Responding to images

Responding, viewing and participating as audience members are ways in which people receptively participate in the Arts (Australia Council for the Arts, 2010), and Arts engagement can be considered a human right for adults and children (Ewing, Reference Ewing2020; General Assembly, 1948; Mai & Gibson, Reference Mai and Gibson2011). Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum describes how children explore artworks and artists, considering the ways in which the Arts communicate meaning and emotion across diverse contexts, cultures, communities, times and places. Children respond to artworks by making art, discussing art and writing about art (ACARA, 2022). Previous research has shown that even very young children use complex and sustained strategies to connect with and communicate about artworks (Mai, Reference Mai2013).

People respond to artworks in very personal ways. When children engage with the Arts, they are constructing who they are, building meaning about the world and exploring how they interact with meaning-making (Lemon & Garvis, Reference Lemon, Garvis, Pendergast and Garvis2023). Responding to artworks can be associated with a mix of feelings and emotions.

Emotional engagement

The Arts are uniquely positioned to connect with our emotions. Engaging with quality Arts experiences enhances children’s social and emotional well-being (ACARA, 2022). The Arts provide people with languages to communicate ideas that are important, reaching beyond the spoken or written word (Eisner, Reference Eisner2002). The Arts break down traditional language and literacy barriers to enable communication across age groups (Knight et al., Reference Knight, Zollo, McArdle, Cumming, Bone, Ridgway, Peterken and Li2016), across diverse cultures (UNESCO, 2010) and across time (Baker, Reference Baker2012).

The Arts deal with what makes us essentially human, and all human cultures use the Arts to communicate meaning (Dinham, Reference Dinham2023). Responding to the Arts can prompt feelings of joy, excitement, connection, empathy, peace and community. The Arts reach us at our core, helping us to remember, to hope, to feel sorrow, to find balance, to understand ourselves and to appreciate (de Botton & Armstrong, Reference de Botton and Armstrong2013). Artworks can also be confronting, to prompt feelings of interest, surprise, sorrow, anger, disgust, confusion, shame and despair (Silvia, Reference Silvia2009). Jickling (Reference Jickling, Jickling and Sterling2017) calls for sustainability education experiences that are held, felt and disruptive. The Arts offer a case for contributing to such experiences, as they allow us to see a troubled world from another’s perspective.

Many contemporary artists are exploring topics related to sustainability such as climate change, ecosystem collapse, extinction crises, pollution, world poverty, social injustice, conflict and so on (Curtis et al., Reference Curtis, Reid and Ballard2012; Song, Reference Song2012; Steiner, Reference Steiner2007). Brook (Reference Brook2022) explored the emotional impact of environmental artworks on adults, revealing a wide range of emotional responses and mixed positive and negative responses to some artworks. While children may have the right to engage with artworks that address sustainability topics because they are relevant to their present and future lives, this is, potentially, a risky and emotional business. When events, behaviours and consequences have uncertain outcomes, these are deemed risky (Aven & Renn, Reference Aven and Renn2009). However, there is an argument that children have the right to be emotionally impacted by images that tell a troubling story about our shared planet (O’Gorman, Reference O’Gorman, Elliott, Arlemalm-Hagser and Davis2020) and that risk and resilience often go hand in hand (O’Gorman, Reference O’Gorman, Hughes, Franz and Willis2019).

Risk and resilience

The AC (2022) emphasises that the Arts hold the potential to develop children’s creativity, confidence, compassion and resilience, supporting them to contribute towards imagining, building and sustaining their communities and their futures. Engaging deeply with the Arts can involve risk-taking related to experimentation, problem-solving and trial and error (Harris & Carter, Reference Harris and Carter2021). Making art can make us feel vulnerable if we perceive that our artwork is of poor quality. It is common for children to begin to lose confidence in their artmaking abilities around the age of eight (Lehrer, Reference Lehrer2012). Aside from the risks involved in making art, the Arts can also involve risky subject matter that children may encounter as viewers, for example, of Chris Jordan’s online galleries.

