Unlearning through art: Developing decolonising and empathic pedagogies in climate mobilities education

Abstract

This paper introduces arts-based participatory research combining decolonising and empathic transformative environmental pedagogies, in the context of climate mobilities education in Finland and Greece. It offers methodological contributions to existing research with emphasis on multimodal arts methods and the role of emotions. We introduce the dimension of empathic unsettlement as a vital element of the transformative unlearning-learning cycle, and child-centred play space as an ethical setting for these challenging educational processes. Our focus on climate mobilities brings together experienced and imagined climate-changed realities, the colonial history of climate change, and its current effects on places and people around the world.

Introduction

“[D]eriving hope and solutions from within modern/colonial systems will not lead us to a different or wiser future; instead, we will end up wanting and creating different versions of the same system that led us to the [climate and nature crisis] in the first place.” (Stein et al., 2023: 992)

“The problem is that the actions become global, but ethically what still predominates is the village ethics, the microethics or, at most, the mesoethics of the nations (states).” (da Silva, 2011: 47)

At a time when deepening ecological crises are intertwined with alarming geopolitical developments, the anxiety of children and youth in Europe and beyond is growing. While some youth may find ways to address “precarious hope” through climate activism or other forms of political agency (Bowman and Starzak, forthcoming), others face “eco-paralysis” (Becht et al., 2024) or generate climate denialism due to experienced “overburden” (Veijonaho et al., 2024). These trends were widely noted long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and the ongoing violent conflicts emerged, not to mention the current geopolitical ambiguity (Bowman, 2019; McKnight, 2010). Results from a global survey in 2021 reveal that the vast majority of 16–25-year-olds share critical concerns about climate change (Hickman et al., 2021).

Concurrently, in many countries and at different levels of education, students find the climate change education (CCE) offered to them inadequate, repetitive, and lagging behind (Karsgaard and Davidson, 2023; Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie, 2020). While this is mostly the case in secondary and upper secondary schools and higher education, Satchwell and colleagues (2025) argue that also “primary school curricula often largely avoid the climate crisis, and teachers feel ill-equipped to teach it.” We have made similar observations in Finland and Greece (Kallio et al., 2025a). More attention to the link between CCE and civic education is also requested (Chan, 2023; Hollstein and Smith, 2020).

If CCE does not provide children and youth with the means to adequately understand the changing world around them, it does not equip them with the tools to act as “planetary citizens” (da Silva, 2011). This highlights the need for transformative and empowering pedagogies. Particularly missing are justice-based social science perspectives through which people can progressively learn to understand what climate change means contextually – in different places, for different people, and for the environment – and what kinds of mitigation, adaptation, and reparation measures are needed in different parts of the world (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020; Stein et al., 2023).

CCE is typically overwhelmingly science-based and solution-oriented, to the exclusion of a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon as a set of conditions for people and societies. These conditions are changing rapidly and in unexpected ways in some places, while in others the impacts are mostly slow or indirect, leaving more room for adaptation. However, because hazards are more directly linked to climate change than deprivations and disruptions that occur over long periods of time, it is often easier to garner both domestic and international support to address fast-onset impacts. To shed light on this complexity, or what Bulkeley and McFarlane (2024: 2) call the “radical interdisciplinarity of climate change”, in this paper we propose steps toward a holistic CCE that encourages students’ engagement with spatial inequalities and emphasizes the interconnectedness of places and people.

We align with scholarship that emphasizes the double loop of learning and unlearning (Van Oers et al., 2023), where people are invited “to confront the harmful and unsustainable nature of the modern/colonial system itself, including confronting their own complicity in that system and, most importantly, the relational possibilities that have been neglected within it” (Stein et al., 2023: 994). With a focus on climate-induced mobilities and their implications for the well-being of individuals and societies, our research aims to strengthen critical perspectives in CCE by acknowledging both the social history of climate change as a legacy of colonialism and industrialisation, and the persistent presence of climate coloniality in different forms of global capitalism (cf. Pedwell, 2012; Sultana, 2022; Zembylas, 2024).

Cross-curricular CCE requires the development of novel pedagogies, not least to avoid increasing young learners’ anxiety, but also to support teachers in their challenging task (Oranga et al., 2023). Based on a comprehensive literature review, Rousell and Cutter-McKenzie-Bowles (2020: 191) have identified “the need for participatory, interdisciplinary, creative, and affect-driven approaches to climate change education, which to date have been largely missing from the literature.” To respond to their call, we have developed an approach that brings together decolonising and empathic transformative pedagogies in the context of education on climate-induced mobilities. We have used various arts-based methods to create what Nussbaum (2012) calls a “play space”, a creative and safe learning environment for exploring challenging topics in the spirit of co-creative knowledge production. The participatory research took place mainly in primary schools in Finland and Greece, but we have also worked with classes in secondary and upper secondary schools, as well as at the university, to test and develop our methods and materials with the help of children and young people at different stages of their educational paths.

This paper introduces methodological insights from our study. The first section offers an overview of the project, followed by the description of decolonising empathic CCE and the play space. The rest of the article portrays our arts-based methods and pedagogical practices, including both positive outcomes and challenges we encountered. We conclude with brief suggestions on the development of EEC pedagogies.

