Critical sustainability: Promoting pedagogies of placefulness in outdoor education. (original) (raw)
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Opportunity and Obligation: A Role for Outdoor Educators in the Sustainability Revolution
Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 2009
A primary educational challenge of the 21st century is to inspire students to become socially and ecologically conscientious citizens who are empowered, responsible members of the larger world. Outdoor educators and, in many ways, outdoor recreation as a broader field are well-suited to take the lead in this educational enterprise that requires transcending the dichotomy between people and nature to see ourselves in the Leopoldian tradition as plain members and citizens of a larger community of life. Drawing on the strengths of constructivism as a pedagogical approach, outdoor recreation as a pedagogical context, and the inherent compatibility of the big ideas of ecology and recreation, we assert that outdoor educators, specifically those involved with higher education at the curricular level, have both an opportunity and an obligation to be vanguards of the sustainability revolution.
Relationship with Place: Transformative and Sustainable Pedagogy for the Planet
Academia Environmental Sciences and Sustainability, 2024
Building relationships between the classroom and the world outside, between academics and personal experience is the central hypothesis of this commentary and review of literature at the nexus of environmental education, place-based approaches and transformational learning. Further, natural environments are offered as an optimal context for the sensory-rich needs of learning experiences that transform eco-paradigms and develop land ethics. The aesthetic quality of a learning experience is dependent on: the relationships within the community of learners, sensory interaction with the learning context or place, the emotion that arouses, thoughts derived from reflection on the experience and the depth of engagement that ensues. Place-based educational approaches which use local environments as learning context could provide, not only needed educational reforms, but sow the seeds of sustainable behaviors of future generations.
Sustainability in Outdoor Education: Rethinking Root Metaphors
Recognizing that behavior comes not only from understanding, but also from attitudes cultivated in outdoor settings that elicit visceral feelings toward nature, outdoor educators have unique opportunities to make sustainability comprehensive, accessible, and relevant. Yet the principal metaphor underlying outdoor education in general, and the Leave No Trace (LNT) program in particular, may be counterproductive to fostering environmentally and socially responsible behavior. We attribute this possibility to the prevailing "humans as apart from nature" metaphor underpinning LNT and recommend it be replaced by a "humans as a part of nature" metaphor grounded in heightened ecological understanding. We contrast the tenets of LNT with those of As Sustainable As Possible and Conscious Impact Living, and with the work of ecologists and critical educators to illustrate the practical implications of our point of view. We conclude by suggesting that outdoor educators are well-suited to lead the proposed linguistic, metaphorical, and pedagogical shifts towards better encompass humankind‘s relationships in the natural world. In so doing, we hope to encourage dialogue about the unique opportunities outdoor educators have to shape an ecologically literate citizenry prepared to make environmentally responsible choices in all dimensions of their lives.
2013
This paper explores the observations and perceptions of school children as they engage with nature through place based environmental experiences. The paper reports on two projects, one based in the USA and the other in Australia, designed to promote understanding of sustainability through outdoor interventions. While the interventions share common educational goals the children came from very different places, on many levels. From New York City to regional Australia the children’s collective experiences highlight the capacity of outdoor-based interventions to promote understandings of nature. Originating and enacted in different hemispheres, both interventions demonstrate the value of passive outdoor education in developing eco-centric thinking and values.
City Kids in the Wilderness: Critical Outdoor Education Approaches
2020
Outdoor and environmental educators are increasingly concerned about the presence and resistance of whiteness, racism, and settler colonialism in outdoor pedagogy. In this dissertation, I present three distinct inquiries examining the entanglement of educator identity, curriculum, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism in outdoor and environmental education (OE/EE). All three manuscripts are united by self-study, which is a methodology whereby educational professionals make inquiries of and investigate their own practice. In chapter one I use an action research framework and discourse analysis to better theorize my anti-oppressive outdoor curriculum design. Through this analysis, I uncover my tendency to position critical educators at high levels of consciousness and ignore the complexity of learners’ meaning-making processes. Subsequently, I shifted towards strategies that placed participants in conversation with entities of place. This curricular approach decenters educators’ singular ...
Scholars Speak Out Ecological Schooling: Questions, Curriculum, and the Power of Place
This paper begins with the premise that schools and communities are linked in ways that educators do not often acknowledge in classrooms. This means that the challenges educators face in both communities and schools will go unaddressed if educators continue to approach the work of education in ways that have remained fundamentally unchanged from one century to the next. While we (i.e., teachers and teacher educators) might say that we value the vast human potential that resides in our public schools, we cannot at the same time go on defending a system that fails to leverage that potential in ways that address the systemic problems that produce the material conditions experienced by students, parents, and other community members in our most underresourced communities. If one of the goals of education is to prepare students to create a more just and habitable world, then educators need to acknowledge that schools are not doing a good job of directly addressing our most pressing social problems (i.e., poverty and inequality) (Marsh, 2012). One of our first priorities as educators should be to work with students, parents, and community-based organizations (CBOs) to reframe the purposes of schooling in ways that put community concerns at the center of the curriculum.
Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2009
Narrative is fundamental to our diverse capacities to remember, to provide an account of self, and to represent our actions, motivations and place in society. The narrative mode is concerned with central aspects of the human condition – commitments and personal agency; motivations and emotions; collective experiences and cultural histories and myths. As such it is concerned with relationships between people, their activities within particular places and the ethics that arise in these specific relationships. This paper explores the role of narrative as a pedagogical device and as a form of thinking and valuing for students to use in their everyday interactions. In particular, it considers why a combination of environmental narrative, drama and deep attentive reflection sits so well with the emerging pedagogies of “place”, and why this alliance is such an effective means for allowing individuals to experience, understand and value for themselves the entwined and sensorial connections ...