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Black Mountains College

Teaching ecology through creative practice

Black Mountains College (BMC), in Wales, is dedicated to climate action and adaptation. It uses creative methods and practice-based, experiential outdoor learning in its teaching on climate and ecology to facilitate critical thinking and prepare students for the future.

‘Practising to use your senses is a super-essential part of becoming a change maker.’

Natalia Eernstman


Contents:

Project description


Located in the Welsh Black Mountains, BMC is an educational institution combining ecology, climate science and systems thinking, using creative practice to enable students to become change makers. It bridges science and the arts and addresses questions like ‘how do we change human behaviour through narratives and culture?’

The college aims to drive change and be a catalyst for the creation of a resilient society able to weather mounting climate shocks: environmental, economic and political. This motivated them to create their higher education degree, BA (Hons) Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change. The degree is an interdisciplinary three-year programme created to provide the mindsets and skills needed to tackle the climate crisis through creativity and critical thinking, practically and theoretically.

BMC aims to be a model of lifelong learning, as well as a driver for local circular economy and agroecological practice. The college’s main base is located on the farm, Troed yr Harn. The campus is also a nature recovery project, transforming former upland grazing into regenerated woodland, organic orchards, horticulture and agroecological nature-friendly farming.

Creative modules at the heart

The teaching is founded on the belief that humans learn with all their senses and store memories in their whole body. This is why creativity is at the core of the college. Their learning model, applied across all courses, integrates the head, hands and heart: multisensory protocols, outdoor learning and multiple hierarchies of knowledge or ways of knowing.

Throughout the BA in Sustainable Futures, the students get modules in creative practice. This takes them through different kinds of practice such as writing, movement, theatre, pottery and even cooking. Creative practitioners come in for one or more intensive workshops with the students, followed by a reflection on their learnings and connection to the environment and climate. The creative teaching is centred around using their senses and reflecting differently, rather than becoming a practising artist. The programme combines imagination practices and systems thinking.

Two people with notebooks sitting by a waterfall.
'They get to try different practices to give them a whole range of experiences, and to understand that through every single experience they learn, they move their bodies differently, they use themselves differently, and so develop a clearer understanding of where they might want to position themselves in terms of responding to the climate and ecological crisis.'
Natalia Eernstman

In their second year they can choose a pathway called ‘creative practice for future generations’, where art practice is linked to the Futures Generations Act in Wales, helping public bodies in Wales to think long term about how to work with communities in improving social, economic, cultural and environmental wellbeing.

Sustainability issues

A new method of climate education: bringing back emotional engagement

One of the key aims of the school is to reactivate the senses and engage emotionally with the climate crisis. For a long time, higher education has been about moving away from using our senses. Opening up for more emotional engagement is therefore an important aspect for the students to create change. Natalia Eernstman uses the word ‘sensefullness’, a practice that movement artist Kirsty Simson enables through improvisation activities. These include understanding your body better in space and relating to other people. Teachers experience that the more mature the students are, the harder this often is for them, as the longer they are in the school system the more detached they are from their senses.

‘The idea of just sitting in a classroom and taking in information is not a complete picture of how people learn. Most of the learning happens through emotion and through connections between people.’

Natalia Eernstman

The college facilitates emotional engagement through creative practice, movement, and by making and doing. This kind of learning is traditionally done within the arts, Natalia Eernstman explains, but should be applied to all fields of learning, and at all levels. When teaching climate science, they therefore always try to engage the entire body.

‘Endless seminars on how carbon exactly affects the climate won’t do anything if you’re not given the space to apply theory into practice. As a society we assume that if you give people the knowledge, they’ll change the world, but people need to be encouraged to try things out and learn the ability to translate an idea into practice. That happens through lots of experiences and experiments rather than sitting and listening in a classroom.’

Natalia Eernstman

Creativity to enable systems thinking in the climate crisis

The creative practice takes place in separate modules from science and ecology, but the hope is that the students use their learnings across the programme.