Over recent decades, commentators in some Western contexts have noted a decrease in appetite for risk in children’s play (Wyver et al., Reference Wyver, Tranter, Naughton, Little, Sandseter and Bundy2010), but this mostly refers to physical risk. Negotiating emotional risk is a further consideration. Hägglund and Johansson (Reference Hägglund, Johansson, Davis and Elliott2014) argued that educational spaces can be risky emotional spaces for young children when teachers enable children’s rights to be exercised in a social context. In addition, children may be exposed to challenging news about global disruption and uncertain futures, so adults working with children have a responsibility to help them to negotiate emotionally risky experiences. The Arts can support the navigation of these “emotional obstacle courses” (O’Gorman, Reference O’Gorman, Hughes, Franz and Willis2019, p. 182).

While appetite for risk has reduced, certain tensions remain in the field of sustainability education for children. During the late 1990s, Sociologies of Childhood theories emerged, with children deemed more capable, competent and agentic than adults might have considered them to be (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, Reference Dahlberg, Moss and Pence2013; James & Prout, Reference James and Prout1997). At the same time in the United States, environmental educator David Sobel (Reference Sobel1996) urged adults to give children time to love nature before being asked to heal it. More recently Australian scholars Davis and Elliott (Reference Davis, Elliott, Davis and Elliott2014) have argued that children should not have to take responsibility for addressing the sustainability mess they will inherit, while at the same time emphasising children’s potential as agents of change for sustainability. These challenges offer both opportunities for risk and potential for building children’s resilience in the face of the current and future sustainability crises. While educators should take this responsibility seriously to ensure children are not harmed by their engagement with sustainability topics, children are exposed to challenging topics in a range of contexts, not just at school.

Prior experiences

Children enter learning contexts carrying with them prior experiences and socially constructed knowledge gained through conversations with friends and family, previous educational experiences and exposure to media. Constructivist learning theory suggests that learners are active recipients of information, building their understanding of the world by integrating new information into their pre-existing knowledge structures (Adams, Reference Adams2006).

When children are exposed to new ideas about sustainability, they bring their prior knowledge and experiences of the topic to new learning contexts (Johannesson, Andersson, Arlemalm-Hagser, & Elliott, Reference Johannesson, Andersson, Arlemalm-Hagser, Elliott, Elliott, Arlemalm-Hagser and Davis2020). These new experiences will enrich children’s existing sustainability knowledge as connections are made and new perspectives are explored. The Arts provide novel perspectives and languages with which children might explore sustainability through making art and responding to it (Chapman & O’Gorman, Reference Chapman and O’Gorman2022). Previous experiences of both the Arts and sustainability provide powerful “filters” (Lanier, Reference Lanier1968) that influence the ways in which children experience new learning opportunities. For example, when children experience Chris Jordan’s images, they will draw on their previous life experiences to make sense of the ideas depicted; they will connect with what they know and with the places where they live.

Connections with local context

Sustainability is a global challenge with local implications and the potential for local solutions. While individual actions are important, systemic changes are also urgently required (Ferreira, Ryan & Davis, Reference Ferreira, Ryan, Davis and English2021). Children may be too young to vote, but they can engage in advocacy and action-taking in local contexts and exercise their citizenship and democratic rights more broadly, as sustainability and democracy are both fundamental values in education (Engdahl, Pramling Samuelsson & Arlemalm-Hagser, Reference Engdahl, Pramling Samuelsson and Arlemalm-Hagser2023). An expanding body of international research in early childhood education for sustainability endorses the capacities of young children to identify issues and take action (see, e.g. Elliott, Arlemalm-Hagser & Davis, Reference Elliott, Arlemalm-Hagser and Davis2020). The School Strikes for Climate Justice illustrate the potential of young citizens to demand sustainability action on a global scale (Verlie & Flynn, Reference Verlie and Flynn2022).

