth or an ichthyosaur or something. We love a good sea monster. A rusty bolt, it's just not that threatening, is it? And now instead of a sea, we've got this river here. Water always finds a way, huh? Would you believe me, if I told you there were monsters in this river? X. Third Trail Sign Lifeworlds tries to give back, just a bit, in the best way I can, to the environmental education programs and institutions that have inspired much of my other creative work, including publications in (Be)longing: Tiny Stories for Radical Futures, Eavesdrop, Fire Season, and a forthcoming publication in Solarpunk Magazine. And the 130,000-word draft of an ecofantasy novel about climate anxiety sitting in another open Scrivener document that I chip away at editing as my break from writing this paper. The sturgeon mentioned above, who I walked by every morning, led me to question the histories of sturgeon in New York State, which in turn led to the first several drafts of Albany Beef, a one-woman/many-sturgeon educational performance piece about relationships in and around the Hudson River ("Albany beef" is a 20th century nickname for New York sturgeon, historically distributed out of the Port of Albany) (Lewis). I've done a couple of readings from Albany Beef in Kelowna, but ultimately it's a piece for and about New York that I realized I wasn't going to be able to take any further out in British Columbia. Albany 21 Beef was so site-specific that it was difficult to envision as anything other than a monologue in a setting so far removed from the geography of its subjects. My passion and research on sturgeon eventually morphed into the less site-specific "Breathing with Sturgeon" workshop for Lifeworlds. Two of the main challenges I observed while working in outdoor and environmental education roles in New England and Upstate New York (observations echoed by education leads I've spoken with in Canada and the western US) are a lack of spare time for developing new programs and a high turnover rate of educators. Neither of these challenges are particularly surprising. When job responsibilities frequently include running existing programs, taking care of animals on site, and patrolling trails for safety risks, there's not much time to devote to developing new material. Additionally, many public parks and nature centers see increased visitation rates during the summer, so many education positions are on a seasonal and/or volunteer basis. The AmeriCorps and SCA (Student Conservation Association) job boards tend towards hiring a specific demographic of 18-26 year olds on university off-terms or fresh from finishing undergraduate or high school degrees. Teaching resources like Lifeworlds could provide some utility for these educators. The outlines are formatted to be taken and filled in with species-specific information for a particular place. For example, in "Listening with Bats," the activities (aka the portion of the workshop that takes more trial runs to develop) would remain the same whether the workshop is held in Kelowna or New York. The discussion topics would also remain the same, but the information discussed would be tailored to the local bat species. With the intention of keeping these workshops portable, sustainable, and budget-friendly, I also strove to design activities that repurpose common objects (string, balls, clean 22 trash/recyclables, etc.). In my trial workshops, the most expensive prop I bought was a bottle of bug spray that cost CAD$15.95 at Mountain Equipment Company. There are many pieces of technology on the market now that can help humans translate aspects of other species' umwelten, like the Echo Meter Touch 2, which plugs into a phone to pick up on ultrasonic frequencies and convert them real-time into human-audible sounds. However, the Echo Meter Touch 2 also currently costs CAD$250 (Wildlife Acoustics). (Additional discussion of why I veer away from these "prosthetic" ways of expanding our umwelt can be found in Section XII). A third challenge, specific to institutions that keep resident animals on-site, is that visitors would not infrequently approach us educators with questions about the ethics of keeping captive animals for educational purposes. It's a question I still struggle with. In my particular situation in New York, some of our animal ambassadors were ex-falconry birds who couldn't be released into the wild. Surely for them, it was more ethical that we provide these birds with food, shelter, and health care instead of releasing them into an ecosystem they were too old and no longer had the skills to survive in. But what about the sturgeon? They were hatched in a Department of Conservation (DEC) fishery, which presumably released their siblings into the wild. Those two sturgeon just happened to get the short end of the stick. Their particular species (Acipenser fulvescens, lake sturgeon) reaches lengths of approximately seven feet and can live for up to 150 years (NYSDEC). Presumably my sturgeon friends will eventually outgrow their tank, and I have no idea what will happen to them then. This ethical predicament of using