Different from other types of outdoor or environmental education which offer room for aesthetic experiences, AEE turns the tables in a fundamental way.
Art is not an added quality, the icing on the cake; it is rather the point of departure in the effort to find ways in which people can connect to their environment.
A second fundamental characteristic is that AEE is one of the first contemporary approaches of bringing together artistic practice and environmental education in which practitioners also made an attempt to formulate an epistemology.
I aim at an openness to sensitivity, new and personal ways to articulate and share one’s environmental experiences which might be beautiful, disgusting, peaceful or threatening.
Important to underline - because it counters possible allegations of embracing a too Romantic view of nature – is that there is also room for the “shadow” side of experience, for feelings of disgust, fear and agony.
The historical antecedents of arts-based environmental education as it was developed in Finland go back to 1971, the year that the first European regional InSEA congress was held in that country.
Quoting Kauppinen (1972), she provides the rationale for the congress at the time: “One reason for making the theme was the wish to emphasize the manifoldness and diversity of our environmental problems – [they] are not purely biological, economic and social ones but also aesthetic ones, and are consequently part of art education, not only as separate subjects of study but also as integrated parts of other subjects dealing with our living environment” (Kauppinen,[6] cited in Pohjakallio, 2007).
[7] Already at that time, as Meri-Helga Mantere, notes, attention was paid to aesthetic and critical observation of the environment, both in the education of art teachers and in the curricula of Finnish schools.
Environmental education, at the time, concentrated on problems, and this was reflected in the images that were created in art classes, representing “dying nature, spoilt built environments, factories that polluted, and chaotic traffic jams”.
However, when they tried to address the themes and questions during art lessons, these proved so wide and difficult, that neither pupils nor teacher could envisage any solutions, leading to feelings of despair rather than empowerment.
Ultimately this led to a dead end: “the use of conscious, threatening environmental scenarios and political topicalities as intellectual fuel proved to be a questionable idea”.
Effectively, what this implied was that in the entire environmental education process the emphasis would be on the manner of observing, experiencing and thinking that is customary to art.
[10] Whereas before, art students, on basis of the prevailing orientation at the time of linguistic methods and critical theory, typically used collage of media images rather than personal and intimate contact with the actual environment, this now all began to change.
[12] Art students participated in courses on environmental pedagogy and camp schools were organized in “unspoilt” environments such as the Finnish archipelago and Lapland.
Pohjakallio lists the following sources of inspiration for the new activities: deep ecology, gestalt therapy, experimental learning theories, and environmental aesthetics.
Through that emphasis on the idea that the environment is, first of all, inhabited by persons and not something remote or detached, aspects were taken up that had been mostly neglected in art education's earlier bearings in formalist and semiotic approaches.
It involved a two-way influence and identification: "In this approach, the environment is as much a drama and narrative as a set of critical insights and political views.
In contrast to the compulsory comprehensive schools, these provided a new opportunity to develop artistically demanding and at cases long-term projects.
At this occasion, Mantere articulated the specific Finnish approach to an international readership more fully in her seminal article “Ecology, Environmental Education and Art Teaching” (which appeared in the InSEA publication Power of Images, 1992).
For that reason, aesthetic practice could be an extremely valuable contribution to experiential learning in environmental education (which she held as the latter's most fruitful and functional principle).
These two combined, mean that art education can offer a mode in which learners can engage with their experiences and observations of the environment through artistic activity.
Finally, Mantere calls attention in her article to the critical insight that when an ecological lifestyle is primarily seen in terms of restriction and austerity, then it is more likely that change will only be accepted as a last resort.
Through art, “it is also possible to develop the mythical, metaphorical and deep-level psychological levels of man’s relationship with nature into a constructive resource, in which factual information achieves deeper meanings”.
"[23]Here, Mantere touches upon two contrasting forces within AEE: the more passive not-knowing while being open to one's senses, and the more active learning that takes place when integrating the new information.
[25] When, through conscious training in the senses, the predominant cultural and personal stereotypes are decoded, not only the participant's perception becomes very different, but also his or her articulation of these in words and picture.
[27] In this overview of the way in which a specific form of arts-based environmental education developed in Finland the following core traits to be distinguished.
It is to this second phase of AEE, which emerged in the 1980s, that my attention is mostly focused, the idea that a relationship with nature can be built through the senses: the art teacher puts his or her trust in experiential learning and the teaching can move out of the classroom.
The pupils are encouraged to open their senses by artistic practices, which can be almost anything from drawing and building out of natural materials to making conceptual art.
In her foreword to the book Image of the Earth, Writing on Art-based Environmental Education, Mantere speaks of a “we,” that is a group of Finnish artists and art teachers at the university level.
The issues of values and lifestyle, raised by the ecological crisis, can be approached by artistic methods, reaching otherwise unattainable areas of experience.