(Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education: Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist 981992586X, 9789819925865

Table of contents :
Foreword
Acknowledgements
About This Book
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
Cluster One: Inspiring 
1 Turning to Posthumanist Possibilities in Environmental Education
1.1 Lines of Flight Across the Pacific
1.2 The Purpose of This Book
1.3 The Promise of Posthumanist Performativity
1.4 Book Organisation
References
2 Environmental Education in These Times of the Anthropocene
2.1 The Concept of Nature
2.2 Evolution of Environmental Education
2.3 Education for Sustainable Development in the Canadian Context
References
Cluster Two: Performing
3 Researcher Worldings: Lady/Backpacker Storytelling
3.1 Researcher Worldings Apparatus
3.2 Edge Places
3.3 Introducing Agential Realism
3.4 Figurations
3.5 Learning-With the Kisiskâciwani-Sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River
3.6 Dwelling in the Middle Space of Ecotones
References
4 Researcher/Teacher Worldings: Relationships with Land and Pedagogy
4.1 Researcher/Teacher Worldings Apparatus
4.2 Thinking Through Land
4.3 Mindful Walking: A Teacher/Crow Story
4.4 Mapping Worlds: Becoming-with Land
4.5 Pedagogical Events in Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds: Opening to Relational Care Ethics
References
5 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Negotiating a Lived Curriculum
5.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus
5.2 Eco-Art Installation: Tools, Toys, and Friends
5.3 Transdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum: Dwelling at the Borders of Difference Between Curriculum-as-Plan and a Lived Curriculum
5.4 An Ecosophy of Becoming
References
6 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Agential Worldings Outside the Classroom
6.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus
6.2 Tensions in Photographic Encounters
6.3 Indoor/Outdoor Binaries in Environmental Education
6.4 Teaching-with the Outdoors in Environmental Education
6.5 Intraacting Me/Us Relationships in Sympoietic Systems
References
Cluster Three: Becoming
7 Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist
7.1 De/Recomposing Assemblages
7.2 Break One: Ethical Forces Moving Identity to Nomadic Multiplicities of Subjectivities
7.3 Break Two: Sociocultural Forces Moving Humancentred Agency to Relational Agency
7.4 Break Three: Political Forces Moving Top-Down Policy Enactments to Globalised Localities
7.5 New and Different Stories in/for Environmental Education
References
Appendix Meeting Provocations
Meeting 1 Provocations
Historical Accounts
Meeting 2 Provocations
Part 1: Mapping Conceptions and Practices of Environmental Education
Part 2: Conceptions of Relational Teaching Practices
Meeting 3 Provocations
The Potential for the Future
Index

Citation preview

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

Kathryn Riley

(Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia Editorial Board Gail Boldt, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA Iris Duhn, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Linda Knight, RMIT University, Mill Park, VIC, Australia Walter Kohan, Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Casey Myers, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Tracy Skelton, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

Kathryn Riley

(Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist

Kathryn Riley University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-99-2586-5 ISBN 978-981-99-2587-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Gunnamatta

Foreword

We face uncertain and certain futures that are unimaginable and yet all too real (and present) in our Anthropocene epoch. We know that there have been decisions made that carry unforeseen (unconsidered) and catastrophic outcomes for many multispecies kin. And yet, we seem reluctant to make the necessary changes to the ways we live (especially in our western worlds). For example, the sixth mass extinction is unfolding as we continue to practice mineral exploration and develop our wetlands into cities. Many now imagine solutions, mitigations, and adaptations. These are framed as opportunities to correct the multiple crises we face. Forgetting that we took generations to degrade Earth’s systems, we contend that what we broke is fixable, misrepresenting the complexity and interconnectedness of these systems and the devastating loss already realised. Also forgetting that these Anthropocene challenges are human generated and social, not external to us and only environmental. We look to science to provide technical solutions, and in repeated practices we expect our indigenous colleagues to share their knowledges and practices to again show us other ways of being in our world. We are starting to comprehend the enormity of what we have done. Education, especially school education, is thought to offer a panacea of opportunity to address social challenges. Get them while they are young! Young people take the messaging home and generate change by influencing their family! These are strategies often exploited by interest groups with agendas to forward. Indeed, education may be part of the solution, especially school education. Although it requires careful, relational work to prepare teachers and communities to learn the skills and to be enabled, Kathryn’s research provides insight into how this might be possible. Environmental education has explored learning with, through, and in the environment since its early beginnings in the 1960s. More recently, and with Kathryn’s research leading the way, more relational ways of learning through human/Earth relationships are enabling educators to explore the interconnections and complexity of dynamic inter and intraactions. Kathryn carefully explores the theoretical and methodological as well as the thinking and doing of relational educational practice

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Foreword

as she is indeed in relation with a class of young people, their teachers, and their ecosystems. Kathryn offers us insight and theoretical application so that we too can learn relational ways of being and doing as applied through our own educational practices. She carefully explicates the application of posthumanist performativity through diffractive storytelling as we consider the possibilities of the Researcher/Teacher/ Environmental Education Worldlings. She holds us gently as she applies theory with deft hand and voice, and with explanations that leave us confident to proceed. Throughout this book, Kathryn speaks to us—directly. She is encouraging, but also firm and clear. She shares deeply of herself, so that we might see productive ways forward for us to lean into the work of relational, decolonising, and educating. Crafting ways to enable explorations of our entangled assemblages while noting and re-learning to not reinscribe our colonial practices or people and place requires us to pay attention. Kathryn leads our practice through her story so beautifully represented in this book. Kathryn calls us to (re)story our practices and compels us in these urgent times to move confidently into relational and considered practice. With her research assemblage invites us to find ways to open through ‘thinking with the land’, ‘mindful walking’, ‘mapping worlds’, ‘eco-art installations’, and ‘photographic encounters’. She creates space in our practice to be inquisitive, enthralled, open, and connected. And yet, Kathryn enables us to take up these practices in any educational context, but especially in schools where teachers and young people can reshape the discourses and (re)story human/Earth relationships. It is with great pleasure that I commend this insightful, beautiful book to you, dear reader. I had the pleasure of being on some of this journey with Kathryn and am forever changed by these invaluable experiences. I wish you space, openness, and future insight in the delights that lie ahead for you through this precious investment into how we can (re)story our futures. Bon voyage… Melbourne, Australia

