Nature Pedagogy: Education for sustainability (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lost in Space? Education and the Concept of Nature
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2000
Although the idea of nature has all but disappeared from recent discussion of education, it remains highly relevant to the philosophy and practice of education, since tacit notions of human nature and what constitutes underlying reality-the 'natural' order of things-necessarily orientates education in fundamental ways. It is argued that underlying our various senses of nature is the idea of nature as the 'self-arising' whose intrinsic integrity, mystery and value implicitly condition our understanding of ourselves and of the reality in which we live. I argue that the acknowledgement of nature so conceived opens up a perspective on education that requires us to review currently dominant technological notions of truth and knowledge, and also of what should characterize the process of education, reasserting the proper place of more intuitive, local and dialogical knowledge and relationships.
Sustainability, nature, and education: A phenomenological exploration
Inovacije u nastavi
This paper begins with a brief evaluation of the notion of sustainable development as an influential orientating idea for environmental education. It is argued that the strong anthropocentrism that can be detected in dominant versions of this idea needs to be complemented by a deeper non-anthropocentric understanding of sustainability. It is believed that this latter has radical implications for education because it reveals the way in which human consciousness is itself inherently environmental. It is argued that nature is a key reality that engages this environmental consciousness and that a phenomenology of nature discloses features of our direct experience of the natural world that are seminal to understanding environmental education, and that have important implications for education as a whole. In particular, the problem of the influence of scientism is raised.
The concept of nature and how humans relate to nature provide the framework for this philosophical discussion on challenges facing the evolving field of early childhood environmental education. Posthumanistic thinking is proposed as an alternative to what is perpetuated through a more typical Western approach to education. This Western approach tends to reinforce and widen the human-nature separation. A common theme emerging from interdisciplinary thinking about the nature-human connection centers around kinship versus domination. This theme is presented as central to posthumanistic thinking. Suggestions are offered on how to apply post-humanism to pedagogy, especially at the early childhood level. Adopting a post-humanistic approach in working with children is considered to be critical to the very survival of the planet while also nurturing the holistic development of children. Posthumanism is also presented as a catalyst for ushering in a community of life that's inclusive of multispecies beings sharing one common world. Provocations for the future include addressing five areas of concern:
Environmental consciousness, nature, and the philosophy of education: some key themes
Environmental Education Research, 2021
This book explores alternative ways of understanding our environmental situation by challenging the Western view of nature as purely a resource for humans. Environmental Consciousness, Nature and the Philosophy of Education asserts that we need to retrieve a thinking that expresses a different relationship with nature: one that celebrates nature's otherness and is attuned to its intrinsic integrity, agency, normativity, and worth. Through such receptivity to nature's address, we can develop a sense of our own being-in-nature that provides a positive orientation towards the problems we now face. Michael Bonnett argues that this reframing and rethinking of our place in nature has fundamental implications for education as a whole, questioning the idea of human "stewardship" of nature and developing the idea of moral education in a world of alterity and non-rational agents. Drawing on and revising work published by the author over the last 15 years, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of environmental studies, environmental education, and the philosophy of education. Michael Bonnett has published widely in the field of philosophy of education, giving particular attention to ideas of learning, thinking, personal authenticity, and the character of the teacher-pupil relationship in education. His book Children's Thinking: Promoting Understanding in the Primary School (1994) explored the importance of poetic thinking for education. More recently, his focus has been on aspects of sustainability and environmental education, including developing a phenomenology of nature and exploring ways in which human consciousness is inherently environmental. His book Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist Age was published in 2004, and his edited collection Moral Education and Environmental Concern was published in 2014 by Routledge. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS, NATURE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION This series brings together international educators and researchers working from a variety of perspectives to explore and present best practice for research and teaching in environmental studies. Given the urgency of environmental problems, our approach to the research and teaching of environmental studies is crucial. Reflecting on examples of success and failure within the field, this collection showcases authors from a diverse range of environmental disciplines including climate change, environmental communication and sustainable development. Lessons learned from interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are presented, as well as teaching and classroom methodology for specific countries and disciplines.
Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of place: Lessons for environmental education
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education ( …, 2006
Sense of place is lauded as critical to developing an environmentally conscious and responsive citizenry. Calls for place-based education have often arisen from an emotional plea to reconnect to the land, become rooted, and conserve natural places. However, in reality, sense of place encompasses a multidimensional array that is not only biophysical, but also psychological, sociocultural, political, and economic. This paper reviews the sense-of-place literature and argues for an integrated, holistic view of place, particularly as it applies to environmental education. Recognizing these interconnected dimensions encourages environmental education that more effectively, practically, and honestly integrates sense of place with realworld issues of environmental learning, involvement, action, and community-based conservation.
A Part of Nature or Apart from Nature
Visions for Sustainability, 2022
Abstract. Diverse inheritances of knowledge and experiences, along with current explorations of holistic sustainability, shows the potential for ecolog- ical longevity and how entanglements with natural worlds might be re- thought toward a better sharing of the world. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this article re-considers Edward O Wilson’s rendering of biophilia, as a response to present Anthropocene crises. The paper further argues for a stronger re-turn to First Nations ontologies, sustainability practices and dia- logue, in the hope of re-discovering how being ‘a part of’ nature might better endorse a ‘love of nature’. Embedded in such inter-disciplinary and critical embodiment praxis are signification systems shown through nature/culture confluences, spiritual beliefs and traditions, that form part of a knowledge plexus that calls on humanity to act urgently.
The Pedagogical Promises and Possibilities of Nature as Teacher
heiJournal, 2023
This article extends Wergin's critique of transcultural and postcolonial scholarship, identifying in both a troublesome willingness to deagentify nature by interpolating people-often indigenous people-as its spokespeople, thus relegating nature to mere settings for human activity. Attention is given to examples of nature being allowed to teach, and to the pedagogical possibilities of learning from "living country." The article identifies several "tenets of transecological teaching" before concluding with four specific recommendations for teachers wishing to collaborate with nature-as-teacher and to invite nature to join their faculty.
2 Nature for Real: Is Nature a Social Construct?
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2020
Six words are especially significant in our world-view; they model the world we view: (1) 'Nature'; (2) 'Environment'; (3) 'Wilderness'; (4) 'Science'; (5) 'Earth' and (6) 'Value' as found in nature. But how far are these words for real? Have they extensions to which their intensions successfully refer? "The world' is variously 'constituted' by diverse cultures, as we are lately reminded, and there is much doubt about what, if anything, is 'privileged' about the prevailing Western concepts. All words have been made up historically by people in their multifarious coping strategies; these six now have a modernist colour to them, and the make-up of the words colours up what we see. More radically, all human knowing colours whatever people see, through our percepts and concepts. Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way. Indeed, the scepticism runs deeper. Many question whether humans know nature at all, in any ultimate or objective sense (the pejorative word here is 'absolute' comparable to 'privileged' as revealing our bias in 'right' or 'true'). Rather we know nature only provisionally or operationally ('pragmatically' is the favoured word). We will first look in overview at the tangle of problems in which these words are caught up, then turn to each word in more detail. Natural science seems a primary place where humans know nature for real; that couples the first and the fourth of these signifying words, with epistemic success. No, some reply, humans know nature through socially-constructed science. Catherine Larrère claims that nature per se 'does not exist.. . Nature is only the name given to a certain contemporary state of science.' 1 Science exists-no one doubts that-but science knows nature conditionally, perhaps phenomenally; science is an interaction activity between humans and a nature out there that we know only through the lenses, NATURE FOR REAL 39 theories and equipment that we humans have constructed. Science does not know an unconditioned nature objectively, or noumenally, certainly not absolutely. Alexander Wilson claims: 'We should by no means exempt science from social discussions of nature. .. In fact, the whole idea of nature as something separate from human existence is a lie. Humans and nature construct one another.' 2 Turn then to the more modest word 'environment'. Surely humans know a local external environment; that, after all, is what environmentalists are trying to save. Be careful, though, warns Arnold Berleant: I do not ordinarily speak of 'the' environment. While this is the usual locution, it embodies a hidden meaning that is the source of much of our difficulty. For 'the' environment objectifies environment; it turns it into an entity that we can think of and deal with as if it were outside and independent of ourselves. .. 