Marie McEntee: The Container Art Project – Part 1

Text: Marie McEntee & Anna-Sophie Jürgens | Series: Street Art, Science and Engagement

Abstract: As environmental sustainability is an intergenerational issue, it is critical that children have voice and agency in environmental issues that are of importance to them. Kauri Park School in Auckland New Zealand, felt disconnected from a local forest park after it was closed due to the presence of a forest disease affecting kauri – the giants of the forest. In this article, action researcher Marie McEntee talks about how a team of university researchers partnered with the Kauri Park School engaging them in graffiti art on two large dilapidated shipping containers to foster students’ voice and agency to act for the trees. By using the creative arts to enable the children to be environmental communicators, it was hoped the children and their community would be able to reconnect with the forest. In Part 1 Marie describes the foundations on which the relationship with the School, and children was established and maintained, and the processes that were developed to foster a genuine child-centred approach to the engagement that stimulated the children’s imagination and creativity.

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Dr McEntee, how wonderful to welcome you to the online journal w/k! You are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland specialising in science and society interactions, with a focus on environmental issues, and you are passionate about transdisciplinary research and teaching at the intersection of science communication, science innovation and science engagement. In this context, you have worked on a number of projects that explore art-based practices to enable children to communicate environmental futures and sustainability. One of these projects is the Container Art Project, which has recently received an award for its contribution to building a sense of place in the community – the 2024 Kūmara Award: Ahakoa he iti, ko tāna pianga ka puawaitia – From little things big things grow. This is really interesting for our Street Art, Science and Engagement series, particularly the engagement focus, as your project is a fascinating example of how public art can be co-created with communities to explore and feature environmental ideas and messages (see our introduction to the series). Therefore, in this article we would like to invite you to reflect on the role and conceptualisation of art in your environmental Container Art Project, with the aim of better understanding the power of public art to communicate both environmental concerns and awareness within and beyond a community.
Marie: Great to be here. 

ART-MAKING AND LEARNING

Marie, the website of your award-winning project says: “Kauri Park School Container Art project is an exploration into how art making, in particular graphic drawing and graffiti art, can be used to express and encourage children’s learning on ngahere ora (forest health) specific to the pathogens kauri dieback (Phytophthora agathidicida) and myrtle rust (Austropuccinia psidii) two pathogens affecting native forests in Aotearoa New Zealand.” The project responded to an explicit biosecurity call for “everyone” in Aotearoa to get involved in biosecurity (for more details see New Zealand’s Biological Heritage website). What was your role in this project?
The container art project was a community-driven action research project that emerged from a much larger project called Toitū te Ngahere: Art in Schools for Forest Health, simply known as TTN, which I co-led with two other researchers from the University of Auckland: Dr Mark Harvey from the Creative Arts and a specialist in mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), and Dr Molly Mullen from Education. Working alongside us in TTN was a dance specialist, Dr Christina Houghton, and art curator Ariane Craig-Smith. As this was a transdisciplinary project, we also worked with artists, particularly Māori artists and natural scientists so as to include a variety of different ways of ‘knowing and doing’, from the social sciences, humanities, creative arts, local place-based knowledge, western physical sciences and mātauranga Māori.  

TTN was a two-year project, funded by the Mobilising for Action theme of the government-funded Biological Heritage National Science Challenge, Ngā Rākau Taketake programme (Saving Our Iconic Trees). We partnered with primary/composite schools across Auckland that catered for years 1-8 children, to explore ways that the creative arts can positively inform children’s, teachers’ and communities’ awareness and understanding of, and engagement in, forest health.

The container art project emerged following our year’s work with Kauri Park School in Auckland, who wanted to take their learning about kauri dieback and forest health to their community. Kauri dieback is a disease destroying the native kauri tree, one of the largest and longest lived trees in the world. The community’s local forest park had recently been closed as a result of the presence of kauri dieback and the children and community felt disconnected from the forest following its closure. The children wanted to know more about the reasons for the forest’s closure and its on-going management. We set up a collaborative meeting with the children and the Council, who are responsible for managing the forest, and it was agreed that the children should engage in some form of the creative arts as a way to give them voice and agency to share their learning about forest health and kauri dieback with their community. At this stage, we had no idea we would do this through container / mural art!

As a participatory action researcher I oversaw the art project, accessing funding and establishing the team consisting of myself, Dr Christina Houghton, Dr Molly Mullen and our incredible project facilitator Dr Kat Thomas, who at the time was a doctoral student and who took on the role of facilitator in her final year of study. Kat visited the school on a weekly basis for nine months to work with 15 ‘senior’ school children from Years 5 and 6 (9-10 year olds) who opted into the project. Christina, Molly and I joined Kat on a number of occasions and I and Kat also regularly liaised with the school’s principal, deputy head teacher and groundsman.