Peta J. White

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are tricky terrain for a book that is attempting to destabilise hierarchies and the associated power differentials enmeshed within these hierarchies, particularly when I think of entangled past/present/futures that connect me to all the people, places, animals, landscapes across for decades. Thus, an acknowledgements page could go on forever as my body is alive and vibrant with diverse, dynamic, and interconnected mappings of all these connections. Yet upon this map, some affective traces have left profound etchings and burrowed deep beneath the surface of my skin to nestle into the very nucleus of my being. There are, after all, different scales of accountability, obligation, and response-ability to the different relationships we inhabit as per the nuanced specificities and complexities of that relationship. So, I’ll do my best to account for the relationships that have helped me produce this book. I extend my deepest gratitude and respect for the Boon wurrung people of the Kulin Nations and to the Cree, Saulteaux Dakota, Lakota, Dene, and Métis peoples of Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. I give thanks to the Elders and Knowledge Keepers, those with us today, and those who are no longer with us, for their stewardship and teachings. I stand-with you. And may we all continue to walk together towards Truth and Reconciliation. I am indebted to the Gunnamatta Back Beach for giving me my lifeforce as a confused and moody teenager and the South Saskatchewan River for being my anchor in the whirlwind of new beginnings overseas. Thank you for teaching me about change and resilience and I will always come back to you. I am grateful to Dr. Karen Malone, Dr. Marek Tesar, and Dr. Sonja Arndt for leading the way in posthumanist and new materialist scholarship. As editors in the Springer Book Series: Children: Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, this series is an incredible testament to the important work being done in the field of environmental education, and I am thankful that I have an opportunity to be part of such mission. In 2004 when I started my undergraduate degree at Monash University, I met one of the most inspiring professors I have ever come to know: Dr. Zosh Pawlaczek. Zosh later became my Masters research supervisor from 2012 to 2014, along with Dr. Terri Philpott, and I will always be grateful for Zosh and Terri’s mentorship. I also give ix

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immense thanks to Dr. Peta White as my doctoral supervisor. In fact, it was because of Peta that I landed in Saskatchewan in the first place! But that is a story for another time. Peta’s passion and expertise in the field of environmental education field is second to none, and I was really fortunate to have you as my doctoral supervisor. I also thank Dr. Claire Charles and Dr. Shaun Murphy for your leadership along the doctoral journey. Pre-, during, and post-Ph.D., I have also had the opportunity to collaborate with, and learn from, many intelligent, caring, thoughtful, and innovative scholars, namely, Dr. Llewellyn Wishart, Dr. Katie Strom, Dr. Bretton Varga, Dr. And Pasley, & Dr. Christie Byers, amongst others from the Posthuman Researcher Nexus. I thank the Commonworlds Research Collective, and other critical friends and peer reviewers that I have met along the way at various conferences and workshops. And I thank the thoughtful, thorough, and insightful reviewers that helped me in the co-making of this book. I have been incredibly fortunate to have crossed paths with so many academic colleagues that are committed to strength-based and generative approaches to scholarship. I also thank my postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Loleen Berdahl, and colleagues, Sylvia Fitzgerald and Bonnie Zink. It was a pleasure working on the Governing Sustainable Municipalities project with you all, and the professional and personal strengths I developed along the way are because of your exemplary leadership. I thank Dr. Marcelo Gules Borges, Dr. Ranjan Datta, and Dr. John B. Acharibasam for teaching me how to navigate academia more skilfully. And Dr. Janet McVittie: not only are you an incredible source of inspiring conversation, but your friendship is also something I value immensely. Thank you for all your teachings. I thank Lily and the host of Grades 4 and 5 children for collaborating with me in this book. Lily is an all-star teacher and I know that every child that comes into her classroom leaves more attuned with themselves and the worldings they are co-constituting. Lily is making a difference. I thank Lynden Proctor, my friend and teaching colleague who is an absolute enigma and joy to work with. I thank R. Elizabeth Tosney for helping Saskatoon to feel like home. I also extend heartfelt gratitude for the incredible group of inspirational women that are more like sisters to me: Amber Cameron, Kylie Jade Clarke, Myra Medhurst, and Natalie Sands. I extend a deep and resounding thank you and respect to Dr. Lesley Biggs. Lesley was the voice of reason throughout these chapters, and she helped me craft the stories in much more articulate ways that I could have ever done alone. Her patience and generosity to call me into good relations with writing processes will surely leave a lifetime of impressions. Thank you. And to those who have burrowed the deepest into the nucleus of my being: my late Mum, Denise Kennedy (23.04.1941–10.11.2017) and my late Dad, Daryl Riley (5.11.1946–21.06.2008). Wherever you are, I hope you know just how much I love you. To my husband, Trevor, and children, Zuzana and Charlie: you are the bedrock in all my worldings. Finally, to all my four-legged furry friends: I adore you beyond words and worlds.