Place-based education, where children address issues related to their local context and to the places they love, also remains a powerful strategy for engaging children in real-world problems and solutions (Somerville & Green, Reference Somerville and Green2015). Kalafati, Flogaiti and Daskolia’s (Reference Kalafati, Flogaiti and Daskolia2024) Arts-based action research study found that young children’s creative thinking and action-taking can be enhanced by a focus on local environmental problems. Images and artworks depicting local ecosystems and species in trouble can be part of a suite of resources used by educators to prompt conversations about relevant local sustainability topics (O’Gorman, Reference O’Gorman, Elliott, Arlemalm-Hagser and Davis2020).

This paper reports on children’s responses to a set of Chris Jordan’s images that explore the sustainability topic of Life below water (SDG 14). Responding to images is a key aspect of Arts education for Australian children, and images hold the potential to prompt emotional responses. While there may be risks involved in exposing children to challenging content associated with sustainability topics, there is also potential to build children’s knowledge and resilience when supportive educators use images as educative tools. The next section outlines the research design of the study.

Connections to prior experiences and knowledge

Constructivist learning theory proposes that learners take on new information to build on their previous knowledge (Adams, Reference Adams2006). One of the themes that emerged from the encounters with Jordan’s images was that the children in this study made connections with school learning experiences, documentaries, famous paintings on which the images were based or family and life experiences generally.

Responding to the Gyre (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009b) image of a wave of plastic debris, G8 recalled seeing “a video at school and it looks horrible. The water’s all brown and mushy with bits of straws and stuff in it.” A12 recalled reading about the “Pacific thing” (presumably the Pacific Garbage Patch), “… the big chunk of plastic.” G8 also described seeing images of polluted oceans at school. P8 responded to one of Jordan’s plastic bag images by discussing microplastics, “One plastic bag can go into like, a hundred microplastics.” When asked how she knew about microplastics, she said, “We watched a video at school and it showed that, like, there’s this thing called an ocean cleaner and this person and he’s cleaned, I think it’s by 2040 he’ll halve the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Some of the children recalled viewing the Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) albatross images “at school,” while M11a described being asked to find similar images for a “Ban the Plastic Bag project” for which she had found an image of a whale that had consumed plastic. L10 also recalled seeing the images at school but “didn’t want to.” Also responding to Midway, E8 detailed her previous exposure to ideas about plastic pollution: “We’ve been watching David Attenborough, we’ve been looking at photos, we’ve been looking at PowerPoints and stuff at school and we’ve seen all of this.” For these children, prior school experiences provided a connection to their analysis of Jordan’s online galleries.

The conversations included connections with documentaries viewed previously by the children, presumably at home and at school. The Shark Teeth (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009c) caption reminded H11 of graphic footage of a finned shark, “I’ve seen an image of a shark just lying in a boat and they’ve cut the fin, and they chucked the shark overboard and they just lay there and no water going into their gills, they just die.” The same participant responded to the Tuna (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009d) image by invoking a David Attenborough documentary about overfishing, “… they were talking about if you overfish then you start affecting fish stocks and then the whole ecosystem will collapse.” He then described efforts in Palau “where they’ve stopped fishing completely, then the fish stocks have overflowed into places where fishing is allowed and then it actually works for the better….” It seems that recalling documentaries invoked both positive and negative stories about life under water.

Jordan based Gyre (Reference Jordan2009b) and Gyre II (Reference Jordan2011a) on famous artworks, and this provided a point of connection for some of the children during the conversations. In response to Gyre, H9 said, “This picture I know.” Gyre II is based on Van Gogh’s Starry Night and several recognised the work: “I’ve seen this one before,” said P8. M12 chose to look at the image because it was familiar to her: “That’s why I picked it … When you recognise something, you’re more interested in what it is.” This suggests that Jordan’s strategy of connection to famous artworks provided an access point for some of the children, prompting their curiosity to choose these particular images for further investigation.

