The first Arts & Ecology Community Hub session invites participants to explore student-led ecological initiatives in higher arts education. The conversation aims to uncover what motivates such initiatives, how they are supported, and what institutional conditions allow them to thrive. By sharing concrete examples from different disciplines, the session seeks to nurture a sense of collective hope and agency across ELIA’s diverse membership.
Core Themes
- Agency and Longevity: How can schools sustain and embed student-led ecological action beyond short-term projects or graduating cohorts?
- Top-down and Bottom-up Connections: Balancing grassroots creativity with institutional strategy to support meaningful and lasting change.
- Students and Staff in Dialogue: Encouraging reflection among staff on the organisational frameworks that enable student responsibility, creativity, and continuity.
- Learning Across Contexts: Inspiring members by showing how ecological initiatives emerge across different institutional and cultural landscapes.
By focusing on student-led ecological initiatives, the session offers a platform for peer learning, dialogue, and the exchange of practical approaches to embedding ecological thinking in curricula and institutional cultures. It supports members in sharing best practices and insights drawn from their engagement with climate action and green skills, while also encouraging reflection on the organisational and cultural conditions that enable such initiatives to emerge, flourish, and be sustained over time.
The session aims to inspire participants with practical actions that can be adapted or replicated in other contexts, to shed light on the tensions that may arise between institutional structures and student initiative, and to strengthen community and shared learning within the Arts & Ecology Community Hub. Ultimately, it seeks to affirm the role of arts education in modeling ecological responsibility and in motivating collective action toward sustainability.
All our online sessions are free and open to ELIA members only. We hope to see you online!