About This Book

Our Earth is at a critical juncture. As atmospheric temperatures rise and cast unprecedented and wide-spread environmental destruction, degradation, and fragmentation upon all of Earth’s inhabitants, socioecological injustices and threats cannot be separated from globalising, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial discourses that continue to abound in these times of the Anthropocene. Resulting in anthropocentric (relating to dominance of the human species) and humancentric (relating to dominance of the human self) logics that proliferate through binary classification, the human is not only seen as separate and detached from the Earth but the dominant categories of human are set in hierarchical positions of power. For environmental education, anthropocentric and humancentric logics work to homogenise and institutionalise the field, as policy-driven discourses of pragmatics overemphasise instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic teaching and learning practices that view the Earth as something to learn about from a detached and separate distance. In response, this book thinks-with materiality to (re)conceptualise anthropocentric and humancentric logics and (re)configure binary classifications. Bringing forth a multitude of stories that demonstrate biological, spiritual, ethical, sociocultural, political, and ecological forces in worldmaking, this effort is not to suggest a more correct or better way of teaching in environmental education but to illuminate complex and dynamic affective becoming-withs through notions of relational agency. Situated in the simultaneous thinking (theory) and doing (action) of posthumanist performativity and new materialist methodologies, this book adopts cartographic and diffractive storytelling to explore affects emerging within, and between, an assemblage comprising Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings. First, this book explores the Researcher Worldings and how the researcher makes sense of herself with/in the broader ecologies of the world. It then explores Researcher/Teacher Worldings as the researcher collaborates with an elementaryschool teacher in Saskatchewan, Canada through enactments of four co-created and co-implemented multisensory, Land-based researcher/teacher enactments: Mindful Walking, Mapping Worlds, Eco-art Installation, and Photographic Encounters. Finally, opening to an exploration of Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings, this book explores how the researcher/teacher organised themselves with xi

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About This Book

Other(s), Land pedagogies, environmental education curriculum policy mandates, and wider discourses of Western education models. As affects emerged from intraactions within, and between, Researcher/Teacher/ Environmental Education Worldings, they generated moments of rupture to reveal co-constituted and co-implicated worldmaking practices, and thus, human/Earth relationships as entangled/differentiated. Disrupting and dismantling binary classifications, difference is no longer understood as hierarchical, oppositional, and dualistic but through affirmative politics imbued with relational accountability, obligation, and response-ability to the types and kinds of worlds that are co-constituted and co-implicated. To understand difference through affirmative politics does not mean that environmental education teachers and learners escape, transcend, or rebuke the precarious socioecological realities of these times of the Anthropocene, but rather, they are provided with the conditions of possibility to act from their (micro) politics of location in attending to contextualised, emplaced, and situated socioecological realities within shared futures on a finite planet.

Contents

Cluster One: Inspiring 1 Turning to Posthumanist Possibilities in Environmental Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Lines of Flight Across the Pacific . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The Purpose of This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The Promise of Posthumanist Performativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Book Organisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Environmental Education in These Times of the Anthropocene . . . . . 2.1 The Concept of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Evolution of Environmental Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Education for Sustainable Development in the Canadian Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 3 9 12 15 17 23 23 25 27 31

Cluster Two: Performing 3 Researcher Worldings: Lady/Backpacker Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Researcher Worldings Apparatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Edge Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Introducing Agential Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Figurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Learning-With the Kisiskâciwani-Sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Dwelling in the Middle Space of Ecotones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37 37 38 41 43 44 50 53

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Contents

4 Researcher/Teacher Worldings: Relationships with Land and Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Researcher/Teacher Worldings Apparatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Thinking Through Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Mindful Walking: A Teacher/Crow Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Mapping Worlds: Becoming-with Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Pedagogical Events in Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds: Opening to Relational Care Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Negotiating a Lived Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Eco-Art Installation: Tools, Toys, and Friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Transdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum: Dwelling at the Borders of Difference Between Curriculum-as-Plan and a Lived Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 An Ecosophy of Becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 58 60 61 66 68 69 73 73 74

83 85 89

6 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Agential Worldings Outside the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.2 Tensions in Photographic Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 6.3 Indoor/Outdoor Binaries in Environmental Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.4 Teaching-with the Outdoors in Environmental Education . . . . . . . . . 98 6.5 Intraacting Me/Us Relationships in Sympoietic Systems . . . . . . . . . 102 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Cluster Three: Becoming 7 Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 De/Recomposing Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Break One: Ethical Forces Moving Identity to Nomadic Multiplicities of Subjectivities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Break Two: Sociocultural Forces Moving Humancentred Agency to Relational Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Break Three: Political Forces Moving Top-Down Policy Enactments to Globalised Localities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 109 112 114 116

Contents

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7.5 New and Different Stories in/for Environmental Education . . . . . . . 117 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Appendix: Meeting Provocations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

About the Author

Kathryn Riley is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She completed a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Sport and Outdoor Recreation at Monash University in 2007. Becoming increasingly despondent with pervasive forms of adventure hegemony constraining and disciplining how humans relate with more-than-human worlds, she then went on to complete her Masters research through Deakin University (Australia) in 2014, adopting Narrative Inquiry to explore mindfulness as a strategy to cultivate environmental ethics in Australian Outdoor and Environmental Studies. As a 3rd generation Settler to Australia from English and Scottish descent, she immigrated to Canada in 2015 as a Visiting Research Student with the Sustainability Education Research Institute (SERI) at the University of Saskatchewan. Finding a sense of home in Saskatchewan, she obtained her Ph.D. through Deakin University in 2019, conducting her research within the Saskatchewan-based education system to explore different ways to (re)story human/Earth relationships in the face of human exceptionalism and supremacism in these times of the Anthropocene. Her current research is grounded within pursuits of socioecological justice within an anticolonial praxis in education, taking up posthumanist and new materialist scholarship to challenge anthropocentric and humancentric hierarchical thinking and generate an interconnected sense of belonging with Land/Country/Place.

