Learning with environments: Developing an ecological psychology inspired relational pedagogy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2021
Reviewing Tara Page’s book, Placemaking, A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy for Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, specifically its section Affecting Affirmative Reviews, was an affective and material placemaking journey(ing). Taking new materialist thinking and doing, Page explores how we make and learn place through the entanglements of body with the socio-materiality of place-world. Page’s book is an invitation to a journey of placemaking, with the children of a particular place-world, the Australian Bush, and with Page, herself, an Australian artist scholar based in London. The reader learns and makes place with Land and Bush alongside Page and her human and more-than-human participants. Through a series of images, Page’s embodied and embedded experiences of the Bush, walking with children in their everyday placemaking practices, show us how learning, knowing and becoming happen through the intra-action of bodies of humans, the Land, Bush, dirt, rain, clouds, their colour, texture, sounds, tastes and feelings.
At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education
2013
In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature has been severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography. The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world? In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering. The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.
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.
Place, space and materiality for pedagogy in a kindergarten
Nordtømme, 2012
This study explores how kindergarten spaces and materiality can be vital for children's exploration of participation and how the physical environment enables children to interact and position themselves in play and meaning making. Methodologically this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with two groups of 2-to 5-year-old children in two Norwegian kindergartens. Place, space and materiality are analysed through a theoretical framework based on socio-cultural perspectives of learning and meaning making, aspects of power relations in play supported by Corsaro's concept of children's power-sharing relations and Bourdieu's reflections on social fields as fields of force. The main findings of this study describe how kindergarten children create meaning and play within and outside of pedagogically staged spaces, and how materiality creates power relations and interplay with the actors involved.
Pedagogical Experiences: Emergent Conversations In/With Place/s
LEARNing Landscapes
In this paper, we find and share emergent and relational learning practices through intra-actions with people, places, and materials. We are pedagogical and artistic practitioners who learn from experiencing the world with others and explore relational “intra-actions” (Barad, 2003) that facilitate knowledge-making practices. Contrary to mainstream Anthropocentric understandings, we do not see humans as the only agents in learning. Rather, we learn with other beings—places, materials, humans, and more-than-humans—as we attend to and move with each other.
Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 2020
This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children's social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with choreographic movement and the heterogeneous materialities of place through differential flows of human and non-human agencies as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic, movement as a choreographic architecting of experience, and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. We acknowledge that the impetus for movement generation may come from a multitude of sources, however in this project we develop a series of experimentations with movement, materiality, environment, art, and pedagogy through a/r/tographic fieldwork. These propositional encounters generated four artistic processes as they emerged through the concepts of 'corridors', 'flight', 'viscosity' and 'construction'. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to retain the radical openness and contingency of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in response to the rapidly changing material conditions of our times.
Engaging With Place: Playground Practices For Imaginative Educators
2017
This article explores one aspect of a pedagogy called Imaginative Ecological Education (Judson, 2015, 2010). Interweaving reflection and practice, it focuses on the principle of “Place” and the process of place-making by describing some learning tools that all educators can employ to connect their students with the natural world. The article concludes with a few examples from a teaching resource called a “Walking Curriculum” that exemplify imagination-focused place-based practices.