Eating Climate Change with Making the Best of It Dandelion: Collaborative Public Art as a Mode of Future-Oriented Learning

Long-term public art projects that engage public audiences in collaborative learning can be powerful venues for exploring public pedagogy and for investigating the mechanisms that allow people to learn and change. In the iterative and exploratory modes such projects usually require, we can learn a tremendous amount from interactions over time among the many audiences and networks that these projects involve—creative teams, production crews, performance staff, volunteers, participants, onlookers, and viewers of documentation. This article discusses a year-long public art project designed to engage diverse audiences in imaginative consideration of their future agency in the face of a changing climate. The project was carried out in a range of settings—public art festivals, university symposia, community meals, seminars and large lecture classrooms, and online—and the process provided many opportunities to learn about the methodology of developing and carrying out participatory future-casting events. The varied frameworks of this project provided practice with a range of interaction mechanics, and also provided participants with the chance to learn, with others, how to leverage the familiar in order to address the strange. We consider how this project maintains a focus on inclusive and equitable process in future building, and particularly how explicitly focusing on play, silence, beauty, stress, and the more-than-human contributes to successful learning, and to moving beyond some of the barriers we commonly experience in sustainability-oriented teaching and social organizing.