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Abbreviations

3Rs 5Rs CMEC ECCC EECOM EfS ESD FSDS GAP IEEP IUCN LSF NGOs RCE RW SDGs SE UNEP UNESCO

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle Council of Ministers for Education Canada Environment and Climate Change Canada Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication Education for Sustainability Education for Sustainable Development Federal Sustainable Development Strategy Global Action Programme International Environmental Education Programme International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Learning for a Sustainable Future Non-Governmental Organisations Regional Centre of Expertise Resources and Wealth goal Sustainable Development Goals Sustainability Education United Nations Environment Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1

Touching the sky. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . An assemblage of Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River basin. Source and Drawing credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delights of the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cutting-together-apart. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frozen in silence. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . Cut-out words for Eco-art Installation. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amongst the wolf willow. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rip currents at Gunnamatta. Source and Photo credit Life Saving Victoria (2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

14 16 45 46 52 75 84 96 111

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List of Tables

Table 2.1

Table 4.1 Table 5.1

Aims and goals of Grades 4 and 5 Social Studies curriculum and learning outcomes of the Resources and Wealth goal (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010a, 2010b) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary of the researcher/teacher enactments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grades 4 and 5 Saskatchewan curriculum policy taken up through the researcher/teacher enactments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

30 59 79

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Cluster One: Inspiring

Chapter 1

Turning to Posthumanist Possibilities in Environmental Education

Abstract To challenge the idea that the Earth is something to learn about from detached and distant human positions, this chapter begins the project of (re)conceptualising binary classifications through the possibilities (and promises) of posthumanist performativity to generate new and different worldmaking practices in, and for, environmental education. Grappling with what it means to be human living amongst impoverished social and environmental systems, this chapter offers a (re)configuring of human/Earth relationships as entangled/differentiated, and thus, opens environmental education to ethical horizons of hope within co-implicated and shared futures. Keywords Posthumanist performativity · New materialism · Relational agency · Binary classifications · Anthropocentric and humancentric logics · Anthropocene · Policy-driven discourses of pragmatics

1.1 Lines of Flight Across the Pacific This is a story about the wild, primordial, and messy body breathing me to life. My name is Kathryn Riley.1 I am a third-generation Settler2 to Boon wurrung Country in south-eastern Australia (from Scottish and Welsh descent) and a 1

Hello, Reader, I’m grateful you’re here! In this book, I follow the lead from Liboiron (2021) and adopt footnotes to provide a space for a more nuanced discussion that more thoroughly contextualises, expands, and emplaces ideas. While my footnotes might not always take on a political connotation like Liboiron’s do, they serve as a method for deconstructing the linear progression of text to provide moments of rupture in the reading journey. If you’re like me, perhaps you will move between footnotes to serve as a reminder to inform different parts of the book. I like to think of them as an orientation in what can seem like a sea of text—maybe like bobbing buoys that demark boundaries within contextualised, emplaced, and situated knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling. 2 I capitalise Indigenous, Settler, White, and Western to indicate reference to specific social groups, while acknowledging the unstable and political nature of these categories in that they possess fluid borders and heterogeneous members (Haney-Lopez, 2006). It is not my intent to reify categories and place myself, or others, into neat and fixed identity boxes; I am cognisant that Settler is a loaded term and I do not mean to reinstate the Settler/Indigenous binary nor obscure the many © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_1

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first-generation Settler to Treaty 6 Territory and the homeland of the Métis in Saskatchewan,3 Canada.4 I (im)migrated from coastal Australia to make a new home in the Canadian prairies in 2015, first touching down in the twilight of a golden hued summer. As a doctoral student researching in the field of environmental education, this international relocation came about through a research project that I’d been hired to work on. And was I in for a wild ride. While I had intended to come to Saskatchewan to expand my environmental education network and knowledge of the field, the journey evoked a complete transformation of knowing/being/thinking/ doing/feeling.5 It was in Saskatchewan that I first reckoned with myself as a human living amongst impoverished social and environmental systems of these times of the Anthropocene.6 The Anthropocene is the current geological epoch that describes the disastrous and permanent changes to earth systems due to over consumptive and fossil-fuel dependent human activities (Angus, 2015; Crutzen, 2002, 2005; International GeosphereBiosphere Programme, n.d.; Steffen et al., 2007). Through global discourses that portray cataclysmic social and environmental crisis narratives, the planet has arrived at a critical juncture. The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities in that the planet different routes that non-Indigenous people have taken to call Canada home, all intensely complicated and fraught with vast differences in resources and privilege (e.g., refugees, African-Americans in North America). While I wholeheartedly believe that colonial relations with Land/Country/Place need to be approached critically through relational and sustainable solidarities, Settler is the best word I currently have to describe my White/Western privileges (Hern & Johal, 2018). Further, I respect Yunkaporta’s (2020) claim that suggests “an Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land base, as part of that land base” (p. 36). 3 The modern spelling for Saskatchewan was adopted in 1882, derived from the Nêhiyawak (Cree) word for the Saskatchewan River, kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, which describes the “fast-flowing” Saskatchewan River or its “Swift Current”. As Fromhold (2013) wrote, the variations of this include kiskatchiwan (fast-running stream), kisiskatchewan (rapid water), kisaskatchiwancipi (swift current river), kihtcicipi (great river), pasquahyah sipi (desert, prairie), saskadjiwan (the running of the thaw or swift current), paskwa sipi (prairie/desert stream), kichi siskachiwin sipi (big swift current stream), and kichi sipi (big/great stream). 4 The name Canada likely comes from the Huron-Iroquois word Kanata meaning village or settlement. This came about when in 1535, two Indigenous youths told French explorer Jacques Cartier about the route to Kanata. While they were referring to the village of Stadacona (now known as Québec city), Cartier used Canada to describe not only the village, but the entire area controlled by its chief, Donnacona. Canada was officially named in 1791 as the Province Québec was divided into the colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. The two colonies were united in 1841 and called the Province of Canada (Government of Canada, 2020). 5 The use of the forward slash (/) is used throughout this book to denote relational indissolubility (Clarke & Mcphie, 2020a). 6 Superseding the period known as the Holocene, the Anthropocene was popularised by earth systems scientists at the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report indicating that human-induced warming has reached approximately 1 °C above pre-industrial levels, with expected increases likely between 0.1 °C and 0.3 °C per decade. Increased atmospheric temperatures have caused unprecedented and widespread environmental destruction, degradation, and fragmentation through pervasive droughts and heat domes, evaporating lakes, floods, major storms, melting glaciers and polar caps, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and species extinction (Allen et al., 2018).

