Following lines in the landscape: Playing with a posthuman pedagogy in outdoor environmental education

Abstract

Situated within a series of river journeys, this inquiry considers the role of material landscape in shaping learning possibilities and explores practices of reading landscapes diffractively. We consider ways we might pay attention to the ever-changing flux of places while experimenting with posthuman pedagogical praxis. Methodologically, we embrace the post-qualitative provocation to do research differently by enacting a new empiricism that does not ground the inquiry in a paradigmatic structure. In doing so, we rethink conventional notions of method and data as we create a series of short videos from footage recorded during canoeing journeys with tertiary outdoor environmental education students. These videos, along with a student poem, form the empirical materials in this project. Video allows us to closely analyse more-than-human entanglements, contemplating the diverse ways we can participate with and read landscapes in these contexts. We aim to provoke diffractive thought and elicit affective dimensions of material encounters, rather than offer representational findings. This project intends to open possibilities for post-qualitative research, inspired by posthuman and new materialist orientations.

The Experience of Inspiration in Natural Landscapes: Awe, Wonder, Sublimity, and Bergson's Qualitative Multiplicity

“…Bergson's concept of qualitative multiplicity (1889/2001) (QM) described direct experiences of reality, helping explain what happens as one encounters a landscape. QM has been a construct helpful for thinking about the nature of experiences from which inspiration may arise (Lawlor, 2010;Jukes et al, 2022). Bergson (1889Bergson ( /2001 depicted experiences as composed of heterogeneous elements that could be congruous or oppositional.…”

“…Elements of it emerged in the cybernetic tradition of communication theory (Wiener, 1948), information theory (Shannon, 1948), and the Palo Alto School of family systems therapy (Watzlawick et al, 1967). It has been a tool for conceptually framing the need for open borders for non-human migration and conservation (Ozguc & Little, 2003), sonic landscapes of Aboriginal language groups (Rousell & Peñaloza-Caicedo, 2022), and a posthuman pedagogical praxis for environmental education (Jukes et al, 2022).…”

The wisp of an outline ≈ Storying ontology as environmental inquiry↔education :–)

“…I've started to think of places as made of lines (for another example, see Jukes, Stewart & Morse, 2021). It wasn't my idea.…”

A physical education/environmental education nexus: Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum for a sense of belonging

“…In this way, we simultaneously attend to a (re)configuring of human/Earth relationships (Hart & Hart, 2019), and thus, situate our writing within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up postqualitative research, and specifically, Barad's (2007) agential realism within 'new' 5 materialist accounts, we note the expansive postqualitative work already taking place in (environmental) educational scholarship, namely, by Somerville (2020), Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone and Barratt Hacking (2020), Malone, Tesar, and Arndt (2020), Mcphie (2020b), andJukes, Stewart, andMorse (2021).…”