One example of this is that students have a module about systems thinking and complex systems, for which they choose an environmental challenge and work over six weeks to create a prototype for a solution. They use their practice of design thinking to find potential solutions. In this way, the modules have their own focus, but the creative thinking applies to the entire programme. The arts enable the students to treat different aspects of a topic at the same time by creating an immersive experience of an issue.

‘As part of the creative practice module we asked students to pick a “hyperobject”, something that has ambiguous, paradoxical characteristics, and is complex – hard to grasp as a whole. They then had to create installations or performance pieces within half an hour, which somehow represented that hyperobject. One group chose migration, and they used tectonic plates as a metaphor, by scraping their chairs over the floor and playing radio stations from different parts of the world. It was simple, but they and the rest of the group felt that they had expressed something more about the subject – more than if they had sat around the table discussing migration.’

Natalia Eernstman

Using creativity is a way of creating change makers and enabling students to be responsive to the climate crisis but, to allow for this to happen, we need more places to experiment in order for critical thinking to develop. At BMC students learn how to apply a theory of change that is centred around the use of artful means, and they learn how to generate ideas and how to make them into a concrete manifestation.

‘People need to be hyper-creative in order to navigate and start responding to the super-fast changing world around them. These are skills that we should all have, not just artists.’

Natalia Eernstman

A sustainable organisation

BMC aims to purchase as much as possible from local providers or sustainable suppliers, ensuring their values align. They make use of coppiced and sustainably sourced wood to produce their own tools or fencing at their farm campus, or as a sustainable energy source, and utilise recycled, compostable, hand-made and eco-friendly materials wherever possible. Students are also encouraged to car share, walk, or bike into Talgarth, where they operate a minibus to lessons to minimise traffic disruptions and promote a more sustainable way of travelling.

Regenerative farming

The college’s campus is located on a 120-acre farm. Managing land sustainably is vital to creating a healthy farming sector in the UK. By protecting and restoring green spaces, the regenerative approaches taught at BMC offer an alternative to the extractive practices used in mainstream farming and land management. Students are taught how to work in ways that don’t require petrol power tools, to follow ‘no-dig’ principles, which lock more carbon into the soil, and to use techniques that reduce demand for water. A year-long traineeship in agroecology at Black Mountains College is currently in development, with land-based learning to help people transition into, or upgrade their skills in, the world of regenerative farming. On the farm campus, the team is working to increase biodiversity and experiment with regenerative practices. Volunteers, short course participants and students all help with ecological monitoring, nature restoration and land management.

A person sitting outside using a woodworking tool on a piece of raw timber.

Lessons, tips and advice

Commitment to inclusion: environmental education for a wider part of society

The college encourages education for all with an open admission policy, as they believe that the climate crisis is indiscriminate and universal. Educational opportunities must therefore also be universal, and that means available to all. The commitment to inclusion and diversity includes close ties with its local community: students take part in projects with local schools and faith groups, and work in community woodlands as a way of building community and resilience. Short courses help the college widen its outreach to more people. The annual Ecological Futures Camp is a residential experience for young people living in towns and cities, giving them an experience in nature whilst also exploring their position in this world.

A ground-level wooden treehouse frame with people sitting inside.

Interdisciplinary education: the challenge of depth vs width

Delivering a fundamentally interdisciplinary programme can be tricky. The first year has been an experiment in navigating a breadth of disciplines and finding that this sometimes comes at the cost of depth.

‘How do we avoid a session just becoming an introduction to pottery, and the students  go, “oh, now I know a little bit about pottery”. How does the experience of learning how to throw a pot link up to everything else in the programme, so that it becomes a coherent learning journey where the sum is greater than the parts? That’s the challenge.’

Natalia Eernstman

With every guest lecturer, Eernstman often felt that the students could have done a whole year on that topic. Rethinking how the different specialists come into the programme is therefore a key focus for the continuing development of the programme. On reflection, they tried too many different things and thus Eernstman wants to slim down the elements involved and work with fewer people who come back a little bit more often.

