Margaret, cyanotype portrait with foraged materials, grade eleven.

Gregg Stevens

Teens today spend less time outdoors than any generation in history and are in vital need of more interaction with the natural world. Students spend four to seven minutes a day outdoors, while spending, on average, seven and a half hours looking at a screen (see Resource). Coined Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv, the lack of exposure to the natural world is having devastating consequences on our students, including increased anxiety, depression, attention issues, obesity, and a disassociation with the natural world. As art educators, we have a responsibility to design innovative curriculums that can encourage students to take on this problem.

Tackling Contemporary Issues
Although addressing the challenges young people face in what we teach can seem daunting, we must look at it as an opportunity to create a curriculum that is timely, relevant, and purposeful. We are tasked with providing students with the knowledge they need for a successful future, but we are often limited to lessons that are too cursory or dated to be relevant. Art educators need to meet this moment by designing innovative curriculums that tackle contemporary issues and build advocacy in students.

Art educators must innovate by developing classes that address the issues facing students today.

With this goal in mind, I developed an Eco Art curriculum over the last two years and built an outdoor classroom. This experience allowed my inner-city students to foster a relationship with nature through art.

A Nature-First Curriculum
Eco Art is broadly defined as art that utilizes natural materials in its creation and/or uses nature as its subject matter. I developed a class that uses nature as its primary subject while also having an interdisciplinary approach. Science, history, and literature are integral parts of the class. These corollary subjects are needed to understand and address issues like climate change and the loss of ecological diversity. I hope this class can be a first step in studentsʼ environmental advocacy, educating them about the power of nature to improve their health and mobilizing them to act on our current environmental crises.

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