Lunchtime talk with the CLA hub

• Date and time: 19 June 2026, 1-2pm CET
• Talk title: Transcending the stories we live by: using improvisation comedy in environmental education

The increasing destruction of the ecosystems that life depends on calls into question the fundamental stories that over-consuming industrial societies are based on: stories of competition, consumption, growth, material success, technological progress, extraction, and exploitation. Transcending these stories requires thinking ‘outside-the-box’ – outside cultural values that are so dominant they go unquestioned and unnoticed. This presentation looks at the power of improvisation comedy (improv) to facilitate a breaking out of cultural conventions to liberate thinking and imagine new environmental possibilities. It explores a pedagogy for bringing improv into environmental education classrooms that involves a disruption of typical conversational styles. Students build on ideas that at first seem humorously far-fetched, ridiculous, or outrageous, in the spirit of ‘yes, and’ rather than the more usual behaviour of shutting new ideas down immediately with ‘yes, but’. What is generated is, most likely, a lot of environmental ideas that would be hard to practically implement, but more important than that, the pedagogy results in an opening of minds to the scale of the problems and the scale of the responses necessary to respond to them.