Participatory research in Finland and Greece

In the spring of 2024, we conducted participatory research in primary schools in the cities of Athens, Greece and Tampere, Finland. ² The comparison sheds light on ‘climate mobility extremes’ within the EU, with implications for CCE. Greece is at the forefront of receiving climate-induced migration from outside the EU, and the direct impacts of climate change, including internal displacement, are felt more acutely there. In Finland, people are only indirectly aware of, or affected by, climate mobility. As part of the Global North, the countries are similarly situated in terms of the historical legacies of climate change – their prosperity stems from Europe’s colonial and industrial history, and both countries continue to maintain “climate coloniality” (Sultana, 2022) as part of the global capitalist economy. Although Athens is the capital and has a much larger population, the two cities are comparable in that Tampere is the largest inland city in Finland.

The educational systems have similarities and differences (for details, see Kallio et al., 2025a). Both countries provide free education up to the upper secondary level. In Greece, this begins at kindergarten (aged 4), while in Finland it begins at pre-primary education (aged 5–6). In Greece, compulsory education ends at the age of 15, whereas in Finland it was recently extended to the age of 18. The curricula and teaching and learning materials used in the two countries differ considerably. In Greece, the materials for public schools are produced nationally, alongside general and subject-specific curricula. In Finland, the materials are produced by commercial publishers, and only curricula frameworks are established at a national level. These frameworks are then interpreted and specified by municipalities, schools and teachers to suit the local context and possibly the schools’ profile areas and teacher-specific methods. In general, classroom practices tend to be more authoritative in Greece, while in Finland participatory teaching methods are commonly employed.

In both Tampere and Athens, we worked in a school with two multicultural Year 4 classes, with a total of 71 students aged around 10 years (Table 1). Of these students, 20%–40% were first- or second-generation migrants. They worked in double classes with two teachers. In Finland, some students with special needs took part in our sessions. We requested permission for participation from the guardians and the participants themselves, who could offer their informed consent during the fieldwork whenever they felt comfortable doing so. They could also participate in the sessions as part of the schoolwork, which meant that their artwork was not included in the research materials.

Table 1.

Overview of fieldwork in Finland and Greece.

Finland	Greece
38 students in the class	33 students in the class
34 participants with consent	33 participants with consent
28 pedagogical sessions of 45–180 minutes	13 pedagogical sessions of 90–300 minutes
16 individual tasks + interview	6 individual tasks + interview
7 collective exercises + 1 at the exhibition	3 collective exercises + 2 at the exhibition
417 individual and 12 collective arts-pieces	195 individual and 8 collective arts-pieces
305 photos and 117 video recordings	179 photos and 44 video recordings

Following the ethical standards of child-centred research, we explored multiple forms of encounters between researchers and participants to allow for different ways of orienting, motivating, elaborating and expressing oneself. This included using slightly different methods in the two contexts, as this best suited the fieldwork planned and carried out in close collaboration with the teachers. It was designed to fit within the curricula and cover specific tasks that the teachers had already planned. The teachers’ roles evolved organically: initially acting as observers, they gradually took on more active roles in the spirit of participatory research as they felt comfortable. Based on their long-term knowledge of individual students and group dynamics, they helped us in many ways, including asking questions during sessions as if they were part of the class.

Multimodal arts methods that engage multiple senses are emerging in educational research (e.g. Bentz, 2020; Malis, 2018; Satchwell et al., 2025). Being particularly sensitive to group dynamics and differences between learners, they facilitate broader inclusion and empowerment. In our study, the selection of methods was done collectively by the research team, which included consulting with the teachers. We chose methods that encourage different forms of communication, imagination and learning about climate mobilities. The broad theme was approached gradually so that participants could engage with it at their own pace. We also attuned our plans during the fieldwork, based on the participants’ and teachers’ feedback. Each session had an element of improvisation, as is common in the ‘what works today’ approach in this type of participatory fieldwork. Children contributed to the sessions by sharing their views. This gradual process was slow enough to control the amount and intensity of climate mobilities education, enabling us to learn from and adapt to how the children reacted to each session.

Throughout the research process, we strove to remain open to the children’s experiences and views, which they mainly expressed non-verbally, to maintain a child-centred working atmosphere. The power relations between us — both adult/child and researcher/participant — were the subject of constant reflection, and we discussed these within the research team throughout the fieldwork. We also paid attention to the group dynamics in the classes to create a safe and inclusive learning environment for each participant.