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might continue with or without us, yet our relationships with planetary ecosystems and earthly critters that we have become accustomed to may not (Haraway, 2016). To shift socioecological crisis narratives to stories of hope about the kinds and types of futures that are composed, created, and cultivated-with Other(s) (Stengers, 2017), I follow Donna Haraway’s (2016) conceptions of the Anthropocene as a fluid and dynamic boundary rather than as a static, stable, fixed, and rigid epoch. And thus, references to the Anthropocene throughout this book are taken up as these times of the Anthropocene. As the Anthropocene exemplifies the entangled nature of humans and the fate of the planet (Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Somerville & Green, 2015; Taylor & PaciniKetchabaw, 2015), this entanglement became more than just a discursive7 knowledge but a materially8 lived, embodied, and embedded knowing/being/thinking/doing/ feeling as I searched for a sense of home in Saskatchewan. Colliding with a very troubling personal dilemma by what it meant to belong to planet Earth and the Land9 in which I dwelled, and simultaneously, what it meant to unsettle privileged positions of White/Western/Settler-subjectivities set in dominant Western worldviews,10 (im)migrating to Saskatchewan pulled me to address how I might be complicit in,

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Discursively/discursive/discursivity refers to the historically situated political, sociocultural, and ethical conditions that set limits and provide possibilities for what counts as socially meaningful. While we will always be influenced by the social worlds in which we inhabit, focusing on the concrete, complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power is to bring attention to how bodies are affected by stimuli in the environment, and thus, how bodies simultaneously affect the environment (Barad, 2007; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Hughes & Lury, 2013). 8 Materially/material/materiality refers to the physical substance of things (i.e., matter) (Barad, 2007); for example, the interconnected relationship between matter inside and outside of bodies through the preconscious capacity for the body to act and be acted upon (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). 9 Land (as a term adopted by Indigenous peoples of North America [Tuck et al., 2014]) is sometimes capitalised in this book and sometimes it is not. When capitalised, I am referring to Land as a proper noun to indicate a primary relationship, and as something highly contextualised and specific to one culture, time, and place (Liboiron, 2021). A capitalised Land, therefore, extends beyond the materiality of earth, rocks, and waterways to become a spiritually infused place grounded in cultural positionings, relational, and interdependent relationships (Styres & Zinga, 2013). When land is not capitalised, I am referring to it through colonial imaginaries, in which landscapes are generalised, universalised, and seen as a blank slate for cultural inscriptions (Liboiron, 2021; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017). This same logic is applied to articulations of Country as a term adopted by Indigenous Australians (Rose, 1996), and Place as a term commonly adopted in Western perspectives, which also include the environment and the outdoors (Somerville & Green, 2015). I tackle the differences between Nature and nature in Footnote 17 of this chapter. 10 Worldviews are how we make sense of the world through our cognitive orientations, and the themes, premises, values, ethical, and philosophical systems that make our activities and habits feel normal (Wooltorton et al., 2021).

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and response-able11 to, the colonial12 realities of Canada. That is, steeped in anthropocentric (relating to dominance of the human species) and humancentric (relating to dominance of the human self) logics, my White/Western/Settler-subjectivities became starkly illuminated through assumptions that I could readily access the Land and people of Saskatchewan. Afterall, I held the necessary currency to make a new home in Saskatchewan, not out of need but out of choice and desire. This relationship was also true in my homeland. Yet as I traversed the strange and unfamiliar landscapes of Saskatchewan, I met foreign and remote parts of myself that, while buried in the subterranean of my body, were scratching to be heard. Accustomed to turbulent waters of Bass Strait, I would often peer out across the world as the roar of the crashing waves met the edges of my chaos. The Land in Saskatchewan, however, was wildly different. As the rolling, colliding, and spraying turquoise and navy-blue waters of ocean swells gave way to patchworks of greens, browns, yellows, and often frozen white vast and windswept grasslands, I experienced a landlocked anxiousness and arcane disorientation stemming from the breadth of Land that seemed to be subsumed by endless horizons and yawning skies. Without a shoreline to function as a border of my identity, the expansiveness beckoned an internal gaze to navigate my position in what seemed like the infinite middle. Feeling like I might slip away into nothingness at any moment, I searched for a foothold to ground myself and locate a sense of belonging with the Land and peoples of Saskatchewan. Yet, this sense of belonging was not without consequence. In the inbetween space of occupant and tenant, I was forced to grapple with the idea that a sense of home was not pre-given. At the same time, I became attuned to a gnawing frustration with professional practices in environmental education that over-rely upon, and over-emphasise, the concept of sustainable development. Sustainability, development, and education were consolidated in the late twentieth century through brands of environmental education known as Sustainability Education (SE) and Education for Sustainability (EfS) (Jones et al., 2010). Seeking to reimagine and reinscribe how education could effectively work to attend to global social and environmental justice, SE and EfS prioritise the development of an active, constructive, and radical citizenry in education, in which learners are not seen as docile bodies but as agents of change within reflexive and critical understandings of current ecological, political, and social systems (Sterling, 2004). Then, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as environmental education

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I adopt Haraway’s (2016) term, response-able/response-ability to account for responsibility through grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded practices of knowing/being/thinking/doing/ feeling that cultivates, maintains, and sustains affirmative relationships with Other(s), rather than responsibility taken up as an ethical principle. TallBear (2014), Todd (2016), and Liboiron (2021) also comment extensively on ideas of response-ability within relational ethics. 12 Colonial/ism is the assimilation, objectification, exploitation, and dispossession of Land and of Indigenous rights and connections to traditional territories and spiritual ontologies with Land through physical and cultural dislocation and displacement. I note that colonialism should not be thought of as a universal category enacted in the same way in every context but there are many colonialisms with different goals and strategies (Hern & Johal, 2018).

