The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism

Abstract

The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the environment are persistently caught within humanist traditions that place agency and action as sovereign to humanness. It uses new materialist ontologies to suggest how hybrid relations among humans, nonhumans, and matter can be read by way of interactions among assemblages and entanglements that are alive, vibrant, and powerful. While much of environmentalism is bound to political action with nature as passive backdrops, the authors suggest that individual and everyday responses to ecological devastation may better reside in our capacity to act creatively, even horizontally, within political ecologies that disrupt theories of vertical domination and conquest. Admit that humans have crawled or secreted themselves into every corner of the environment; admit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds, and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life. (Bennett, 2010, p. 116).

Mattering pedagogy in precarious times of (un)learning

“…Conventionally, the human (cultivating, liberating, emancipating the human) is placed in centre of attention in pedagogy and pedagogical thinking. In this respect, much pedagogy and pedagogical thinking has played and still plays a role in the staging of the human as privileged and 'exceptional' beings in the world (Snaza 2015, Sonu & Snaza 2015, Taylor 2016, as pointed out by feminist new materialist inspired research in sustainability and climate change education (see for example Taylor, 2017;Verlie, 2018;Mannion, 2019;Johns-Putra;). Furthermore, many pedagogical theories set at their heart the development of the (white) child into a (flexible) citizen as their im-or explicit concern (see for example Hultqvist & Dahlberg 2001, Fendler 2000 for such observations and critique).…”

“…These separations and hierarchies can be considered part of the global problems that we now face. Sonu and Snaza (2015) suggest, "It is a task of pedagogical research to keep investigating what is it that impedes the possibility of acknowledging our entanglement with nature" (Sonu & Snaza, 2015, p.259…”

Symbiopolitics, Sustainability, and Science Studies: How to Engage With Alien Oceans

“…This entanglement of the world and everything in it leads Barad to argue that there are no separate “objects” with boundaries in nature, but there are identifiable “phenomena,” which are the “ ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” and “basic units of reality,” where “‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies ” (p. 33, emphasis in original). Similarly, for Sonu and Snaza (2015), new materialism is “a subset of the posthumanist drift in the fields of philosophy, biology, and the human sciences—attempts to rethink human subjectivity so that it accounts for its relationship with non-human affect and force” (p. 259). These issues are discussed further below.…”

“…More-than-human scientific inquiries would need to stop simplifying the sea and accept that oceans are complex entanglements. They would also need to include “pedagogies inspired by posthumanist and new materialist ontologies [that] are situational encounters made up of entanglements and interweavings, conjoint actions and political ecologies, entanglements that are alive, vibrant, and powerful” (Sonu & Snaza, 2015, p. 274). Probyn (2016) provides a clear example of entanglements and interweavings, which relates to the Year 2 Humanities and Social Sciences curriculum content elaboration noted previously (studying patterns and relationships between marine animals and where human rubbish may go) (ACARA, 2018), when she writes: “Fish eat the microplastics used in daily skin care; humans eat the fish and the microplastics; and fish and human bodies intermingle” (p. 16).…”

Teaching as an Immortality Project: Positing Weakness in Response to Terror

“…In the context of education, it makes some sense for us to foster a different ethic: ‘We need to figure out how to educate in ways that attune to the human as entangled with the more‐than‐human without hypostasising “the human” as if it were separate or separable’ (Sonu and Snaza, , p. 262). Posthuman thought can lobby a strong critique of anthropocentrism (individual humans) and nationalism (groups of humans), while providing us (as humans) with an opportunity to free ourselves from the ‘provincialism of the mind, the sectarianism of ideologies, the dishonesty of grandiose posturing and the grip of fear’ (Braidotti, , p. 11).…”