This chapter is about edge places and the situational structures of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling from Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist subjectivities (Braidotti in Metamorphosis: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Polity Press, 2002). Growing up on the shores of the Bass Strait oceanscape, I explore how I negotiated my gender as female, not always fitting in within the androcentric (male-centred) context of surfing in Australia. Then, (im)migrating from Australia to Canada as an adult and beginning postgraduate studies, I immersed myself in Barad’s (Barad in Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, 2007) agential realism and cartographic and diffractive storytelling, and since then, my views of the world have never been the same. Agential realism helped me to live with the tensions inherent in the diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist subjectivities. Learning with the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River, I show how I dwelled in the middle space of these subjectivities, moving between categories, boundaries, and borders like the ecologically embedded, ecotone.
In this chapter, I show how I negotiated a shared space of entangled/differentiated existence with my teacher collaborator, Lily, with Land, and with pedagogical events in the researcher/teacher enactments, Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds. Exploring how Lily and I underwent a settler reckoning with what it means to assume access to the P/places and L/lands we call home, this chapter activates an anticolonial praxis in/for environmental education (This anticolonialAnticolonial praxis is at the forefront of relational (re)configurations of myself as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist [as I explore in this chapter] and enactments of environmental education pedagogies and curriculum policy in the researcher/teacher enactments [as I explore in Chaps. 5 – 7 ].) that relationships to, and with, Land/land begets for a White/Western/Settler researcher/teacher living, learning, researching, and teaching on Land/land with troubled histories of settler colonialism. For Lily and me, this meant grounding our environmental education-type teaching practices within pedagogical events imbued with agentic assemblages that are relationally inclusive of all bodies (human, animal, and Earthly materialities) and discursive practices (ethical, sociocultural, and political constructions) (Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things, Duke University Press, 2010). Thus, pedagogical events opened us to relational care ethics as an ontological (re)conceptualising of how individuals are relationally positioned with broader ecologies of the world, not just as individuals in the world.
To challenge the idea that the Earth is something to learn about from detached and distant human positions, this chapter begins the project of (re)conceptualising binary classifications through the possibilities (and promises) of posthumanist performativity to generate new and different worldmaking practices in, and for, environmental education. Grappling with what it means to be human living amongst impoverished social and environmental systems, this chapter offers a (re)configuring of human/Earth relationships as entangled/differentiated, and thus, opens environmental education to ethical horizons of hope within co-implicated and shared futures.
In this chapter, I show how the concept of nature has changed meanings in Western thought throughout recent history, to its position as separate from the human through Cartesian representational knowing in the seventeenth century leading to Latour’s Great Divide in the twentieth century. I then explore the evolution of environmental education, following its roots back to progressive education of the sixteenth century (and reinvigorated in the twentieth century), the nature-study movements of the early twentieth century, and the conversation movements of the 1960s. By the latter half of the twentieth century, environmental education sought to develop informed, skilled, and action-oriented citizenry towards responsible environmental behaviour (Greenwood, The Educational Researcher 34(1):71–107, 2004; Orr, Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. First Island Press, 2004), heralding the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) from 2005 to 2014. I end this chapter with an examination of ESD in the Canadian context and show how sustainable development is taken up in Grades 4 and 5 curricula in Saskatchewan. Here, I note inherent tensions in sustainable development discourses that continue to exacerbate binary classifications and the separation of the human from the Earth in environmental education.
As pedagogical events in Photographic Encounters brought forth affective bodily markings of anxiety and discomfort, they illuminated problematic discursive constructions in Western education. Embedded within prevailing globalising and neoliberal risk societies, these discursive constructions include an overemphasis on objectives and outcomes, indoor learning held in hierarchical superiority, and a universal we that fails to account good local citizenship. Thus, outdoor learning within environmental education-type teaching and learning practices is seen as deviant to normalising practices, and subsequently subjugated and marginalised within the status quo of educational practices. In response, I explore sympoietic systems thinking in this chapter to show how individual entities in/evolve with the broader ecological communities. As such I aim to locate environmental education as entangled/differentiated with broader Western education models.
To grapple with the research provocation offered in the Chap. 1 , How and why do material/discursivities within, and between, intraacting Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings (re)story human/Earth relationships?, in this chapter, I draw on the moments of rupture storied in Chaps. 3 – 6 to bring stories forward into thick presents and still possible futures (Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016). Specifically, I draw on ecological, biological, ethical, sociocultural, and political forces that have generated moments of rupture to show how Lily and I, as a researcher/teacher collaborator, took up new and different lines of flight for new and different stories, assemblages, and worldings in/for environmental education. Such worldings worked to affectively and effectively navigate the middle space between identarian categories, boundaries, and borders to illuminate difference as affirmative through notions of relational agency; and, locate teaching and learning practices within contextualised, emplaced, and situated (micro) politics of location.
This chapter begins with an exploration of pedagogical events in the Eco-art Installation researcher/teacher enactment that prompted considerations of top-down curriculum policy to be relationally entangled/differentiated with a lived curriculum. Bringing forth transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum that are grounded in lived, embodied, and embedded practices between, and across, disciplinary categories, boundaries, and borders, this chapter explores Deleuze and Guattari (in: Massumi (trans) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1987) ecosophy of becoming that begets performance-causality relationships, and thus, relational accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities to Earthly systems and structures by inhabitants within these Earthly systems and structures.
This book presents the types of teaching and learning practices which inevitably position humans as separate and detached from the world
In the last century, whenever people from different backgrounds and cultures met with the intention of communicating, in almost all cases, they barely understood one another. Similarly, the old and young often appeared to be speaking different languages. In decades (or centuries) preceding the “End,” respect for and true understanding of the needs, values and capabilities of ‘others’ was a very rare ‘commodity.’ Now, it appears that the situation has changed significantly.
Extreme meteorological events can dramatically affect places and human lives. The advent and recognition of Climate Chaos, fifty-plus years ago, finally taught society just how much devastation and suffering can result from unsustainable and unjust environmental policies, economic systems and everyday lifestyles.