live animals in environmental education got me interested in working with imagined and/or wild "ambassadors." Nowhere in Lifeworlds is it 23 a requirement for the facilitator to have a captive animal on hand. Instead, the premise is that the facilitator and participants gather in an outdoor environment where these beings may or may not be present. For "Passing Time with Trees," it's fairly straightforward to pick a central tree species for the workshop common to the delivery area. The facilitator can 100% guarantee participants will encounter a Douglas-fir, or a sugar maple, or a trembling aspen. For "Listening with Bats," it's a little harder. In my trial workshop, I had younger participants very keen to know if they would see a bat that night. I told them the odds were good--we were in the right place at the right time--but it would be up to the bats whether they appeared or not. (We did in fact see several bats, species indeterminate, and two barred owls.) For "Breathing with Sturgeon," it's unlikely that participants anywhere would actually see a sturgeon during a workshop, unless there's a captive one in a tank nearby. Because participants must engage their imaginations to engage with how these beings experience their environments, I hope it might also become easier for them to imagine these beings lead unique and complex live--and humans aren't exceptional in having an experience of place. XI. What Do You Notice Here? What do you notice here? Bringing creative practices into environmental education isn't new. What do you see that makes you say that? I've seen artist residencies in public parks, bird ambassadors making paintings as 24 enrichment activities, and winter light shows designed to get visitors to engage with spaces during colder months. Oh, and in more direct conversation with Lifeworlds, the recent inclusion of visual art aesthetic development methodology as an educational tool for prompting visitors to think critically about their assumptions. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a facilitation method that began with Dr. Abigail Housen's research into stages of aesthetic development and became an education strategy "supportive of critical thinking, visual literacy, communication, and collaboration skills" (Visual Thinking Strategies). The steps are fairly straightforward, and it's in the conversations that emerge from them where the education happens. First, participants are presented with a subject (a photo, a painting, a video, etc.). They observe the subject in silence for a minute, then the facilitator asks, "What do you notice?" To each respondent, the facilitator follows up their observation with, "What do you see that makes you say that?" The facilitator repeats these two questions as necessary (Visual Thinking Strategies). This method of participant-led engagement also works quite well for teasing out visitors' biases and assumptions about flora and fauna. [We round a bend and find a FACILITATOR and a group of PARTICIPANTS by the shore of a lake. The FACILITATOR holds up a large photograph of a sturgeon swimming along the bottom of the lake.] FACILITATOR: What do you notice about this sturgeon? PARTICIPANT #1: Um, it's kind of ugly. And it looks like a brute. 25 FACILITATOR: What do you see that makes you say that? PARTICIPANT #1: Well, it's really big, and there aren't any other fish swimming near it. And its scales aren't shiny like the salmon we were looking at before. (FACILITATOR may choose from three responses: FACILITATOR: It is quite big! The sturgeon in this lake can grow to [...] FACILITATOR: Okay, so we're noticing that this sturgeon is at a different place in the water column from other fish [...] FACILITATOR: Nice observation about the scales. Sturgeon belong to an older family of fish [...] (FACILITATOR may not start an argument over whether or not the sturgeon is "ugly.") [We meander on past the lake.] After using VTS in environmental education settings myself, Lifeworlds uses a similar methodology in how it connects embodied experiences to discussion topics that I'll call ETS (Embodied Thinking Strategies). In addition to asking participants to observe a subject, the facilitator also asks participants to embody one aspect of a subject. And then what did you notice? 26 What did you feel that makes you say that? XII. Trail Snacks I came to environmental education through theater, and I came to theater through technical theater (lighting and projections, specifically), so maybe it's ironic that I now strive to keep technology out of my environmental education theater. Or maybe it's that I read too much Ursula K. Le Guin while waiting around in lighting booths, and when she said: As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world (Le Guin 369). I said: "Huh. I know you're referring to creative writing here, but I feel like this applies to theater too." Humans are so, so good at expanding our species umwelt via technological prosthesis. We made the Echo Meter Touch 2 so we could bring echolocation frequencies into our own hearing range. We made the Birdly® using Oculus Rift 3D