OC13-Engaging Children in Ecology

$39 (free with subscription)
Sophie Edwards
Date:  Saturday, November 30, 2024
Length: 1.5 hours
Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm (EST)

Sophie Edwards
Date:  Saturday, November 30, 2024
Length: 1.5 hours
Time: 1:00pm – 2:30pm (EST)

About this Online Conversation

In this participatory and hands-on virtual workshop, we’ll dig into ecological engagements with children. How do we build what Sophie Edwards calls ‘relational muscle’ and develop an ethos of collaboration and care? We’ll expand the ‘100 languages and a hundred more’ to include the natural world, and explore how we might hear what various materials and natural spaces have to tell us. We’ll grapple with why such an ecological stance is important for children, for ourselves, and for the planet, and how our many choices – from materials and tools, from strategies to contexts – can be care-fully, thoughtfully curated toward engaging the ecological. Together we’ll explore the voices of natural materials and share our thoughts in small groups. You’ll leave feeling connected and reinvigorated.

Sophie Edwards

Sophie Anne Edwards (she/her/settler) is an interdisciplinary environmental artist, geographer, and writer residing on Mnidoo Mnising | Manitoulin Island in Northeastern Ontario. Through her practice, Sophie engages with the natural environment and the more-than-human world. She employs various mediums such as text, textile, drawing, and natural materials to create site-specific and embodied works. Sophie's work delves into spatial and imaginative geographies, geopoetics, and the possibilities of co-creation.

• Sophie was the founding Artistic/Executive Director of 4elements Living Arts, formerly a community engaged arts organization focused on the intersections of land, art and community. Sophie has curated, designed and facilitated dozens of land- and place-based community engaged projects, working with hundreds of children, adults, schools, communities and organizations over the years, supporting people of all ages to build what she calls “relational muscle”, and to engage in creative ecological research.
• She was the curator and lead manager for the Billings Connections Trail, a $450,000+ project that saw the installation of 11 permanent public works through a year-long community-engaged process, a project which received an Ontario Lieutenant Governor award for Cultural Heritage Preservation.
• She is the lead author of Learning the Land: Creative Community Engagements, and of the two-volume Art of Land-based Early Learning that have become beloved resources for educators.
• She is the artist in residence for ECCCo (Early Childhood Creative Collaborations), and acted as a ‘conductor’ for the international Reggio exhibits in Toronto and Sudbury. Her writing has been published by presses and journals across Canada.
• In addition to being supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, her work has been long-listed for the national CBC Poetry prize, Omnidawn’s 1st/2nd book prize, and short-listed for the national Arc Poetry Magazine poem of the year. Conversations with the Kagawong River, described by Governor-General Award-winning poet, Don Mckay as “Subversive, risk-taking, restlessly immersive”, is forthcoming with Talonbooks.