Nurture-By-Nature in Affordance-Need Context

Abstract

In the spring of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of people improvised land art in Lachine Park, Montreal, Canada, that turned a broken embankment into a landscape, and debris rocks into a parade of rock art at the waterfront. This improvisational community art that progressed without an organizer, reminds me of the ancient term of the Supreme Master (大宗师) in the Taoist literary classics, referring to a powerful approach of teaching without a teacher. Analyzing my personal experience as a participant in the community land art process, I propose a more-than-human approach to art education: Nurture-by-nature in the affordance-need context. It is fundamentally an instinctive approach, based on coincident convergence between human psychological needs and the affordances, or invitation of the physical world. Its learning process simulates the natural way of all life forms’ interaction with the world. Regardless of a teacher or a lesson plan, such pedagogies enhance learning effectively and beyond prediction.