goggles and a movable platform so we could experience a simulation of flight (The Wild Center). We made models of continental drift and projected them on giant globes so we could understand vast time scales. Maybe it's a radically conservative position then, to shun these technological expansions for Lifeworlds. But I don't want participants to experience a virtual landscape. I want them to experience this landscape, the one their body is physically in at the moment of workshop. I 27 don't want them to have to wait for an Echo Meter Touch 2 or a Birdly® to be provided to them in order to imagine a bat's experience of flying through the forest at night. This turn from the technological expansion trail pivots me down the mindfulness trail. "Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally," says Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) (Kabat-Zinn). By embracing the power of participants' ability to imagine the umwelten of others through their direct interaction with their bodies and their surroundings, Lifeworlds has the ability to bring mindfulness practices wrapped in theater practices wrapped in environmental education practices to facilitators' toolboxes. Like putting on layers when heading out on a brisk fall day, I wrap Lifeworlds up in this mindfulness/theater/environmental education cocoon and pull it out the door with me. We stand (or sit, or lie down) in the dusk and open our human hearing to the crepuscular sounds around us. There is education in this simple act--who and what do I hear around me? There is performativity--how does the producer of one sound impact the producer of another sound? There is performance--we are gathered in this place, at this time, to experience this sound show together. There is a sliver of mindfulness--put away your phones, your Instagram, your Tiktok. Just listen to the place around you. You're here. Who else is here? I bundle this up and offer it to other facilitators. You can take this, if you want it. I'm not going to quote Susan Sontag or Augusto Boal or Jon Kabat-Zinn at you. I baked them in here, but the taste is quite similar to what you're used to. Put it in a pocket, pull it out if you're hungry. Try it. 28 XIII. Outflows The outcomes of these workshops will be highly varied, and the degree to which I, the designer, can look at them and determine a level of "success" is questionable and somewhat irrelevant. Was there a nod to another way of how information is conveyed, through some embodied way of sensing the world around us and how other beings may sense it? I will take that as a successful outcome. For facilitators looking to their own participants, there is no quantitative way of reliable value to measure the educational output of workshops like these, but they can use conversation topics and physical creative outputs from participants to gain insight into what participants are focusing on (and how that focus may change over the course of the workshop). An example of this from "Listening with Bats" is the sound drawings participants made by using color and shape to represent the crepuscular soundscape of our site at Woodhaven EcoCulture Centre. In focusing on sound, participants became more attuned to the noise created by traffic on nearby Gordon Drive, which was overwhelmingly represented in their drawings. This marked a sharp change from experimental workshops I'd run in the same location during previous months when working to develop the structure and activities for Lifeworlds, when the influx of late spring meltwater made nearby Bellevue Creek a much more prominent sound than it was by mid-July. Some of these outputs didn't work as intended. I'd originally planned for a common conclusion to all three Lifeworlds workshops, where participants would use their embodied experiences to write a short (~5 minute) response based on a series of prompts encouraging them to wrap up what they felt during the workshop. But conversations ran longer than anticipated, and with temperatures hovering around 100°F/38°C, I offered it as an optional 29 wrap-up. Understandably, not many participants were interested in sticking around in the heat to write. I'd be interested to see if this conclusion works any differently in a different environment, but in future versions of these outlines, I might consider replacing the writing prompt with more discussion prompts. XIV. Passing Time with Trees I am looking at a tree, and there is a problem. The problem is I've just driven 3,000 miles across North America to start an MFA program in a different country on a different coast--cramming my aged Subaru with cross-country skis, the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer, and as much King Arthur flour as I'm legally allowed to bring across the US-Canada border--and now I'm looking at a tree, and for the life of me, I cannot say what kind of tree it is. It's clearly some sort of pine, and it has a reddish bark that reminds me of Scots pine, but I know Scots pine like I know the scar on the back of my wrist from chopping them into firewood, and this is not one of them. I come from a