We tried a variety of arts-based methods in our 41 pedagogical sessions including individual and collective exercises: making emotion colour cards, drawing and painting, collage and comic making, crafting, creative writing, performative arts, shadow theatre and drama processing, superpower games, collective online art making, reflexive dialogue with parents, creating an artistic CV, and acting as a guide in an art exhibition. The project involves working with artists whose own artwork are used as pedagogical materials. We are creating an educational comic material with non-fiction writer Laura Ertimo and comic artist Mari Ahokoivu. With singer-songwriter Lydia Lehtola, we have worked on music pedagogies based her song Huomisen lait (Tomorrow’s Laws, by the band Lyyti). We used the books Kurnivamahainen kissa (Grumblebelly Cat) by fiction writer Magdalena Hai and Sara ja kadonneet sateet (Sara and the Vanished Rains) by fiction writer Tuula Korolainen and illustrator Maria Palin, and the research team created 10 fictional stories based on real situations of climate mobilities in different parts of the world, all of which we engaged with in several exercises. An animated short film Footsteps on the Wind, directed by Maya Sanbar, was watched with the children and used in arts activities. Finally, from the wealth of the child-produced materials, the research team created an educational animated music video freely available for educational use on Youtube (https://youtu.be/RUV2-UB1PJ8). ³ This was an artistic activity for the researchers, one of whom (Nicholas Haswell) is an artist, carried out in collaboration with the participants who could comment on the film during the process.

All researchers and research assistants kept a field diary, and we photographed and videotaped the pedagogical sessions. We also interviewed each participant about their artwork to elicit their thoughts and feelings. They were recorded and transcribed verbatim (in Greece in Greek, translated into English, and in Finland in Finnish). ATLAS.ti software was used for coding all materials. The analysis was conducted with theory-based qualitative content analysis. The framework of topic emotions created by Oberman (2024) structures the analysis in this article (immersive experiences, communicated feelings, hybrid experiences, ethical judgements).

Decolonizing and empathic climate change pedagogies

Learning about the experienced impacts of climate change, on people and their living environments in different geographical contexts, requires reaching across distances and otherness. To facilitate this, we have explored the pedagogical potential of dialogical-hermeneutic empathy (Smaling, 2007) and empathic unsettlement (LaCapra, 2014). Empathy is a commonly used term in everyday language, but as an analytical concept, its meaning is different from its colloquial use. It is a matter of understanding, without the normative weight that sympathy carries. Thus, empathic encounters can ground genuine sympathy and compassion as well as indifference or even hostility (Kallio et al., 2025c). Empathy can therefore be used pedagogically to create a better understanding of ideas, places, and people with which one is already sympathetic, as well as those with which one is critical. On socially controversial issues such as climate mobility, this openness is crucial because the necessary unlearning processes are “difficult and in some cases painful” (Stein et al., 2023: 996) requiring “uncomfortable reflexivity” (Van Oers et al., 2023: 100,693) and involving “emotional ambivalence, mixed feelings and contradictions” (Zembylas, 2024: 579).

Educational research has begun to recognize the inadequacy of neuroscientific and psychological models of empathy in complex real-life situations and has therefore turned to sociological, cultural, and philosophical approaches such as “environmental empathy” (McKnight, 2010) and “radical empathy” (Ratcliffe, 2012). Ruiz-Junco’s (2017) conceptualisation has proven useful in capturing the social aspects of empathy in the classroom: that one can understand, to some extent, the feelings of others or what they have experienced, even if one has not had similar experiences (Wynn et al., 2023). The first path is self-transcendence, where people seek to remove boundaries between themselves and others, to allow for shared emotional understanding. Building on this, the therapeutic path generates bonds of emotional understanding. As we can never truly experience what someone else is experiencing, empathic encounter is always about “attentive secondary witness” as LaCapra (2014: 82) puts it. The third path is instrumental, where, in contrast to the previous two, empathy is used for extrinsic purposes, often for the exercise of power in the guise of sympathy, which we have termed “sympathetic performativity” (Kallio et al., 2025c: 10). This dimension we have actively sought to avoid in our ethnography.

Ruiz-Junco’s (2017) first two paths are in line with Smaling’s (2007) and LaCapra’s (2014) conceptions of empathy. While Smaling is an ethnographer, LaCapra has developed his ideas in the context of historical enquiry, through documentary analysis, where direct encounters are inaccessible. This combination is helpful for our pedagogical purposes as people’s encounters in a climate-induced world are both direct and indirect. Imagination is, therefore, required in the creation of empathic understanding (Cretan et al., 2018; Jensen, 2016: 102). For Smaling, empathy is a basic human capacity that people use intuitively, but also a skill that can be cultivated through embodied encounters. In research, this means a “spiral process of interpreting, testing, re-interpreting, re-testing a whole and its parts in their reciprocal relationships”, which describes well our participatory research (Smaling 2007: 332). LaCapra’s key concept is empathic unsettlement, which refers to an experiential situation in which one’s conception of the state of affairs is shaken, but a new understanding has not yet emerged. This in-between state can be uncomfortable in its vagueness, but also curious, requiring the courage to expose oneself to new understandings and new ways of framing oneself and the world. Together, these perspectives take us to the heart of pedagogies of unlearning (Stein et al., 2023; Van Oers et al., 2023; Zembylas, 2024).