How do you define art making in this educational context?
The Toitū te Ngahere team saw art making as a process of inquiry for children to make sense of their environment and specifically the forest. We engaged in any art form chosen by a class to enable the children to act collectively as kaitiaki (a Māori kupu/word that commonly translates to mean guardian). We focussed on the visual and language arts and often utilised indigenous art forms such as pūrākau/story-telling. The creative arts enable children to experience, interpret, make sense, and share their knowledge, emotions, feelings and understandings about the world in a way that is relevant to them.

We have been strongly influenced by the writings of Anna Hickey-Moody, Marianne Presthus Heggen and Mary-Ann Hunter who research about engaging children through child-centric and eco-centric approaches by drawing on “more-than-human-others” (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, 24) and engaging in a child-sized “eco-citizenship” through involvement in their local community and nature (Heggen et al., 2019, 391). By doing this children are acknowledged as “capable and useful citizens” (Hunter et al., 2018, 98).  These writers see art-based practices as legitimate forms of participation that act as valid and important ways for children to engage in the public sphere.

The Kauri Park School is an Enviro School with an environmental action-based programme that educates year 1 to year 6 children (see also the Mobilising for Action framework). Why does art making matter as a science education and learning strategy in this specific programme and beyond?
In environmental management, western science is the dominant epistemic authority. However, Toitū te Ngahere recognises the role that multiple knowledges play in addressing ecological issues, and therefore it sought to interweave multiple knowledges and methodologies in understanding and addressing forest sustainability. From a learning perspective, our aim was to provide opportunities for children to draw from different ways of knowing and doing in their inquiry. The “sensory, affective and embodied process of art-making” (Mullen et al., 2024, 167) enables imaginative and creative ways of knowing and doing  allowing children to make sense of the ecological world and their relationship with it (Hunter et al., 2018; McEntee et al., 2023). We have found that art-making can be an excellent way of inter-connecting the different ways of knowing about the forest and particularly for engaging with mātauranga Māori.  

Sustainability is a complex socio-environmental issue. This complexity requires solutions beyond the techno-scientific. In thinking about forest sustainability, te ao Māori (a Māori worldview) calls for the emphasis to be on ngahere ora, or the wellbeing of the forest and not on forest disease. Through this framing, forest sustainability is not examined through a biosecurity lens of plant pathogens or through western ontologies that separate concepts often into hierarchies, but rather through a more holistic framing of ‘ngahere ora’ or forest wellbeing. When we frame the forest in this way, we recognise the broader range of capabilities that students need to address forest wellbeing, such as creativity, reflexivity, critical thinking, complex problem-solving, communication and collaboration. Art-making which fosters imagination and creativity provides ways for children to have agency to develop something new, and facilitates a child eco-citizenship that is different from adult citizenship (Heggen et al., 2019).

Art-making therefore provides an opportunity to support the inclusion of voices beyond science in forest health and particularly the inclusion of children’s voices in environmental issues.  We deem the exclusion of children’s voices from environmental discussions and decision-making to be an epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), that lowers children’s sense of epistemic worth and confidence and their ability to feel that they can make a difference to environmental issues.  Given that sustainability is an intergenerational issue it is important that we support children’s broad environmental learning.  Our project aligns with the goals of New Zealand’s Enviro-Schools that seeks to empower learners in holistic and future focussed action towards sustainability and draws from insights, tikanga (customs and values) and knowledge of te ao Māori to foster sustainable communities. We sought to specifically achieve this through the creative arts.

Art making was more than just an enrichment for the children in the context of the Container Art Project. Why did the project choose the medium of public art (a mural) on a container to express environmental concerns?
The school asked us to consider using two containers on the school grounds as a medium.  We always prefer to work with the art form a school or class chooses.  We agreed to this medium despite none of us having ever worked before with container art or at such a large scale. 

No doubt the school saw the dual opportunity to recondition two very ugly looking containers on their grounds by covering them with children’s art, while also drawing the local community into the school to look at the art and learn about kauri dieback. However, this project was about the children, and they first and foremost wanted to be environmental communicators. They were really excited about the idea of working on such a large canvas. This was a grassroots-driven project, iterative in nature, with co-learning at its core!  We knew how to run a co-design process, but we had almost no experience of working with this art form.