place where I know conifers. I know how to politely shake hands with a branch and let the length and number and sharpness of needles tell me who I'm greeting. The rumble of logging trucks on a dirt road lulls me to sleep at night, and in the morning I saddle a stocky roan pony named Arthur and head out onto the trails I maintain with a folding saw, a notebook, and my student on her old Haflinger gelding. I point out Scots pine to her as we ride by and tell her a story about European settlers who brought their seeds over with them and expected to harvest them as masts for their ships, but the trees grew knotty and scraggly in the unfamiliar Adirondack soil. They grow best where there has been a 30 disturbance, and there was plenty of disturbance for them to grow into. My student--who I'm only supposed to be teaching how to ride, but how can I teach her to ride if she doesn't know where she's riding?--reaches out to shake hands with the branches as we pass by. "Oh!" she says, pointing at a rustling just off the trail. "Baby turkeys!" I watch her posture relax as we talk through the trees, forgetting her nerves at riding outside the safety of an arena. Arthur's ears flick between us to catch our voices, then he offers his own opinion on the local flora by grabbing a bite of beech leaves. But now I'm 3,000 miles away, and this tree is definitely not a Scots pine, and that is a problem. (Not for the tree, the tree's problem is drought, I don't need to know what kind of tree it is to notice that.) Feeling a bit like I'm cheating, I pull out my phone and ask iNaturalist for an ID. It's a ponderosa pine. Of course. I should have known that. When I was a kid, my parents brought back a ponderosa seedling that some environmental group was handing out at the Idaho State Fair and planted it next to the white pines in our Upstate New York backyard, where it proceeded to grow slightly faster than it was dying. This ponderosa pine looks nothing like that spindly, starved sapling stretching roots down into strange soil. I sit in front of my laptop in a stuffy apartment, where the whisper of the creek has been replaced by the scream of revving engines, where I only touch the soil through the soles of my shoes, where I cannot find the right brand of flour in the grocery store, and I imagine I know how that lost ponderosa feels. 31 XV. Other Paths to Wander We have been wandering on the Lifeworlds trail, but it is not the only trail in this network. It crosses and recrosses dozens (hundreds, maybe) of other trails. This just happened to be the one I followed. May I interest you, for your next journey, in one of these trails? Deke Weaver's Unreliable Bestiary (junction with Lifeworlds near the use of performance to tell non-human stories) -- A planned series of 26 performance pieces, one for each letter of the alphabet, diving into the stories of a particular endangered species or habitat. As of 2024, six shows have been completed, incorporating "contemporary stories, myth, and unusual immersive events." Each show includes research from "science, folklore, interviews, national parks" (Weaver). Cleo Wölfle Hazard's Tell a Salmon (junction with Lifeworlds near applied theater and climate anxiety) -- A "slapdash queer punk style" salmon oracle first staged at the Bay Delta Science Conference in 2014. The first performer, the greeter, invites scientists to sit down with the second performer, the salmon. The salmon does not speak, but turns "over one of sixteen stones arrayed on the table to reveal prompts such as "Describe a place you love that no longer exists," "Are you troubled by your data?" "What would you trade to save a species from extinction?" and "Do you like to swim?" Scientists might respond by writing or speaking to the salmon (Wölfle Hazard 93). Ania Upstill's Urban Field Station residency project (junction with Lifeworlds near 32 applied theater and stewardship) -- A scavenger hunt in three NYC parks where, with the guidance of a facilitator, adult participants are encouraged to play and explore the park while solving a mystery. Upstill "aimed to educate participants about how, and why, stewards care for green spaces in New York City" while giving adult participants an opportunity to play in these spaces (Upstill). Or, if you're seeking other ways of considering your movement along these paths, may I suggest: Michael Pearce on "Embodied ecological awareness and the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq" -- An exploration of how movement-based approaches to actor training provide unique opportunities for co-opting into ecological awareness. Pearce argues: that the unique way that the training navigates binaries of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism makes it a particularly suitable model for a contemporary green theatre training course. On the one hand, the pedagogy's deconstruction of human/non-human hierarchies provides facilitators with pathways to making work from an eco-critical perspective. On the other hand, its emphasis on human creativity means the human is never "removed" from the art and, therefore, our ethical responsibility to address this crisis of our own making is not diminished (3). XVI. Packing List for Next Time Lifeworlds will keep evolving beyond this thesis. There's always something to learn, and there's always something new to notice. A non-inclusive packing list for future excursions: 1. A distribution platform. I'm not a web designer, so the scope of this thesis didn't include designing an online distribution platform for Lifeworlds. Instead, I focused on 33 creating proof-of-concept for the outlines and trial workshops. The next stage here would be to secure funding to collaborate with a web designer to build digital housing for these resources. 