In his nonfiction novel The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh investigates the current generation's incapacity to comprehend the scope of climate change in literature, history, and politics. The primary concept of this nonfiction work is based on the assumption that literature will be accused of involvement in the big derangement and blind acceptance of the climate crisis. This paper follows the preparation for an art class that will engage with the topic of climate change and the transformation of the art classroom caused by engagement with this topic. We question in which ways engaging with the topics of climate change, social justice, and storytelling transforms the art class itself. By addressing the challenges of creating graphic narratives (drawn stories) about climate change, we will show how climate change highlights the need to move away from dealing with aesthetics in educational contexts in a purely instrumental manner: promoting arts for their potential to strengthen the acquisition of predefined learning outcomes more efficiently and effectively (Biesta 2017). Following The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin, 1986), we draw comparisons with the traditional creation of what Le Guin calls the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero and its impossibility of doing justice to the narratives of climate change. To engage with the narratives about climate change, we need to step away from traditional visual storytelling and engage in the drawing activity in a different manner. This will enable us to understand the significance of visual storytelling about climate change not as a cognitive or sensory experience but as a new gesture that allows the topic to become an object of thought. Building on Vansieleghem (2021), we seek to understand the act of visual storytelling as a mode of grammatisation in and of itself: i.e. a particular response to an event that allows us to visualize what confronts us. We are interested in the suspension of the usual ways of visual storytelling and in the act of drawing that facilitates the ability to imagine and create new relationships with the world.

In this contribution, we follow a visual storytelling class at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, which comprises students from all over the world. What became apparent very early in the class is that the significance of the topic is visible from European (and the world) contexts. Some of the works produced by this class are concerned with recent fires in Portugal, the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine, Belgian environmental legislation, deforestation in India, and the global impact of fashion. Furthermore, the results were made accessible in a variety of forms. Some students opted to create political banners calling for action, while others offered visual narratives of good practices in their immediate communities. Some performed innovative plays and reinterpretations of the world's most well-known stories. Working in groups, they were subjected to democratic processes of discussing, questioning, debating and eventually producing works that corresponded both collectively and individually. Despite the large amount of artwork produced during this class, we hope not to elaborate on the outputs art generated but on the specific conditions for self-reflection that this class provided. We seek to shed light on how the specificity of the topic within traditional art classroom challenged the norm and allowed space to shape oneself and the world that was being revealed by making.

In this article, we look back at the Brussels pedagogue Pierre Temple's (1865) argument that drawing should be the foundation of education and question how drawing is employed in the contemporary educational context. From there, we discuss the contemporary roles that artistic competencies play in the neoliberal economy based on innovation and creativity (Harris, 2014) and the current interest in the arts in education that recognize the value of art only in its service to external purposes, resulting in the arts' independent worth being restricted and neutralized (Vansieleghem, 2021). Next, we contrast traditional visual storytelling practices sensitive to commercial imperatives and their inadequacy in addressing a vast topic such as climate change. By reflecting on the difficulties of telling stories about climate change, and the impossibility of implementing the theme in traditional narrative structures (e.g. Freytag's Pyramid), we look at the particular course of visual storytelling and preparation for the Working with Literature assignment. Finally, we reflect on the protocol offered to the students that enabled them to develop shared and individual methods of engaging with the world. Students are divided into groups and asked to examine their connections to the poem "Di Baladna" by Sudanese-American poet Emtithal Mahmoud. Reflecting on the poem in groups and establishing shared perspectives amongst themselves serves as the basis for imposing a set of group constraints. A group conversation regarding shared perspectives aids in understanding the collective linked to the poem, from which they may investigate the individual. Then, using drawing as an exploration tool, groups explored personal understanding while working with self-imposed constraints in visual storytelling. We turn to Ingold's (2007) notions of threads, surfaces, and traces to study the material, marks, and gestures through which students engaged with their environment and try to uncover different types of lines that the world is composed of.

The paper provides suggestions for art-based participatory methodologies for art education. We demonstrate how art may be detached from its instrumental role and utilized as a tool to disrupt linear thinking and allow for more nuanced perspectives of the world. Our practice-based project uses narrative creation as a technique of engaging with critical theory, which opens up room for visual storytelling as a practice of engaging with the world. Traditional narrative approaches are abandoned in favour of drawing as a means of analysis in and of itself to foster non-linear thinking (Kuttner, Sousanis, & Weaver-Hightower, 2017). This method allowed for perceptual interactions between the authors and their own drawings, which fostered attention shifts and allowed for a more in-depth analysis of the topics under investigation (Suwa & Tversky, 1997). Drawing is used as a tool for thinking. The project's collaborative structure allows for debate, questioning, and confrontation of views, stimulating intercultural interchange and leading to more diverse narratives of the subject at hand. Furthermore, the project encourages personal connections to the issue and methods for investigating our lived experiences to understand better how society and our environment influence our identities.

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