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stretched across an intergenerational and transnational stage in its global development (Payne, 2016), the Brundtland Commission signalled a shift to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and the United Nations Decade of ESD from 2005 to 2014 (Dyment & Hill, 2015; Gough & Gough, 2015). The commitment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to ESD now includes an ambitious global framework developed in Berlin in 2021 called, Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs or ESD for 2030. Aligning with the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),13 ESD for 2030 provides a roadmap that supports learners of all ages to be active contributors to peaceful and sustainable societies in promoting a sense of responsibility for the planet (UNESCO, 2021). SE, EfS, and ESD offer important ways forward for learners to develop beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviours to function as active citizens in sustainable communities (Karrow et al., 2019). However, and what will be explored throughout this book, as sustainable development becomes the metanarrative of our time, it becomes critical to ask what we want to sustain and for whom (Benessia & Funtowicz, 2015; Nelson et al., 2018). Through economic paradigms of growth that depend on techno-scientific innovation to address the planet’s precarious environmental, social, economic, cultural, and political conditions, the over-emphasis on the economic (profit) pillar within the sustainable development model is often to the detriment of the environmental (planet) and social (people) pillars (Gough, 2015; Ideland & Malmberg, 2015; Kopnina, 2018; Kopnina & Meijers, 2014). In other words, contrary to the stated objectives to conserve, recycle, and reuse, sustainable development discourses reinscribe the very consumptive capitalist values that these didactic practices purport to critique. While children might learn to become critical thinkers, they are still consuming consumers through the purchase of sustainable goods and adopting sustainable lifestyles. For example, the clothing brand, Patagonia, promotes social and environmental activism through green capitalism, in which its marketing is underpinned by the pursuit of enormous profits while urging consumers to be radically responsible. A critical perspective might suggest that active citizenship in this context continues to prioritise economic growth over social equity and environmental protection (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), because consuming differently, or going green absolves the consumer from more meaningful and relevant actions to effect social and environmental change. Further, as capitalist goals of profit are achieved, the Earth is exploited for its natural resources through colonial tactics of accumulation by dispossession of Land held by Indigenous peoples (Liboiron, 2021; Morgensen, 2009; Sonu & Snaza, 2015). Underscoring sustainable development discourses are universally integrated policies that work to homogenise and institutionalise local (Indigenous) and emplaced (situated) practices, while bringing 13

UNESCO’s SDGs include, no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, reduced inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water, life on land, peace, justice, and strong institutions, partnerships for the goals (UNESCO, 2017).

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1 Turning to Posthumanist Possibilities in Environmental Education

Indigenous ontologies14 of Land and culture under erasure in environmental education teaching and learning practices (Jickling & Wals, 2008; McKenzie et al., 2015). Further, as sustainable development discourses reinscribe the freedom to be good consumers, it is enmeshed in neoliberal ideologies that affirm staunch individualism, human exceptionalism,15 and the supremacy of humans16 over nature.17 This thingifies the Earth into something to learn about (Crinall, 2019) through policy-driven discourses of pragmatics that foreclose deep and expansive thinking/doing for the (re)imagining and (re)storying of different possibilities for different futures (Bang, 2020). Policy-driven discourses of pragmatics in this book refer to the uptake of curriculum via uncritical and rudimental teaching and learning practices. For example, sustainable development is grounded in a set of principles that emphasise teaching and learning, inter alia, as outcomes-focused (instrumentalist) rather than process-focused through attention to the lived stories and experiences of children; that stress actionable goal setting towards extrinsic (technicist) rather than intrinsic rewards or relationally derived ethics (as senses-sensing generate worldly becoming-withs); and that reduce and compartmentalise phenomena to isolated parts (mechanist) rather than situating phenomena as a part of wholistic18 systems (Steen, 2003). As a result, the field of environmental education normalises Western trajectories of deeply entrenched binary classifications19 that position the human teacher and learner (subject) as separate and detached from the Earth (object) they 14

Ontology being the form and nature of reality. By human exceptionalism, I am referring to the belief that humans are categorically or essentially different from nonhumans. 16 Human supremacy is not just about the human but refers to a paradigm of the human. Similarly, White supremacism is not only about White people but is a paradigm of Whiteness within a view of what humans should be and what humans should not be (Bang, 2020). 17 I have grappled with the politics of Nature/nature, considering that the term nature is often used interchangeably with terms such as, Country, Land, and Place, environment, and outdoors. Troubling nature as a highly contested, socially constructed concept, I draw distinctions between nature and a capitalised Nature. As per the same logics for L/land, C/country, and P/place, a capitalised Nature suggests it is highly contextualised and specific to one place, time, and culture, rather than universal as the colonial imaginary would have us think. There are also inherent tensions within ideas of nature as something separate from humans through human/nature binary classifications, in that nature is already an intrinsic and inherent part of humans, just as humans are already an intrinsic and inherent part of nature. I have also grappled with terminology and concepts relating to nonhumans, otherthan-humans, more-than-humans, which are all fraught with their own tensions. For example, as Liboiron (2021) said, calling something nonhuman is like calling women non-men. 18 I used the term holistic until very recently when I was attended an insightful webinar by Dr. Toulouse (2021). Thank you, Dr. Toulouse, for reminding me of the power of words. For example, holistic is a deficit standpoint (hole), whereas wholistic speaks to the whole. In this webinar, I also learned that humans might be called two-legged, given tensions with nonhuman, other-than-human, more-than-human as described in Footnote 17. 19 Binary classifications are historically situated, culturally located, and socially mediated descriptions that sort reality into dualistic and oppositional categories (e.g., male/female, human/nonhuman, white/racialised, coloniser/colonised, etc.). Some scholars, namely Heesoon Bai (2009), and Blenkinsop and Egan (2009) suggested that binary classifications in Western knowing can be traced back to Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. For example, in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, as presented 15

