Bird’s Eye View: Engaging Youth in Storying a Survivability Future through Performance and Interspecies Friendship

Bird’s Eye View is an art-science, informal learning project for youth engagement in storying our way beyond the climate crisis. The project is situated within the larger Side by Side initiative at the University of Colorado and was designed to lead a group of Boulder youth in observing and embodying birds through puppetry, costumes, and movement within multiple outdoor settings. Integral to this approach was the integration of equity and inclusion into environmental preservation. In this chapter, we share moments and highlights of our time spent alongside youth and birds in Side by Side during the summer of 2021. We connect this experience to the broader questions we face as a field: How can we create the rapid and lasting shifts needed to ensure our collective futures through creative climate narratives that can inspire action? How can we disrupt current ways of being and hierarchical models through interdisciplinary approaches? How can we story a new future? We offer our core findings as guideposts for our future work and for the collective efforts of all who work in informal learning spaces. Our findings center on the importance of fostering a sense of belonging through narratives of interspecies friendship that are created and performed by youth as a form of climate communication.