The proposed approach is not about ‘solving the other’s problems’ or feeling rewarded by one’s own sympathetic stance, which postcolonial scholars have criticized as problematic aspects of empathic pedagogy (Pedwell, 2012; Zembylas, 2024). Our decolonising CCE perspective explicitly avoids “taking the other’s place” (LaCapra, 2014: 82) and “run[ning] away with the feelings of another” (Smaling, 2007: 321). Instead, empathic encountering through unsettlement is about seeing, hearing and respecting other people’s life situations or experiences through oneself. This kind of empathetic coexistence – whether interactive in local communities or imaginative across distances – is, we argue, urgently needed in the development of planetary citizenship, where a movement is needed from “village ethics” (microethics) and the “conventional morals represented by the present social institutions, including the spirit of the prevailing lawfully constitute state” (mesoethics) to a planetary “macro-ethics of coresponsibility” (da Silva, 2011; also Kallio, 2025b). In other words, (un)learning to live in a climate-changed world cannot be based on everyday encounters alone but requires multi-scalar engagement with the “political ordinary” (Häkli and Kallio, 2018).

Working in play space

The connection between empathy and arts pedagogies is well established. Aesthetic exploration of ‘the other’ through photo-voice, storytelling and dialogue in collaborative arts practices, for example, have been used to address challenging issues, exploitation, and empathy as resistance (Glynn and Maimunah, 2024). Such methods are increasingly used in CCE as well, including drama (Borba et al., 2024), video art (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022), picture books (Oberman, 2024), comics-making (Pedrazzini et al., 2024), literature (Barton et al., 2019), and narratives in children’s science literature (McKnight, 2010). Oberman (2024: 2031) finds picture books to be “powerful resources for teaching complex issues like climate change, in part because of their ability to engage and motivate learners emotionally.” Similarly, roleplay, films, documentaries, collages, music videos, songs, and poems provide tools for enhancing CCE literacy and understanding (McKnight, 2010), critical thinking (Borba et al., 2024), emotional engagement (Oberman, 2024), use of imagination (Jensen, 2016), and agency/ownership (Paterson-Young et al., 2024; Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). Multiple arts-based methods may be used within the same project, such as silk screen, stencil, drawing, watercolour, and digital image editing (Bentz, 2020), or responses to films and texts and visual artmaking (Malis, 2018).

In climate mobilities education, arts-based methods appeared suitable for facilitating empathic connections between students and ‘distant others’. In line with Bentz (2020: 1608) we found that “group dialogue and creative expression provided students with spaces for disclosure and helped them transform feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, anger, and apathy”. She offers a three-dimensional approach to pedagogical engagements: learning in art as a platform for introducing the issue, learning with art as a medium to facilitate dialogue and express learning, and learning through art as means of transformation (Bentz, 2020: 1598). We have brought Bentz’s approach into dialogue with the studies of Oberman and Satchwell, Walley and Dodding, to emphasise the role of emotions. What is discussed in Satchwell and colleagues (2025) in terms of “feeling with others” is presented in Oberman (2024) in the form of a detailed categorisation, including an explicit differentiation between empathy and sympathy: emotion as reflective and ongoing ethical judgement, emotion as immediate and finite immersive experience, and emotion as communication of feelings defined as empathetic and ethical responses.

In the unlearning framework of CCE, arts-based methods require a safe space in which to encounter the uncertainties and discomforts characteristic of empathic unsettlement. Play space is a concept coined by Martha Nussbaum, drawing on Winnicot’s classic notion of potential space; a pedagogical environment where children can experiment with otherness imaginatively and with some distance from the real world: “Play teaches people to be capable of living with others without control; it connects the experiences of vulnerability and surprise to curiosity and wonder, rather than to crippling anxiety. […] They thus get invaluable practice in empathy and reciprocity” (Nussbaum, 2012: 97–98). Compared to a cognitively oriented learning environment, where uncertainty demands quick solutions and a change of perspective seems to demand immediate action, it fits better with our approach, where empathic unsettlement is expected. Moreover, since unlearning is not about situationally acquiring new knowledge, but a long-term process of building “new ‘affective infrastructures’ that create the potential for alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Zembylas, 2024: 570), it is the space created for learning that matters, not the acquisition of knowledge that can be assessed in terms of learning content.

Encouraging empathy in play space

During each visit in the schools, we opened and closed the play space with a meditative ritual that the participants would come to know well. We began with attention to embodied existence, with dimmed lights and a peaceful soundscape. With our eyes closed, we explored our emotional state and bodily sensations by focusing on our breathing and going through some relaxing movements. The facilitator (member of the research team, mainly Maria Sulonen in Finland and Nefeli Bami in Greece) reminded us of our right to be ourselves and to express ourselves freely without offending others; that activities in the play space would not be graded; and that ideas created there could stay there. We then imagined a magic door leading to the play space that everyone would open at the clang of a sound bowl. A similar ritual of closing the door and leaving the play space ended each session.

The children participated in the ritual in their own ways – some made fun of the situation, others quietly refused any physical involvement, and yet most students followed the narrative. Towards the end of our fieldwork, the moments became more peaceful, and when the teachers in Finland had asked the children to paint their magic doors, the whole class produced very inspired work. Related personal experiences were brought up in our interviews:

“And every time when you come, the elevation to the play space is like a single moment during the school day when you can properly calm down.” (Elias, Finland)

“I liked the music at the beginning, it was very relaxing. I am doing the same at home, too, and I fall asleep.” (Maria, Greece)

While the ritual was repeated each time, we were otherwise quite flexible in our work with the children, with attentiveness to how they approached our tasks. The teachers helped us respect their different ways of being, to ensure equity – not just as a matter of (dis)comfort, but as a matter of feeling safe and respected as a person (e.g. Paterson-Young et al., 2024).

