Embodying our future through collaboration: The change is in the doing

Self Cite

Two school strikers − Niamh and Harriet − come together with two environmental education academics − Peta and Joseph − to explore what it means to be young people enacting politics for the environment in Australia, and what this might mean for re-imagining education. Niamh and Harriet are leaders of, and were integral to initiating, the highly effective School Strike 4 Climate − Australia (SS4C) movement, enacting ‘principled disobedience’. Peta and Joseph work in teacher education, preparing future teachers who will teach students who are increasingly climate savvy and politically active. In coming together and through the lens of pragmatism, we highlight the political nature of what Niamh and Harriet have been undertaking as they negotiate social, cultural, educational and environmental issues implicated in the climate crisis. Collaborative autoethnography framed our exploration of motivations for action, politics and education within our communities. Through Niamh’s and Harriet’s experiences, we explore how young people express agency while developing identity. Our autoethnographic conversations highlighted the experience and political agency that many of our young people demonstrate and led to us reflecting on the resulting opportunity for educators to ‘dare to think’ differently about education.

Section: Civil Disobedience and The Future Of Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

School strikers enacting politics for climate justice: Daring to think differently about education

White

Ferguson

Smith

et al. 2021

Self Cite

“…Developing a collaborative autoethnographic action research project to confront the ecological, economic, and social injustices which underpin the threat of ecological overshoot and collapse, supported me to generate improved practices as an environmental science teacher (see Palmer, White, & Wooltorton, 2017).…”

Section: Literature Connectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Riley

White

2019

Self Cite

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.

“…We argue that love holds meanings and applications that are integral to the work of environmental educators as described in this article. It is recognised that love is entangled with nature, justice, sustainability and environmental education (Griffiths & Murray, 2017;Palmer et al, 2018); however, we question what love means in this context. How do we understand love as environmental educators and researchers?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It remains, however, a word that is not commonly used in Westernised educational research or professional contexts. In this sense, it can create some uncertainty and discomfort in its application (Palmer, White, & Wooltorton, 2018). This is understandable given the meaning of the word in popular culture, with love being commonly associated with emotions and subjectivity; a far stretch from academic contexts.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Where is the Love in Environmental Education Research? A Diffractive Analysis of Steiner, Ecosomaesthetics and Biophilia

Blom

Aguayo

Carapeto

2020

In environmental education research (EER), love is revered as a way to heal or mend the human relationship with nature. However, this interpretation of love rests in a humanist paradigm that considers nonhuman nature as external to the human being. To this end, love has generally been considered as an outward emotion, towards nature, and is less considered an inner movement, towards the human as nature. We were interested in exploring this conceptualisation of nature and love of/as nature and question: Is there potential to locate the concept of love in EER through different theoretical positions to explore the possibilities for its (re)conceptualisation? We aim to stretch academic thinking to (re)consider love through identifying where our own research in environmental education has involved love through the intersection of our journeys at the Australian Association of Environmental Education Research Symposium workshop. In response to the context of this workshop, which explored the concept of diffraction as described by Barad, we have chosen to adopt a diffractive analysis as the methodology to analyse our theoretical perspectives of love in EER. We explore the word love in this article using diffraction to understand the relationality of human and nonhuman nature through our research interests in Steiner, ecosomaesthetics and biophilia. This process cracked our theoretical silos to more openly consider: Where is the love in EER?