Children told stories of family and life experiences generally as they viewed and discussed the images. A7 drew on existing knowledge of turtles mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish as they responded to Whale’s (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011b) plastic bags. A5 responded to the albatross images by citing a dead bat he’d seen previously, while S8 recounted finding a dead bird and burying it. When viewing Whale, the youngest participant, F4, made a lengthy connection with a cartoon story of a sick dolphin. G8 talked about reading a book called Saving the Sea “about plastic and stuff.” M11a described making a poster and marching with her mum and how her mum had shown her a video of a turtle impaled by a straw. When describing making the protest posters, she said, “It was fun making them but it’s really sad that we have to do that.” Prior school and family experiences provided the young participants with rich opportunities for connection to the research experience of viewing Jordan’s images about life under water.

Linking with local contexts and places

Connections with previous experiences were also reflected in the ways in which children told stories about their local contexts as they compared or contrasted these with Jordan’s images. When responding to Gyre (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009b), G8 stated, “I have not seen that much plastic in the ocean, because when I go to the beach, I just see clean water.” Later in the interview when the Whale (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011b) caption was read to her, G8 said, “That’s why I don’t see turtles every single time I go to the beach.” S12 responded to Gyre II (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011a) and the issue of marine plastic: “I see it when I go down to the water, and it all washes up on Moreton [Island] and stuff.”

The images seemed to prompt some participants to link with local wildlife. Some of the younger children mistook the albatross images for local birds. F4, G5 and G8 all thought that the albatross was an ibis, a common long-beaked bird in Southeast Queensland. The Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) albatross images also prompted P10 to tell a story of a turtle rescue, “When my family was at the beach, we saw a turtle that was being taken to the vet or something because it had swallowed a plastic bag and had washed up on the beach.” We can see here that the images provided children with opportunities to consider and discuss local ecosystems and how pollution might be impacting on other species living locally.

Emotional engagement with the images

Emotional responses to the images were common in the conversations. Across the age range, children often used the word “sad” to describe how they were feeling as they browsed and chatted. G8 felt “weird and sad and interested” about the amount of plastic depicted in Gyre (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009b). When D6 zoomed in to see the detail of Gyre, he exclaimed, “Oh that just sucks!” In response to the same image, H9’s response included “It’s really bad. It’s just horrible… Oh my god” and then speculated that if a whale or a seal was under the debris it might suffocate. M11 appreciated Jordan’s creative approach in this image but described the statistics as “terrifying.” S8 expressed that she was “scared” to zoom in on the Whale (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011b) image to reveal its composition. When she discovered it was made of plastic bags, she said that all of the images she’d seen to that point “look really sad to me.” A sense of sadness was also often mixed with appreciation for the artist’s techniques. In response to Gyre II (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011a), P8 found the artwork to be “cool” but didn’t like the statistics about plastic in the oceans.

Expressions of empathy were found in several responses. E8 expressed empathy with the sharks that have lost their fins (Shark Teeth, Jordan, Reference Jordan2009c): “… imagine if your fins got cut off for food and you wouldn’t be able to swim, which means you wouldn’t be able to live,” and E9 took the tuna’s perspective to empathise with the fish losing their family to fishing practices. The youngest participant, F4, suggested that the Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) albatross chickʼs parents would be “disappointed” that it had died.

The Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) album was, as expected, a strong focus for powerful emotions. “Sad” was an expression used by numerous children as they browsed the images of dead albatross chicks, with M11b describing the images as “sad to another level.” Other children used words such as “depressing,” “confronting” and “disgusting” and that they felt “sorry for the bird.” M11b acknowledged that it was good to be reminded that human actions have consequences but that Jordan’s images, with their “sad vibe” were having an impact on him. P9 was one of the participants who described the albatross images as “sad,” but she went further to reflect on the consequences and the artist’s intent. This quote also provides a useful snapshot of the nature of the research conversations:

This longer quote is noteworthy because of the connection between the emotional response and action that can be taken.