An important part of our study is to analyse how participants felt about the methods used, since entering an empathic learning space requires a willingness to open up to transformation. The intensity of the expressed emotions varied greatly. At times, the students shared strong opinions about a certain method, but they could also feel both positively and negatively about a particular activity. When talking about the Grumblebelly Cat, Viola (Finland) noted that it “involved a little bit of tension but also joy”. In the interviews, most of the participants shared their experiences with different methods rather effortlessly. Some chose to keep their feelings to themselves throughout the study, which we respected as their right to participate in the way they felt comfortable.

Different artistic techniques and methods were mentioned both positively and negatively, supporting our approach of using a variety of methods to create space for empathic opening. Some participants liked working with arts methods in general: “I liked drawing… and telling stories… and watching videos… And I liked it all in general.” (Vasilis, Greece). The only audiovisual material we used, the short film Footsteps on the Wind (OA trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm1JIEr819c), evoked many emotional responses (13 mentions in both countries), and its narrative influenced many of the visual arts pieces (see empathic unsettlement section). In Finland, many participants (15) said they liked working on the book Grumblebelly Cat. This may be partly because we worked on the story over four school visits, using different visual art techniques.

Perhaps even more important feedback was non-verbal. Singing Tomorrow’s Laws was mentioned positively by about half of the participants in the interviews (Finland 13, Greece 16); only two Greek students found it challenging. However, our participant observations show that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the music pedagogical sessions, it was clear that the students in both countries were collectively very engaged. Even those who did not wish to join in singing were enthusiastically involved in the choir with an intense embodied presence. During our recording session, one of them even instructed who should sing louder and which voices were drowning out the others. When asked, the participants typically had little to say about the song, but it was clear to all involved in these sessions that the powerful message – encouraging an empowering and radical environmental agency – was inspiring them (and us!) as a collective. This speaks to what Capponi-Savolainen (2025) calls “the emotional power of songs” (p. 166), which she links in her own analysis to the “singing spaces they created themselves for exercising their freedom, agency, and political voice” (p. 161, emphasis in original).

This highlights how “unlearning is not an event limited to the space of classroom walls or the time limits of a curriculum, but rather an ongoing process” (Zembylas 2024: 573). As such, it cannot be assessed in the same way as learning. We found the same when we introduced participants to imaginary superpowers as inspiration for thinking about environmental action, and when we experimented with the fictional children’s stories created by the research team through shadow theatre. Evidence of students’ engagement and emerging unlearning was documented by different members of the team, independently of each other.

“I was really impressed after the class. We did this in an hour!!! The kids were very involved and serious.” (Researcher’s notes, Finland, Shadow theatre exercise)

“From the moment it was introduced, they began to ‘act’ with their bodies as superheroes (Superman holding their fist in the air, etc.). This interest continued and sustained their engagement.” (Research assistant’s notes, Greece)

What we have described thus far highlights the immersive experience characteristic of empathic unlearning. In Oberman’s (2024) conceptual framework, this is accompanied by communicated feelings. While the analysis of immersive experiences is about identifying implicit emotional responses, communicated feelings speak to their origins: Where are these feelings grounded? Both dimensions regularly came up in the child-produced art materials (Finland 101/74, Greece 69/40), in most students’ work (Finland 34/27, Greece 31/23).

Regarding schoolwork, our participants expressed immersive emotions in the form of disappointment and uncertainty, when their artwork did not turn out as they had hoped. Another common response was frustration, related to not having enough time to finish what they intended to write or draw, or when they could not come up with anything to show. Here Iris (Finland) tells how she finally came up with an idea of what to draw for the ‘superpower comic’ after first struggling with the difficult emotions associated with emergency situations (Figure 1):

“Well, I didn't want to make something, um, with a real emergency situation because I was like... ugh. So I thought, could I do something a bit different, but still with a superhero. And then instead of a real person, there's a cat without legs.”

Figure 1.

Example of a superhero drawing.

Communicated feelings often connect with informal sources of learning, such as popular culture, their home lives, or other experiences outside of school. Ava (Finland) drew yellow flowers on her emotion card to express what brought her joy, in Iraq and Finland that both are her home countries. She contrasted them with the “black trees and such that give you a scary feeling” in the climate mobilities narratives. Eeli (Finland) described the feelings of greed and sadness through his involvement in sports. He used his own experience of basketball tournaments to identify sadness (not being allowed to play), and his aspirations toward the NBA offered him an example of greed (seeking fame and wealth). In addition to such deeply personal frames of reference, communicated feelings could be related to the content of our exercises. For example, Footsteps on the Wind was found interesting because they liked fantasy movies, and making comics was found challenging because they generally disliked comics.

