By focusing on school students' experiences of art museums' teaching in eco art, we have investigated how art museums engage with nature, climate crises, biodiversity, and sustainability, and how students become engaged in understanding nature. In a museum teaching about eco art, the student does not necessarily have direct or widespread contact with nature itself, as in land art and similar practices. In the institutional framework and space of the museum, on the other hand, there is a special and slightly more distanced relationship to nature, for example, through the aesthetic presentation, thematization, and choice of materials, which provides a different and interesting opportunity to sense nature's beauty, complexity and extension in time and space (Sattrup & Knudsen, 2025). We have thus been concerned with investigating how school students, through experiences of eco art in art museums, are engaged in understanding nature.

‘Eco art’, ‘Ecological art’ and ‘Environmental art’ stem from a common idea of ​​describing nature and people’s relationship to the environment through varying degrees of involvement in climate issues and thereby addressing and to varying degrees increasing public awareness and qualification of the various natural crises we face (Weintraub, 2012; Brown, 2014). Under the collective name ‘eco art’, this art form is increasingly appearing in art museums, which has inspired schoolteachers who visit exhibitions to teach about nature from an artistic perspective (Inwood, 2008). ‘Eco art’ (Eng. ecological art) is an artistic movement or genre that thematizes nature’s intrinsic value, expression, and significance for humans (Kagan, 2015).

In this project, we have focused on how children experience this art genre through museum media, and whether the genre and media support them in looking curiously and wonderingly at nature and humanity's relationship to it. Art, in itself, has the potential to stimulate the imagination by presenting the world from certain perspectives and, at times, in disharmonious forms, thereby providing emotional and cognitive space for imagining the world differently, a process that may be reinforced by our own aesthetic or discursive expression of the experience of art (Biesta, 2017). In addition, we know that art pedagogy and aesthetic approaches to teaching can arouse engagement, curiosity and motivation when, in museum education, students are invited to participate on their own terms and enter into dialogue with each other and the works (Illeris, 2009; Davis, 2018; Sunassee et al., 2021; Sattrup & Knudsen, 2024a,b,c).

Research in art education indicates that students engage with climate and sustainability when instruction moves beyond the school setting and when they are given opportunities to express themselves through artistic forms of work (Da-vis, 2018). A review of research on eco-art education (Eng.: ‘Eco-art education’) shows that teaching, which draws on elements of outdoor education, climate education, and practical music, plays an important role in sustainability themes across social programs and education (Sunassee et al., 2021). Eco-art education creates opportunities for students to both strengthen their knowledge of and empathy for the environment through work with visual forms of expression.

To understand student engagement, we take the concept of aesthetic resonance as our starting point. Aesthetic resonance builds on Hartmut Rosa's understanding of resonance (2016, 2020), Böhme's idea of ​​atmosphere (2016), and Bennett's concept of enchantment (2001), as well as Heidegger's (1978) and Trout's (2008) understanding of attunement. Together, they describe how engagement is created and arises relationally through sensory experiences, which we have used to analyze student engagement in nature in connection with teaching eco art at an art museum.

Methodologically, the study’s focus on participation was inspired by Rancière’s (2011) concept of partici-pation, which draws on the sensory perspectives through which we perceive the place. In this perspective, participation is not only what students do or say, but also what they sense, i.e., that the sensation itself is a form of participation. This is because, in sensation, there is a significant process of selecting, comparing, and interpreting; thus, participation is not only about what students do or say but also about sensing the place. We have paid particular methodological attention to this and employed an art-based research ap-proach (Leavy, 2015). The purpose has been to capture and describe the students’ sensory experiences and learning by exercising sensitivity to their ways of being, their expressions, gestures, and actions in the plac-es and situations we observed (Sattrup & Knudsen, 2024a,b,c). We have implemented this art-based research approach methodologically by conducting participant ob-servations with students (Sattrup, 2015). Here, we have sought to gain knowledge of the students' perspec-tives partly by acting like the students, talking to the students along the way, and photographing and drawing the special situations that arose or, perhaps rather, how the special situations can be experienced from a student perspective (Warming, 2011; Leavy, 2015). We have written data together in poetizations (Sattrup & Knudsen, 2024a,b,c), which are designed as multimodal microdramas and drawings depicting how situations can be experienced from a student perspective. The poetizations function as juxtapositions of how meaning and meaning can arise in encounters between text and image (Finley, 2018). In this way, they function both as data and as representations of data (Leavy, 2015).

Despite extensive research on engagement and art pedagogy, existing research does not demonstrate how art museum pedagogy fosters engagement with nature. Our study extends existing knowledge about eco-art pedagogy’s focus on sensuality but examines student engagement as it occurs between students and be-tween students and objects rather than within the student (Lawson & Lawson, 2013). In doing so, the study demonstrates how teaching in specific places and with specific materials or works fosters engagement. Based on the concept of aesthetic resonance, we show how students' engagement appears and can be culti-vated in the relationships among students, materials, and teachers, and in teaching within an art exhibi-tion. The analyses indicate that students' engagement is supported by both the concrete opportunities for sensory experiences that the exhibition and teaching created by being able to enter, hear, see, and feel the works, and by the imaginary world that the students, teaching, and exhibition together created. Aesthetic resonance, understood as the reasoning connection to the world, can thus explain how students' engage-ment with nature arises and manifests. It is about both the students, the art, and the teaching, which to-gether create a connection to nature.

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