Solutions/action-taking, both individual and systemic

The collection of artworks prompted interesting discussion about solutions to the depicted environmental problems, across the age range of the participants. Popular solutions included recycling plastic, picking it up, reducing plastic consumption and using it for other purposes such as for creating art. For example, the youngest participant (F4) responded to the Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) image of dead albatross chicks by suggesting the problem could be fixed: “That’s why we put our rubbish into a recycling bin without putting it in the ocean.” One of the older participants, L12 said that the albatross photos were a “smart” idea because “if lots of people see it they might reduce the amount of plastic they use or put it in the right bins.” Correct disposal or reuse of plastic was a suggestion by several children. G8 described her family’s “giant drawer full of plastic that we use for the rubbish.” H9 responded to the collection in general by saying, “They should keep it [plastic] away from beaches or maybe just put the rubbish in the bin… so that birds or other animals don’t die, especially sea creatures.” The artwork Whale (Jordan, Reference Jordan2011b) prompted comments about disposal and reuse of plastic bags, along with reducing plastic use in the first place by choosing glass and metal storage products: “I have a giant metal lunchbox” (G8). When asked if the Midway images made him want to recycle more or less, A5 said “more, more, more! Times one thousand million.” The Midway and Whale images also prompted suggestions about washing and reusing plastic. E8 said, “We’re trying to reduce our plastic and we’re trying to reuse our plastic, like, if we take out a Ziploc bag we try and wash it, I dunno, three times before we throw it out.” In response to Whale, P9 suggested that plastic bags “are kind of just a want not a need… you don’t really need them. You can just get material ones … use them in different ways because plastic bags … you can’t get rid of plastic, it’s too good material to give up but you can stop using it except for special times. In a similar vein, and most likely inspired by the art viewing experience, S8 suggested it is better to use the plastic bags for art: “At least it’s not going to waste in the ocean and it’s making sculptures.” Actiontaking responses also addressed how the Midway images could promote changes in attitudes by helping people to “respect natural things better” (D6). G8 seemed to incorporate an emotional response to the albatross images: “It’s so sad. If I went to one of those beaches, I’d make a grave for the animals. I’d take all the rubbish out. And that’s in one beach.”

Food choices were also raised as a solution to the environmental problems depicted in the artworks. In response to Tuna (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009d), E8 stated, “We need fish to survive. We need meat. But then I feel we should cut down on our meat and stuff so then only the ones that are approved can [fish].” She also suggested “putting a few rules around” around shark finning practices: systemic solutions rather than individual actions. One of the 11-year-old participants responded to Shark Teeth (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009c) by suggesting that all of the sharks be used, “That’s mean! If they really needed to use the shark fin they could use all of the shark instead of just one fin” (M11a). It’s possible that Jordan’s use of vast statistics (270 000 sharks killed per day, 20 500 tuna every 15 minutes) may emphasise the issue of overfishing for these young viewers.

Post-humanism/human-nature binary

The final theme evident in the data was that, in responding to Jordan’s images, some participants expressed views that reflect post-humanism: ideas beyond the human-nature binary to position humans as part of the ecosystem. It was the albatross images that seemed to prompt these ideas most readily. In reflecting on Jordan’s images, G8 said that she will remember the “dead birds… because it’s an animal and we’re animals so I guess I kind of remember that.” For E8, the Midway (Jordan, Reference Jordan2009a to current) conversation turned to plastic use and how it threatens the entire ecosystem: “If we keep polluting these oceans and keep polluting the land, we will also die because we won’t know, like most of our food is meat and most of our meat we need to survive.” P8 described feeling “sad that people are thinking, oh just chuck it on the ground and nothing will happen. But actually a fish could come and swallow that, die and then we come to eat the fish and then we get very sick so if the fish eats microplastics and then we eat the fish, well some people eat the fish and then they get sick.” S7 described the albatross images as “bad” because “if the birds are gone, the animals that eat the birds are gone and if they’re gone, every animal in the world is gone and if every animal in the world is gone, including chickens, people are gone.” One of the older participants, M11b discussed the impact of the Midway albatross and another similar gallery in this way: “If you look at some of his artwork, it’s showing how we’re impacting our world and the things around us. It’s the only world we’ve got. We don’t have another one, so take care of it and not try and destroy it, like we’re doing right now.”