Engaging with climate mobilities through arts

Ruiz-Junco’s (2017) self-transcendent and therapeutic paths emphasise the removal of barriers between one’s own and other people’s lived realities, as the premise of unlearning and as the basis for building emotional understanding – detachment from certain roots to gain access to new routes (cf. Kallio, 2016: 376). In many of our tasks, the participants would “dramatise characters’ feelings and thinking, constructing an imagined emotional experience”, which is how Oberman (2024: 1758) describes hybrid experiences (cf. Cretan et al., 2018; Jensen, 2016: 102). These are emotions for the characters – instead of perceptions of their experiences in the original storyline – aroused by ethical reflection. In Figure 2, Lilja (Finland) combines storylines from two different narratives in this spirit.

Figure 2.

Example of a drawing with two interpretive levels telling of a hybrid experience.

Here, the main characters are fleeing together from a “pistolero” who shouts “come down” (tule alas), threatening the existence of the indigenous people of the Amazon. They encourage each other shouting “yeah” (jee) and respond to the attacker “not coming” (en tule). On another level of interpretation, the story allows us to enter into the experiencer’s reflection, their inner world, through the thought bubble that states “I really wish someone could tell me what’s happening here” (kunpa joku voisi kertoa mitä täällä tapahtuu).

The child-produced artistic materials show plenty of signs of hybrid emotional experiences, making it the dominant form of emotional engagement in our study (all participants in Finland, 29/33 in Greece). Any method of sharing and elaborating narratives seems to have the potential to evoke such emotions, including drawing, painting, collage and comic making, creative writing, choral singing, and shadow theatre performances. Table 2 presents the frequency of hybrid emotions in the tasks where they came up most commonly. ¹

Table 2.

Frequency of hybrid emotional experiences expressed in participants’ productions.

	Finland	Greece	Notes
Collage-making	13	5	Comic about greed in Finland (individual), comics about case stories in Greece (collective)
Drawing	115	15	In Finland seven tasks, in Greece two tasks
Creative writing	44	30	Sara's letter in both countries, dream text based on case stories in Finland
Comic-making and painting	52	22	In Finland comics based on superpowers and case stories, in Greece a movie-based comic

Our participants expressed their engagement with the characters’ situations verbally in the interviews, as part of their artwork, and in the classroom. Emotion colours and associated cards were used as a means to do this (a colour coding created in the first sessions), emotional text and images (such as emoji) were included in the artwork, and embodied expressions were often shared with us when performing a particular task or introducing a piece of art (e.g., facial expressions, body postures, sounds, performances, laughter). This underscores that children’s engagement in empathic unlearning can manifest in many ways, which requires constant attention in the classroom; the learning situation itself is an important site of assessment.

Differences in empathic engagement became visible in a task related to the book Sara and the Vanished Rains. It is about a girl and her mother who, due to years of drought exacerbated by climate change, make a difficult journey across a desert from their home village to a nearby city. The girl nearly dies during the arduous journey. They end up in a refugee camp where she is treated for dehydration and malnutrition. After reading the story, we invited the children to empathise with Sara and write a letter – as her – to someone left behind in their home village. We gave them sentences to start with (in bold below), with an introductory line in the first person: “I am writing to you from the refugee camp where mom and I arrived”.

“The journey so far has been... difficult, because we have been walking for 3 days and they didn't have food and water.” (Vasilis, Greece)

In Finland, most of those who spoke in an emotional register adopted the suggested perspective and wrote the letter in the first person (18/24); only one used primarily the third person. They could convey very different kinds of messages: while Enni writes, “It’s very nice here in the camp but I miss my home.”, Venla conveys, “It’s dry and dreary here in the camp. Need to survive.” In Greece, the class was divided between first person (14) and third person (15). In some cases, the pronouns were used in parallel, as Vasili does in the excerpt above. Only few students (Finland 6, Greece 2) did not use personal pronouns at all when expressing feelings in the letter, which implies unwillingness to empathic engagement.

These findings suggest cultural differences in empathic engagement with unknown others. Finnish children generally found it easy to adopt Sara’s personal perspective, whereas many Greek children felt more comfortable keeping some distance from another person’s emotional experience. This shows how there are different ways of being respectful of others’ experiences without ‘stealing’ them. Postcolonial scholarship emphasizes this dimension – empathy is not simply a sympathetic stance (Pedwell, 2012; Zembylas, 2024). Instead, one should actively avoid “taking the other’s place” (LaCapra, 2014: 82) and “run[ning] away with the feelings of another” (Smaling, 2007: 321) when seeking understanding across distance and otherness. Thea’s (Greece) narrative shows a genuine attempt at empathy: “From my home, I miss… she would miss a pillow a blanket and money, water and food. And animals they had a lot of fear.”

Another illuminating example of how children may (or may not) seek empathic understanding is our final drawing task in Finland. By this time, our participants were quite familiar with the topic of climate change and had been given many resources to approach it. They were free to choose the narrative into which we asked them to emplace themselves. A notable majority followed the suggestion (18/24), which already says something about different interests (or courage) to explore the topic through themselves – to learn with art as Bentz (2020) has it, and to feel with others as Satchwell and colleagues (2025) define the goal of empathic pedagogies.