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are studying; that is, the individual is presented as separate and detached from a sense of being part of a larger global community and connection to planet Earth; and the White/Western/Settler as separate and detached from those deemed as Other(s).20

1.2 The Purpose of This Book The purpose of this book is to de/reconstruct the globalising, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial master stories in/of environmental education; the normalising habits of thought derived from, and further contributing to, anthropocentric and humancentric logics and binary classifications that suggest a human (subject) makes meaning only through the thinking mind to produce knowledge of a passive Earth (object) (Clarke & Mcphie, 2020a, 2020b; Gough, 2016; Gough & Adsit-Morris, 2020; Hart & White, 2022; Jukes, 2021; Rautio et al., 2021). Through relational and sustainable solidarities, I attend to this task through affective, vibrant, and lively materiality that reveals subjects and objects as co-existing entities (Crinall & Somerville, 2020; Myers, 2019); and shows how we, as humans, emerge in relationship with the world through dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative processes of senses-sensing (Ahenakew, 2016; Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). Following the maps of scholars in the field who have cobbled paths and trails for (re)storying environmental education (Adsit-Morris, 2017; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017; Nxumalo, 2018; Payne et al., 2018; Rautio et al., 2022), I open to possibilities for (re)defining the child with nature through the concept of childhood natures (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020; Malone et al., 2020a, 2020b; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020) and (re)configuring the natures of childhood through critical approaches to sociopolitical forces of extractive capitalism and colonial relations with Land/Country/Place (Martuwarra et al., 2022; Nelson et al., 2018; Somerville, 2015, 2020; Taylor, 2013, 2017a, 2017b; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015).

in Republic, Plato contends that thoughts and the rational mind were superior to the senses and feelings. For Plato, knowledge was based on reason and if knowledge is a justified true belief, then humans follow rules that are established through concrete and visible truths to be deemed virtuous. If humans do not follow rules as established through this all-encompassing truth, then they are not virtuous. Thus, Plato’s understanding of the world represented good/bad, truth/nontruth binaries, while also suggesting that humans are entrapped by social truths (realities) made for them. 20 Through philosophical orientations of posthumanism, the idea of Other(s) is understood as only existing in a relational capacity, rather pointing to Other(s) as something separate and discrete (Barad, 2017; Jukes et al., 2023; Riley, 2020; Riley & White, 2019; Somerville, 2020). As I hope will become more salient throughout the narratives in this book, to hold the idea of Other(s) as set within an entangled/differentiated relationship is to challenge the marginalisation, exclusion, exploitation, and dispossession of women or sexual minorities, natives and non-Europeans, and earth or animals; what Rosi Braidotti (2010) called, “the others” (p. 409).

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1 Turning to Posthumanist Possibilities in Environmental Education

To do this, I draw on a year-long collaboration with Lily,21 a Grades 4 and 5 teacher in the Saskatchewan education sector of Canada. Through our collaboration, we uncovered the master stories being told in Saskatchewan environmental education that emphasised sustainable development through the Resources and Wealth goal of the Social Studies curriculum framework while illuminating the im/possibility for other/multiple stories to be told/shared/encountered by Lily and me. As a researcher/ teacher committed to attending to a diverse community of learners (comprising children and Land), we wanted to address a wholistic, systemic, and ecological integration of Saskatchewan curriculum that prioritised teaching and learning relationships between and across disciplines. This cooperative venture led to the co-creation of a project attending to the living materiality of the Earth. We developed and implemented four multisensory researcher/teacher enactments: Mindful Walking (children were invited to move across the Land and silently map their steps in paying attention to how their body moved as part of the Land); Mapping Worlds22 (children were invited to lie on their backs with their eyes closed, and with a piece of paper on their chests/stomachs, draw the Land around them); Eco-art Installation (children were invited to forage for raw materials [e.g., twigs, decaying leaves, pine cones, feathers, etc.] and choose from a variety of cut-out words pertaining to terms and concepts of human/Earth relationships to create an eco-art installation); and Photographic Encounters (in groups of 4–5, children were given a disposable camera and invited to take photos of the Land that reflected emotions they might be feeling). As a move within, against, and beyond sustainable development’s policy-driven discourses of pragmatics, as previously described, Lily and I did not try to produce explicit learning outcomes for the children in our environmental education-type teaching practices. Rather, through speculative inquiry that refuses present systems that are imbued with anthropocentric and humancentric logics, we sought to embrace pedagogical possibilities that open environmental education to a positioning of humans as inextricably entangled with the Earth (Gough, 2016; Malone et al., 2020a, 2020b). The end goal of this book is to show that when humans are not seen as the only significant actors in the world but are entangled within a dense assemblage of kin relations with the Land (Bennett, 2010; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), existence on the planet begets response-ability to the kinds and types of worlds that are co-constituted through thinking, acting, and imagining together in situated intraactions23 with Other(s) (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021; Stengers, 2017). Thus, I depart 21

Pseudonym, as per institutional ethics underpinning my collaboration with Lily and the school community. It is important to note, however, that Lily wanted her identity disclosed as a strategy to continue building a community of practitioners that push important relational approaches forward in education. Moreover, Lily is an exceptional practitioner when it comes to organic, systemic, wholistic, and ecological learning (in environmental education and beyond), so some frustration prevails with the ‘ethics red tape’ that makes this acknowledgement difficult. 22 Mapping Worlds was inspired by Linda Knight’s, inefficient mapping practices (see: Knight, 2021). 23 Intraactions are Karen Barad’s (2007) ontological orientations of agency, in that agency is understood as distinct in relation to mutual entanglements, rather than existing as an individual element (as the term interaction would propose).