Three students talking to each other with maps and workbooks in nature, with mountains behind them.

Nature as the classroom

The college has found that students of all ages engage more when learning practically and outdoors, utilising nature as the classroom. In feedback, almost all students say they prefer learning outdoors. Often being outside is combined with creative movement practice that opens up new conversations and deeper relationships between students.

‘Given that higher education is pretty unfit for purpose, especially in the context of climate change, why don’t we have a new college that offers an alternative with a course dedicated to climate adaptation? This is not just a scientific problem – it’s a problem of consciousness and values and supply chains and a way of looking at the world.’

Ben Rawlence, CEO and co-founder.

Community and local involvement/engagement

Engaging with the college’s local community is an important aspect, as the aim is to benefit both the community and the students with mutual connections. For example, as part of the creative modules the students did a small exhibition in town. This aspect will continue to grow and develop in the coming years.

The main thing I want to change about my modules next year is for the students to work more with creatives in the community by involving local makers more, so that the students feel that they become part of a local creative network and for the college to serve the local community.
Natalia Eernstman
Red stone house with a Classroom sign and a greenhouse in the background.

Listening and treating students as stakeholders

Being open to feedback from students brings valuable insights into improving the college. The college requests regular feedback from staff and students, listening to requests, input and ideas on how to do things. Students are treated like equals and empowered to make suggestions as if they are shareholders.

Partners and stakeholders

NPTC Group of Colleges

NPTC Group of Colleges are further education partners and have supported the college since setup, validating the taught courses. Formerly Neath Port Talbot College and Coleg Powys, it is one of the largest further education providers in Wales.

Cardiff Metropolitan University

The newly developed degree BA (Hons) Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change is created in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University, with their validation. Cardiff Metropolitan University offers programmes at further education colleges and private providers in a range of subjects.

Dr Natalia Eernstman

Eernstman is the Creative Practice Lead and Lecturer at Black Mountains College. She is an artist and educator, interested in creating transformative learning spaces through artful, performative and experiential means like theatre. She holds a doctorate in community learning, climate change and the arts; and has taught in various community settings and across higher education. At BMC she teaches the creative modules, and manages the short course programne for a diverse set of audiences. She overviews all the creative elements and practitioners involved.

Other creative teachers include Kirsty Simson, dancer and movement artist, Katie Mitchell, a performance maker, Tom Duggan, ceramicist and designer and Mat Osmond, an illustrator.

Welcome to Our Woods

Welcome to Our Woods partners with Black Mountains College in training people to grow food and manage the woods as part of a larger National Lottery Climate Action Fund project with multiple partners, based in Treherbert from 2023. This is a pioneering community project under the headline ‘Project Skyline’ that began as a community consultation on managing the re-forested spoil heaps around the former mining town. The Skyline project seeks to reconnect communities in the south Wales valleys with the landscape that surrounds the town.

Other partners

  • Brecon Beacons National Park (partner for their NVQ Level 2 in Nature Recovery)
  • Radnorshire Wildlife Trust (partner for their NVQ Level 2 in Nature Recovery)
  • Real Farming Trust (partner for their new programme Level 3 NVQ in Agroecology for 2025)
  • The Hay on Wye Farming Cluster
  • Powys County Council (partner for many community-based short courses and community resilience)

Funding

National Lottery Community Fund

The National Lottery Community Fund has funded the college’s setup and community-based training over five years. The funding will be used to deliver activities profiling circular economy with a focus on biodiversity, climate action, nutrition and waste reduction, teaching and outreach. Over five years, £549,419 will fund staff, monitoring and evaluation, an electric vehicle, travel and accommodation, marketing, professional fees, translation and overheads.

Qualifications Wales (Welsh Government) funds further education courses, making all NVQs offered by the College free to anyone over the age of 16. The National Lottery, The Carnelian Trust, A-Team Foundation, The Princes Trust and the Community Ownership Fund have funded the Black Mountains College’s core costs.