2024

Kauppinen, Merja

The teachers can find it challenging to deal with the so-called wicked problems with their students. As a result, they can simply pass the themes or consider them too complex for younger students. The basis of these kinds of attitudes can be uncertainty about one's own emotions in the instruction of messy themes. In order to get experience on instruction of sensitive, charged topics, there has been arranged an interdisciplinary course, Environmental Storytelling, addressing climate education through experiential methods as a part of the in-service teacher education. The course consisted of hands-on experience in arts-based learning methods including teaching practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate poetry therapy as a method of empathetic processing of climate education. A deep dialogical process of the interactive poetry therapy model (Hynes & Hynes-Berry, 2012) generates emotional experiences by which participants can gain peace of mind and provide recognition and understanding of one’s feelings. 37 teacher students in two groups performed a 4-part course (orientation, deepening, school pilot and reflective phases). The research question was, what kind of meanings did the teacher students give to the practices of poetry therapy methods. The learning diaries (N=37) were used as data. The preliminary results show that in the parts of the course the poetry therapy methods were appreciated in many ways: they got the students to notice the consequences of the climate change and gave motivation to treat the topic pedagogically as well as gave learning tools for artistic handling of the theme.