Those who placed themselves in the picture could take on an experiential role of a victim of the effects of climate change (10, mostly human figures, one mouse), a saviour for those in trouble (4, all human), a narrator (2), or a threat (1). In the last case, Minerva (Finland) took on the character of a giant wasp threatening people, which we read as a critique of humanity as the cause of climate change and the related forced mobilities. In Figure 3 (Kasper, Finland), depicted is a situation where people are caught in a forest fire, including the participant himself (minä, marked with two arrows pointing down). The people make the decision to leave together, indicated by the speech bubbles that read “run” (juoskaa), “flee” (pakoon), and “fire” (tulta). Taken together, the selected positions offer a wide variety of empathic approaches in a situation where the question of climate mobility arises.

Figure 3.

Empathy expressed in a drawing on climate mobility.

Oberman’s (2024: 1751) fourth category of emotional responses, ethical judgements, refers to “emotions expressed as a reflective assessment of the climate situation as understood by the children”. These were rarely expressed by our participants (altogether 12 mentions in each country), which for us indicates that unlearning directly about emotionally perplexing issues as part of one’s lived reality is not inviting – it can even lead to anxiety (Hickman et al., 2021). Contrary to this, working in play space seemed feasible and inspiring to most participants. Our work included very challenging topics such as the loss of parents (e.g., Footsteps on the Wind), extreme suffering (e.g., Sara and the Vanished Rains), and armed conflicts (see Figure 2). This suggests teaching and learning methods, including assessment methods, that emphasize the process of learning rather than specific cognitive content, in a learning space where different emotions can be safely explored. Yet, this does not make transformative unlearning emotionally or cognitively easy, which we explore through the concept of empathic unsettlement.

Staying with the trouble: Empathic unsettlement

What LaCapra (2014) terms empathic unsettlement is a crucial element of transformative pedagogies where learning is grounded in unlearning (Stein et al., 2023; Van Oers et al., 2023). It is an in-between state in which one’s conception of how things are is shaken without a clear idea of how things could be different. This is uncomfortable for everyone, but the willingness to understand better motivates the tolerance of uncertainty. In our study, some of the participants chose to ‘stay with the trouble’ at times, opening themselves up to the discomfort of understanding someone else’s climate mobility situation. Such moments of empathic unsettlement we read off from the ways in which they expressed difficult emotions in their artwork, or the effort they showed to reconcile issues that they felt needed to be settled in the narratives surrounding these exercises. Different methods helped different children to deal with these emotions.

An example of empathic unsettlement is related to the theme of greed that we explored through the book Grumblebelly Cat where one of the main characters is a man named G. Reed (the name is an aptronym befitting his rapacious nature). One assignment was to make a drawing of greed. While most of the participants drew a little ugly man, following the narrative literally, one portrayed greed as themselves. In the collage work that followed, many chose to include things they desired or liked very much – games and game consoles, fame and money, popular cultural products, and the like. Or they described ideals most prized in the society, such as beauty, health and wealth. An evocative description of greed in the Finnish society came from Ava, whose collage is a figure of a woman, filled with decorative objects: “She just wants to be more and more beautiful.” In these ways, the student set out to understand greed through themselves, as something inherently human; to gain access to understanding the greed of others, as well as to connect their personal feelings to the structural consumer capitalist ethos that underpins the story of the book.

The shadow theatre performances (Finland) included characters who had confronted with the effects of climate change, physically and mentally. The story from Amazonia (also in Figure 2) inspired a performance in which ‘longing for the lost forest’ was enacted in a kneeling position with heads bowed, with the performers placing their hands on their faces and moving back and forth to express grief. Other students were positioned as a crowd witnessing the mourning ceremony. In collective collage making (Greece) the student asked each other in groups, “What is your trouble?”, thus exploring each other’s interpretations of hardship as in the narrated climate mobilities. Also, strategies to overcome difficult emotions or to rule them out were present in some drawings and paintings. In Vivian’s (Finland) comic piece, the audience is comforted by a text: “Nobody died in this comic”. Iris, instead, clarified to us her own position in a piece of art: “No, I am the one telling the story. Do you think I want to be dying here?!”

Unsettlement was expressed through words and facial expressions in many drawings and paintings, and they also came up in creative writing. In one assignment we asked the children to imagine a dream of one of the characters in our fictional stories. Aino (Finland) wrote about Nikos, a boy from Athens, having a dream about his cousin. In the story (created by the research team), the cousin’s family is in a refugee camp due to devastating floods in the rural area where they lived in Greece. Within this framework, Aino develops a narrative with several empathic layers. In the dream, first, “Nikos feels bad. How can his cousin stand all this horror?”, which is a quick sympathetic response to the situation. Then, “Nikos feels angry, but decides to continue watching his cousin’s day, to stay with [them]”. Here we find a hint of empathic unsettlement and a willingness to endure the associated discomfort as, through Nikos, Aino works to understand what life in the camp might feel like even if it arouses unpleasant feelings. Subsequently, Aino portrays how Nikos realises that the cousin’s family “feels cold and homeless”, which “felt terrible” to him. Thus, throughout the narrative, Aino experiences feelings that she can imagine for both Nikos and his cousin’s family, which allows her to consider their lived realities through herself. Finally, Aino finds a way to empathically disengage from the disturbing reality by waking Nikos: “Nikos woke up and realized it was all just a dream. Nikos told his parents about the dream, “we have to bring them to Athens with us”. At the end of her story Aino finds a way to reconcile the unsettling event by doing something about it: she realizes that Nikos can approach his parents in his desire to help his cousin’s family. This is an example of empathic (un)learning where experienced unease makes Aino attentive to something that stands out as important in her “political ordinary”, inviting her into a transformative “state of becoming” (Häkli and Kallio, 2018: 68).