2. Geographically diverse trial workshops. I would like to run more trial workshops, or partner with other institutions to run more trial workshops, to observe how these outlines function in different areas. 3. New facilitators. To work with these outlines and give feedback on how they are/are not useful for incorporating into existing programming. 4. Conclusion review. (As discussed in Section XIII.) 34 Conclusion: On Arrivals I'm writing this final section after arriving back home. Herbie and I always travel in a loop. Out the gate, up the hill, around the mountain, home again for lunch. I sit on the roots of an old Douglas-fir in his paddock and use him as a sounding board as I rehearse the introductions and connective tissue for my trial workshops. Frankly, he pays more attention to the bald eagle fledglings perched higher up in the Douglas-fir than he does to me. Fair play, Herbie. They're very loud and very ungainly and oh so entertaining to watch as they discover the promise of their umwelt for the first time. There is sap on my hands, and sap on my shorts, and sap on the pages of my notebook, sticking me to this and this to that. There is sap on Herbie's shoulder, where he scratched a fly bite against the Douglas-fir. I think about how the feel of sap against skin calls physical attention to every time I move my finger or my leg. Herbie and I do not walk to reach a goal. Sometimes I try, sometimes I tell him that we're going to take photos in a certain patch of arrowleaf balsamroot or that we're going to cool off in a certain stream. Whenever I set us a goal, Herbie almost always has other ideas about where we'll be going and how we'll be getting there. More often than not, we strike off on impulse. To eat that dandelion root. To look at that chocolate lily. To wait for a car to pass us. To make sure that rustling in the bush is quail, not a coyote or a bear. Only in looking back do I see what emerges from our walks and shape it into an 35 impulse to drive our next adventure. How do I bring myself to the crossroads of environmental education and performance? How do I bring my body, and my mind, and my heart there? I could say it's by designing interactive workshops to intervene in environmental education curricula on multispecies ways of knowing with applied theater methodologies. That's the elevator pitch I can use for academics, sure. But when I answer the question for myself--well, it's not words I use, is it? 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Soniak, Matt. “The Origins of Our Misguided Hatred for Pigeons.” Audubon, 14 Nov. 2016, www.audubon.org/news/the-origins-our-misguided-hatred-pigeons. “Sparśa (Biophony).” Zoria Kelly Markovich, Zoria Kelly Markovich, 2024, kellymarkovich.net/home/sparsa/. The Long Now Foundation. “Chronodiversity: Thinking about Time with Trees | Jared Farmer.” YouTube, YouTube, 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaOCVHcMXA. Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. MIT, 2003. Tree Museum, Katie Holten, www.katieholten.com/treemuseum. Upstill, Ania. “Discovering Stewardship Through Play: Using Applied Theater Techniques for Environmental Education.” The Nature of Cities, The Nature of Cities, 30 Oct. 41 2023, www.thenatureofcities.com/2023/10/30/discovering-stewardship-through-play-using-applied-theater-techniques-for-environmental-education/. VTS - Visual Thinking Strategies, Visual Thinking Strategies, 2024, vtshome.org/. Weaver, Deke. “The Speculative Ecologies of the Unreliable Bestiary.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, HowlRound Theatre Commons, 21 Apr. 2024, howlround.com/speculative-ecologies-unreliable-bestiary. “What Tree Is That?” Arbor Day Foundation, 2024, www.arborday.org/trees/whattree/. Wölfle Hazard, Cleo. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. University of Washington Press, 2022. Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022. 42 Appendix A: “Listening with Bats” Workshop Outline 43 44 45 46 47 Appendix B: “Passing Time with Trees” Workshop Outline 48 49 50 51 52 Appendix C: “Breathing with Sturgeon” Workshop Outline 53 54 55 56 57 Appendix D: Lifeworlds One-Sheet as Presented to Committee 58 59 Appendix E: Lifeworlds Trial Workshops Poster Poster by Anne Furman
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Kenney, Denise
Garrard, Greg
Lifeworlds : interactive workshops for discovering how non-human beings experience their worlds
Text