Making art at the end of the world: (Un)learning in the Schoolhouse of Modernity

‘Making art at the end of the world’ introduces a research-creation project with participants from across the world as one step towards collectively reimagining mainstream education’s role in responding to the planetary climate crisis. The article starts with the assumption that the dominant form of education is deeply implicated in the climate crisis and needs to be unlearned and re-learned for the planet and people to survive and thrive. Drawing on the concept of ‘The House of Modernity’ to identify the historic values, beliefs and practices that have propelled our global climate crisis, we focus specifically on what we conceptualize as the ‘Schoolhouse of Modernity’, the place where colonial-modernity is transmitted and reproduced through educational content, pedagogy and structure, including through the arts. Working with artistic responses, crowd-sourced through the ‘Turn It Around!’ (TiA) project, we explore the power of arts as a methodology for critically interrogating education in the Schoolhouse of Modernity, tracing how TiA’s project design and process offer possibilities for education otherwise.