'The' environment [is] one of the last survivors of the mind-body dualism ... For there is no outside world. There is no outside. .. Person and environment are continuous. 3 Environments are horizons that we carry about and reconstitute as we move here and there. Objectively, there are no horizons in nature. Try again. 'A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' 4 That seems to take people out of the picture. Alas, once more-so the selfconscious humanists will protest-we are still very much in the picture. Roderick Nash, tracing the history of Wilderness and the American Mind, reaches a startling conclusion: 'Wilderness does not exist. It never has. It is a feeling about a place ... Wilderness is a state of mind.' 5 That seems extreme; still, wilderness does have to be designated, as it has been by the US, Congress. A society has to decide what wilderness means and where they will have it. Wilderness is another one of Berleant's human environments, even though one about which we have made atypical designations, resolving to leave such areas untrammelled. 'Wilderness' is a foil we have constituted in contrast to late twentieth-century, Western, technological culture. Nash concludes: 'Civilization created wilderness.' 6 Apparently, then, we are going to have to look all over the world, the Earth, to find nature for real. No, the search is impossible-the objectors continue-because the problem is not what we are looking at, some world-Earth, it is what we are looking with, a world-view: our reason, our culture and its words. We must not think, warns Richard Rorty, that 'Reason' offers 'a transcultural human ability to correspond to reality'; the best that reason can do is ask 'about what self-image society should have of itself.' 7 The big mistake is 'to think that the point of language is to represent a hidden reality which lies outside us.' 8 Jacques Derrida's remark, 'There is no outsidethe-text,' by this account, forbids any correspondence theory of truth. 9 We can hardly have descriptions, much less valuations, of nature as it lies outside of us. That is 'the world well lost'. 10 40 HOLMES ROLSTON III Philosophers have perennially found themselves in an epistemic prison, as every freshman discovers early in the introductory course. There is no human knowing that is not looking out from where we are, using our senses and our brains, from an anthropocentric perspective. That is the lesson of Plato's myth of the cave from ancient Greece, or the tale of the blind men and the elephant from India. These fables, all over again (so they say), enshrine the deepest truth of all: all knowledge is relative; there is no 'mirror of nature'. 11 Viewing one's world, the realist hopes 'to detach oneself from any particular community and look down at it from a, more universal standpoint.' 12 This can't be done. Hilary Putnam explains to us 'why there isn't a ready-made world.' 13 Yes, but at least there are those magnificent pictures of Earth taken from space, and the conviction returns that we humans can look over the globe at least, and find a world that had 'already made' itself. We ourselves are part of its making, whatever making up we do after we arrive and turn to view it. Using our 'reason', somewhat trans culturally it would seem, 14 perhaps we can couple the question what self-image our society wishes to make of itself with what to make of this planet we find on our hands, imaged in those photographs. So there is an epistemic crisis in our philosophical culture, which, on some readings, can seem to have reached consummate sophistication and, the next moment, can reveal debilitating failure of nerve. We need to ask, in theory, whether nature is for real to know, in practice, whether and how we ought to conserve it. Mirrors or not, the self-image question is entwined with the image of nature. Environmental ethics is said to be 'applied philosophy' (sometimes with a bit of condescension), yet it often probes important theoretical issues about nature, which (we add with matching condescension) has been rather mistreated in twentieth-century philosophy, overmuch concerned with the human self-image. Is environmental philosophy another of those para-professional 'philosophy and. .. ' spinoffs, not really philosophy per se, only philosophy 'ad hoc'? Yes, but philosophy is always philosophy of X: and if the object, X, is 'nature' described and evaluated, is not such enquiry axial philosophy, right at the centre? Now we reach the sixth, and most loaded, of our appraisal words. Surely, comes the retort 'value' is something we humans impose on the world. Nature may be objects there without us. There may be a ready-made world, but human values are not found ready-made in it. We make up our values. But not so fast: perhaps we humans do find some non-human values, or some of our values already made up, in the evolutionary history of our Earth, or our ecology. We ought not to beg that question. After all, the less we really know about nature, the less we can or ought to save nature for what it is in itself, intrinsically. Indeed, if we know that little, it may be hard properly to value nature even instrumentally. We cannot correctly value what we do not to some degree correctly know. Even if we somehow manage to value wild nature per se without making any utilitarian use of it, perhaps this valuing project will prove to be a human interactive construction. Such value will have been projected onto nature, constituted by us and our set of social forces; other peoples in other cultures might not