This chapter approaches sustainability from an educational and artistic angle, notably through the dance educator’s gaze, as a contribution to conceptualizing sustainability education. In this, education and the arts generally are viewed as spaces for young people’s efforts to enter into dialogue with the world – past, present and future. Providing space to work in an art mode like dance is seen as essential to education’s existential remit, a task the chapter explores as owning a dimension of sustainability in itself, in terms of catering for a sensitive dialogue between the self and the natural and social world, calling for survival.

The chapter is written as an essay, tentatively conceiving dance teaching as aesthetic teaching and pleading for an aesthetic turn in education. At its core is the capability and willingness to be permeated, through the senses, by what the world offers. The dancing young person is seen as an agentive subject coming into being by submitting to movement and imagination, vulnerable and receptive to what comes from ‘outside’. In the concept, teaching is seen as allowing the world with its phenomena to reveal itself aesthetically, offering its gifts and lending its heritage to us to take care of and live in balance with before passing it on to new generations. 

In the chapter ethical and relational, existential and sustainability aspects of dance and education are brought to the fore, reminding us of what education essentially is all about, what dance as primordial interhuman and world-human interaction can teach us about these fundamentals, and, hopefully, what dancing together can teach us about sustainability education.

The arguments are informed by Gert Biesta’s ideas on art as education, subject-ness and democracy in a world-oriented education, in dialogue with John Dewey’s and Maxine Greene’s thinking of art as experience, aesthetic literacy and education, and dance scholar and educator Susan Stinson’s stances on dance education and dancing as becoming.