‘Attuning-with’, affect, and assemblages of relations in a transdisciplinary environmental education

Abstract

In these Anthropocene times humans are vulnerable through the effects of socio-ecological crises and are responsible for attending to past, present and future socio-ecological injustices and challenges. The purpose of this article is to challenge discursive structures that influence knowledge acquisition about/of the world through binary logics, acknowledging that we are never apart from the world we are seeking to understand, but that we are entangled through a mutual (re)configuring with the world. Through storytelling and entangled poetry from outdoor education and environmental science education contexts, this article explores discursive/material forces (socially meaningful statements/affective intensities) enacted through pedagogies ‘attuning-with’. As pedagogies ‘attuning-with’ take up a relational ontology, in which sense-making is generated from the grounded, lived, embodied and embedded politics of location in relationship with broader ecologies of the world, they illuminate a transdisciplinary environmental education. A transdisciplinary environmental education is important for these Anthropocene times, because it not only promotes a multivocal approach to environmental education, but in acknowledging our inherent and intrinsic responsibility and accountability for the kinds of worlds that we are co-constituting, it provides opportunities to change the story of how we choose to live with/in/for these Anthropocene times.

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