‘I wish you a good life’: embedding intergenerational learning into pre-service teacher education through an art, community and environment unit

The chapter takes as its’ focus, a place-making project, supported by the Mornington Peninsula Shire, Melbourne, Australia (2019) where formal and informal learning joined forces through the ‘Our Waste, Our place, Our Actions’ project. Together, primary schoolchildren, pre-service teachers and seniors from the University of the Third Age (U3A) created and shared ‘waste wisdoms’ as a form of community-based art education that softened our institutional divides while also causing us to question our shared waste behaviours. As a consequence, we rethought our understandings of ‘community’ through the porosity (Barad, 2017; Malone, 2018) of waste/wildlife/land/sea/children/pre-service teachers/seniors/local/regional knowledge as evoked through art; suggesting in the process that we are implicated in other animals, plants and entities (like waste) that materially course through us (Neimanis, 2017 ). By upcycling everyday waste and developing ‘good-life' amulets to prompt connections to local wildlife, we employed creative capacities to problem-pose (Harris, 2016) waste possibilities and quandaries that affect our shared sense of place. In the process, we became aware of the wildlife that lives in our shared locale, from surprise sightings of fairy penguins and turtles to the leafy sea dragon that is emblematic of the region; to the recently described burrunan dolphin and the eastern rosellas and cockatoos that frequent our various locations. Agreed among participants was the desire that all these creatures deserve a waste-free life. The form of the chapter ensures that visuals, text and narratives combine so that a series of provocations and insights ensue. Among them is a discussion on the role that waste and materiality (Bennett, 2010) played in our arts-based intergenerational learning. While another discussion forms around participant interviews, and a reported sense of feeling valued, joyous and excited because of involvement with each other through art. This leads to an exploration of how a salutogenic lens (Vaandrager & Kennedy, 2017) can offer insights into intergenerational art practices; and how art, wellbeing, and ecological awareness are prompting new ways to engage with art education. To finish the chapter explores the role that social networks and communities (Harris Lawton, Walker & Green, 2019) can play in educational reform within pre-service teacher education (Dustin, Sinner, Walker, Esmat & Seonjeong, 2019) and the need for art education to outreach beyond academia to community contexts if it wants to remain relevant to real-world issues.