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Increasing concern over environmental sustainability and socioecological well‐being has motivated people to consider ways to reconnect humans with the natural world through lifestyle changes that integrate well with natural systems. Educators who share environmental concerns have explored diverse aspects of ecological art practices to envision an extended and socially relevant role of art. Accordingly, the present study aims to bring educators' attention to a collective journey of artists who have immersed themselves in making an affective relationships with nature. Regarding the journey as an invaluable cultural resource that holds the potential to extend the horizon of how we may live with nature, it examines the collective journey of the artists in Yatoo, an artist association based in Gongju, a greenery city in the southwest region of South Korea. The guiding questions set for the contextual analysis are: 'how do Yatoo artists become native to their place?' and 'what can be learned from their collective journey?'. First, the collective journey of the artists is examined based on four major factors: regionality, positioning, methodology and networking. This is followed by discussions focusing on the value of the collective identity shaped by bioregionally conscious art practices and the pedagogical potentials arising from the collective journey. This paper suggests that the collective journey of Yatoo's life‐sustaining practice, operating in an era of environmental crisis, contributes to the recently developing alternative pedagogical discussions by opening up dialogues that navigate ways to encourage more sustainable practices for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the basis and main characteristics of fine art as a subject discipline and looks at how these elements combine to create a distinctive and in many ways unique learning environment. Taking the premise that fine art as a subject discipline is concerned with encouraging the development of individual artistic practice and enabling the student to articulate and define the social and cultural context that they are working within, this paper considers how fine art students come to develop alternative ways of thinking, seeing and conceptualising. Referring to the Art and Design Subject Benchmark statements the paper argues that in a fine art education, a set pf principles, core characteristics, skills and abilities are combined to create a unique learning environment that gives its graduates a set of abilities that are particularly relevant to our complex society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas of social responsibility and exploring art's place in society are widespread and prevalent. Access, community, participation, empowerment are words that appear with increasing frequency within disparate discourses. From Glasgow's successful bid to be UK City of Architecture and Design 1999, [1] to lottery guidelines [2] and policy research [3], there appears to be a preoccupation with such terminology. However, does this demonstrate a true desire to find a point of mediation between discourses, between one place or one group and another? Do projects establish sustainability in the relationships that are built up between apparently disparate elements or are these terms linked mainly to high profile events that intervene, then move on, leaving people with little more than a memory of the encounter? This paper proposes that in order to shift the topography of art practice – the where, how and on whose terms it occurs – spaces and forms of mediation have to reconstruct the very sub structure on which they are founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]