Our amazing facilitator Kat, who was an experienced youth facilitator and understood how to engage children using creative practices through a child-centred learning approach, had by chance pre-planned a short trip to New York to study mural art, so she was able to build her learnings from this overseas trip into the project. Kat wanted the children to embrace graffiti as an artform. She began by introducing the children to the history of urban and graffiti art. They learnt about graffiti as vandalism, as acts of writing or ‘scratching’ messages in paint on walls. They learnt about the shift in graffiti art in the 70’s and 80’s when graffiti ‘writers’ shifted to being graffiti ‘artists’ so focusing on “how their message was communicated” (McCormick & Corcoran, 2013). The children developed a sense of excitement about engaging with a ‘political’ art-form that was often provocative and challenged people’s thinking about issues, and not uncommonly about environmental issues.

As such graffiti art provided an opportunity for the children to feel part of a social movement, identifying themselves as ‘art-activists’ for the kauri tree. We positively embraced the notion of children as environmental ‘activists’ and ‘dreamers’ in sharp contrast with mainstream media’s negative framings of youth in climate marches as truants and environmental dreamers (Bergmann & Ossewaarde, 2020). We encouraged the children to dream and reflect on ‘how’ their message could be communicated, and not just on ‘what’ they might want to say.  

In a recent co-authored academic paper on the very Container Art Project, you wrote that “the creative arts could facilitate the children’s meaningful engagement in environmental issues in a learning environment that fostered child-centric approaches”. Could you explain the child-centred approach to art making used in this project? 
I am a participatory action researcher. In my research, I utilise co-design processes that support and drive action or change that is sought by communities. Kauri Park School children felt disconnected from the kauri forest that had previously been an important part of their lived experience, but which they no longer could access. The forest is likely to remain permanently closed to protect the spread of kauri dieback that is present in trees in sections of the forest. Despite its closure, the children wanted to continue their relationship with the forest and so it was hoped the containers would act as a platform for the children to become the voices for the trees and in so doing we hoped, support the development of a new relationship with the forest, one that no longer required the children to feel that they needed to physically go there. We needed to acknowledge that as senior students the children had experienced the ‘before’ and ‘after’ effects of having been able to access and then not access the forest park.

To foster child-centred learning, Kat drew from Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert, “whereby a mantle of leadership, knowledge, competency and understanding grows around the child” (p. 35). This recognises the knowledge and past experiences a participant brings to their work. Through the children’s drawings, paintings, reflections and collaborative discussions, they constantly negotiated their own artistic material alongside their growing knowledge about kauri dieback, forest health and mural art. In addition, underpinning all our relationships is the te ao Māori principle of whanaungatanga. This recognises and enhances the mana or esteem of people. We believe that all endeavours should foster respectful and equitable relationships. In the container art project we therefore viewed the children as knowledge creators, whose ideas, opinions, visions and views were respected and valued. This built the children’s self esteem and their epistemic confidence and worth.

To foster the children’s sense of agency, Kat tasked the children with generating all their own material and undertaking their own research, mostly in each weekly session, but they could, if they wished, also continue this independently at home. They documented their research and discoveries in their own workbooks, sharing something at each session, but not everything. Each child’s workbook was their space to record personal discoveries, some shared and some not.  Shared sketches, drawings and large images were transferred to a Toi Rākau or ‘Design Wall’. Collaborative discussions and a reflection time at the end of each session fostered an opportunity for both individual and collective thinking. These spaces allowed the children to develop a collective ‘environmental narrative’ rather than just two beautifully painted shipping containers.

Find out more about Marie McEntee’s thoughts on mural art, environmental awareness and engagement in Part 2 of this conversation.

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Acknowledgements: I would like to especially thank the entire container art team – Kat, Kauri Park School (the children, principal, deputy and groundsman), Molly Mullen, Christina Houghton and mural artist Numa MacKenzie.  The core team were 15 senior (Year 6) children and Kat whose dedication and commitment over 9 months cannot be under-estimated.   In addition we thank additional members of the TTN team, Mark Harvey and Ariane Craig-Smith.  We acknowledge the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge in Aotearoa/New Zealand (C09X1817) for their funding of TTN and the School of Environment at the University of Auckland for additional support for the container art project.

Cover image

Completed northern walls. Screenshot. Container Art Project Storymap. Photographer: Christina Houghton. 2023.

How to cite this article

Marie McEntee & Anna-Sophie Jürgens (2025): Marie McEntee: The Container Art Project – Part 1. w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. https://doi.org/10.55597/e10258