We also learned that many children in Finland could find a passage to feelings of loss through the experience of losing their pet (only one participant included a deceased family member, which we will not discuss for ethical reasons). Some included their former pet in a drawing, thus bringing their own experiences into the climate mobility narratives. Rami (Finland) drew a blue dog among the things that are important to him. When we inquired about the colour (blue = sadness), he said: “Well because it is dead, our dog […] I hope the same dog would come back to life.” This impossible wish helped him to understand the wishes of others in desperate situations.

Footsteps on the Wind provided an opportunity to further explore these kinds of unsettling issues. The short film tells a story about siblings who lose their parents in an earthquake, followed by a storm that hits their house. The children themselves fall into the sea, where they can travel in search of safety. The story leaves open many things, such as what happened to the parents and the lives the siblings went on to lead. Our participants worked on the narrative with different emotional registers in their artwork (Figure 4). Some interpreted that the parents died, some emphasized that the siblings found a nice place to live, and in Greece in the narratives of four students the children are adopted by a new family.

Figure 4.

Drawings expressing different emotional registers from sorrow to hope.

Children used a variety of techniques to express unsettling experiences. A character’s death could be marked with closed eyes or a cross, or with named gravestones as in Ariana’s comic work above. People could also be left out of the artwork altogether, with buildings, natural forces, the landscape, and other non-human elements of the story emphasizing their absence, as in Atlas’s comic here. The openness of the story invited some students to wonder with us in the interviews what had happened to the parents – for them this discussion was a ‘safe space’ to consider the issue.

Discussion and conclusions

Based on our arts-based participatory research in Finnish and Greek schools, combining decolonizing and empathic pedagogies, we suggest that CCE should involve transformative long-term processes of unlearning alongside the more traditional forms of learning. Nussbaum’s (2012) play space offers a safe environment for exploring challenging topics such as climate mobilities, encouraging co-creative knowledge production and empathic exploration of the topic, while allowing participation with different emotional intensities. We stress the importance of respecting emotional distance as part of transformative educational practices, in the spirit of child-centred research ethics. The double loop of learning-unlearning provides children with capacities to live in the climate-changed world as planetary citizens (da Silva, 2011), without generating anxiety and overburdening them with neoliberal individualised responsibility (Bowman and Starzak, forthcoming).

While unlearning cannot be assessed similarly to learning, in our study we could follow the emerging processes through the students’ artmaking, their emotional and inspired engagement, and different forms of communication. Following Oberman’s (2024) topic emotions framework, we could analyse immersive experiences, communicated feelings, and hybrid experiences that emerged in various ways in the different tasks. The reflection of feelings and experiences of others through fictional characters was the most inviting way for our participants to engage empathically with climate mobilities – exploring emotions for the characters, which involves ethical reflection. These practices, closely tied to personal experiences as well as specific climate and mobility events, may open the door to empathic unsettlement as a transformational turning point (LaCapra, 2014, cf. Zembylas 2024). Although ethical judgments of climate mobilities were less frequently expressed, some children were able to critically reflect on broader structural issues and phenomena specifically in the state of unsettlement. Children with personal experiences of migration had particularly good capacities to access decolonising relations-building, which should be recognised as a resource in the co-creation of knowledge in the classroom.

Our study offers methodological contributions to existing research in which empathic arts pedagogical approaches are used to explore climate change with students. It emphasises multimodal arts methods and engages with empathic unsettlement through dialogical-hermeneutic ethnography. In line with the work of Malis (2018), Bentz (2020) and Satchwell and colleagues (2025), we advocate the adoption of a variety of artistic methods and techniques to cater for different learning styles, abilities, and interests, as well as the social dynamics within the classroom. This expands the role of emotions in the classroom and beyond, taking forward the methodological ideas developed by Oberman (2024). Building on Zembylas’ (2024) concept of unlearning, we introduce the dimension of empathic unsettlement, drawing from LaCapra (2014), which we consider to be a vital element of the transformative unlearning-learning cycle. The child-centred, inclusive play space – inspired by Nussbaum’s (2012) ideas – provides an ethical setting for these challenging educational processes (cf. Glynn and Maimunah, 2024). More broadly, our focus on climate mobilities within the context of CCE brings together experienced and imagined climate-changed realities, the colonial and industrial history of climate change, and its current effects on different places and people around the world. This political geographically oriented approach responds to Sultana’s (2022) call for education on climate coloniality, a topic that is largely absent from school curricula (Kallio et al., 2025a).