Learning through Distraction: Creative Climate Pedagogies in the Global South

<p dir="ltr">This short film, developed by the SWISP Lab team (Associate Professor Kathryn Coleman, Dr Sarah Healy, and artist-filmmaker Kriti Aggarwal) highlights SWISP Lab’s climate-justice collaborations across Australia and India. Asking the audience to consider their personal points of in(ter)vention, the film documents the Lab’s participatory, creative, and educational strategies that mobilise young people, educators, artists, and researchers across the Global South to reimagine what learning, justice, and attention might mean in the Anthropocene. Filmed through a poetic artistic lens, the first project of SWISP Lab's residency at Science Gallery Melbourne invites an entangled reconsideration of distraction, art-making, and climate attunement. Moving beyond traditional pedagogies of focus and productivity, it frames distraction as a generative method of noticing and knowing otherwise; a way to dwell in uncertainty, play, creative climate education and planetary awareness. Through a sequence of moving images, ambient soundscapes, annotations, and field-walk fragments, the film weaves together scenes from workshops, classrooms, and residencies in Melbourne, Bengaluru, and Jaipur.</p><p dir="ltr">The film traces SWISP Lab’s partnership with Science Gallery Melbourne and Science Gallery Bengaluru, the University of Melbourne Faculty of Education, and the Model United Nations for Climate Change in Jaipur, India. It situates these collaborations within a shared commitment to youth agency and creative climate education foregrounding speculative and arts-based pedagogies that allow learners to move from despair to possibility. Through its visual and auditory language, the film acts simultaneously as artefact and provocation. It invites viewers to attend, wander, interrupt, and re-imagine how we might learn in an age of planetary destabilisation. Each sequence gestures toward a practice of re-worlding in which creative play becomes an act of care and resistance. The film’s texture mirrors the Lab’s methods: participatory data storytelling, multimodal inquiry, and speculative design games in the <i>DISTRACTION</i><i> Living Lab</i> residency such as <i>Wondering Walks</i>, <i>Resonation Salon</i>, and <i>HAK.io Reverberation Wall</i>.</p><p dir="ltr">Produced as part of SWISP Lab’s residency within the <i>DISTRACTION</i> exhibition at Science Gallery Melbourne (2025–2026), the film extends the exhibition’s curatorial question, what if distraction is not a failure of attention but a portal to another kind of learning? <i>Learning through </i><i>DISTRACTION</i> unfolds as an assemblage of fragments: teacher candidates in studio workshops; young people mapping emotional landscapes; artists tracing climate stories across land and screen. The interruptions between these moments become sites of reflection echoing Maxine Greene’s notion of “wide-awakeness” and calling for education that is felt, embodied, and socially engaged. In doing so, the <i>Learning through </i><i>DISTRACTION</i> and the <i>DISTRACTION</i><i> Living Lab </i>residency unfolds as an assemblage of fragments: teacher candidates in studio workshops; young people mapping emotional landscapes; artists tracing climate stories across land and screen. The interruptions between these moments become sites of reflection echoing Maxine Greene’s notion of “wide-awakeness” and calling for education that is felt, embodied, and socially engaged.it aligns with the Lab’s larger body of work, <i>Hacking the Anthropocene</i>, which explores how creative climate education can transform paralysis into participation contributing to a growing body of speculative a/r/tographic research that situates art, education, and environmental ethics within the same frame. It offers not just documentation but a method: a visual invitation to wander, to linger, and to listen differently.</p><p dir="ltr">Through digital storying of SWISP Lab programs such as HAK.io and the <i>DISTRACTION</i>, the film showcases how young people and educators in the Global South use art, storytelling, and speculative design to address climate injustice and imagine sustainable futures. Filmed across Science Gallery sites and the Model United Nations for Climate Change in Jaipur, it foregrounds community action, local knowledges, and intergenerational learning. Advocating for equitable climate solutions that protect Country, water, and ecosystems, and demonstrates how global collaboration in education can empower youth to be agents of transition. Released in October 2025 and support by Professor Helen Stokes at The University of Melbourne, it contributes to global efforts to meet the Paris Agreement through culturally grounded, participatory practices. It will be showcased at COP30 in an Australian Pavilion in Belém, Brazil. </p>