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from an understanding of myself through an independent existence set in separate and detached subjectivities to interrogate how I came into being due to my encounters with the Land and peoples of Saskatchewan and with Lily, the teacher collaborator in this project, and in conversation with environmental education pedagogies, curriculum, and discourses (Rautio, 2013). That is, I am not a passive bystander looking in on my research. Rather, through relational entanglements of singularity/plurality and individuality/collectivity (Barad, 2017), I am written into the worldmakings of this research. This is taken up in this book through Researcher Worldings,24 Research/ Teacher Worldings, and Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings. To challenge ontological positionings of the human as separate and detached from the Earth, and associated sustainable development discourses, I turned to posthumanist performativity and its associated subset of new materialism.25

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Worldings is a term I use to denote the pluralities of worldmaking practices through performative accounts of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling. As such, I am not just naming relational ethics throughout this book, but through performative accounts of worldings, I am bringing relational ethics into being. 25 I acknowledge that Indigenous scholarship has a long history of agent ontologies and ethics of earthly materiality, well before Eurocentric/continental philosophy of new materialism (see: De Line, 2016; Martin, 2017; Todd, 2016; Tuck, 2014; Watts, 2013). Further, agent ontologies are more developed in the context of Indigenous studies literature given that this lens already presumes the existence of nonhuman agency. This stands in contrast to the Eurocentric cannon of new materialism that works to justify nonhuman agency against humancentric “presumptions that objects of study are passively awaiting our discovery and description” (Rosiek et al., 2020, p. 336). In other words, nonhuman agency is taken as a given in Indigenous Knowledges, with the focus more frequently on the formation of relations with more/other-than human agents, rather than having to provide rationales for how binary classifications within human/nonhuman relationships could/ should be reconfigured. It is also important to note that new materialism has been critiqued for its lack of engagement with Indigenous scholarship, given similar agent ontologies (Coulthard, 2014; Coulthard & Simpson, 2016; Deloria, 1999; Martin, 2017; Simpson, 2017; Todd, 2014; Watts, 2013). While tensions might be inevitable given histories of European colonisation, as a White/Western Settler (3rd generation in Australia and 1st generation in Canada), it is crucial that I address ethical positions in avoiding the appropriation of Indigenous Ways of Knowing/Being, tokenistic gestures of inclusion in storytelling, and/or extraction from Indigenous scholarship. As such, the focus of this book is a (re)configuring of Western binary classifications that is made possible through posthuman performativity enacting a radical relationality to disrupt anthropocentric and humancentric logics, while also serving as an anticolonial praxis against the colonial erasure and dispossession of Land and culture (more on this in Chapter 4). I also note that Ahmed (2008) argued for new materialist scholarship to acknowledge what has come before (within Western paradigms of research), and not clear the ground in establishing new terrain. It is for these reasons that I acknowledge the posthumanist performativity and new materialism that I take up in this book, is not new, but is an expansion, or a thinking-with, the Indigenous, feminist, critical, and poststructural scholarship that precedes it.

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1.3 The Promise of Posthumanist Performativity Posthumanist performativity is grounded in, yet expands beyond, Butler’s (1993, 2007) radical rethinking of identity. In her poststructural26 accounts, Butler claimed that identity is not an essence; nor is it an inherent categorical attribute of an individual that is self-evident and pre-existing through naming (e.g., woman). Rather, identity is a reiterative doing, becoming, and performing that is made through repetitive discursive acts (in Butler’s case, acting out woman). Butler’s queer (re)configurations offered a seminal shift in the way identity is understood; however, Butler’s concept of identity is situated within anthropocentric and humancentric limits that do not account for how the body’s materiality also shapes how we understand ourselves with/in the world (Barad, 2007; Taylor, 2013). Troubling these limits, posthumanist performativity expands beyond a critique of sociocultural inscriptions of identity (how discursive structures influence and inform a person’s understanding of themselves with/in the world), to also take up the lively, vibrant materiality of matter (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, 2019). In other words, it decentres a discursive gaze focused on social dynamics to bring commensurate attention to how the body is (re)configured through the physical substance of things (materiality). Moreover, because we are living and learning with a world that is made up of Earthly materiality, we are always undergoing dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative worldmaking practices in moment-to-moment intraactions with Other(s) (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). While Butler (1993, 2007) didn’t believe identity was something static, stable, fixed, and rigid, through a focus on the materiality of things, the idea of identity shifts to notions of nomadic multiplicities of subjectivities (Braidotti, 2011). That is, as the world is no longer seen as a container for humans to act out their lives through pre-given notions of what the world is, or what the world expects us to be, a sense of self is always undergoing a dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative (re)configuration with Other(s). In short, things come into being through their relational entanglements, which means worldmaking is enacted through relational agency. Relational agency refers to modes of thinking, emotions, feelings, and actions that are derived from the bodily state organised with/through intraactions with Other(s). It does not propose that we can detach or transcend our humanness. Rather, as the human (re)emerges through complex, messy, and dynamic entanglements with Other(s), it displaces a separate and detached human to reveal humans-in-relation with each other and with broader earthly systems. For example, as I listened to the haunting call of a

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Through social revolutions of feminism, decolonisation, anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements of the 1960s, poststructuralism emerged as a school of thought that challenges the strong and pervasive hegemonic influence of the positivist science paradigm and scrutinises binary constructions of structure versus agency (Braidotti, 2013). Poststructuralism troubles social structures that inform agency in suggesting it is discourse, not the things in themselves that produces knowledge, agency, and power; what Michel Foucault famously called truth games within the Regime of Truth (Foucault, 1988).

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kêhkêhk/maanzheur di koolayvv/red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)27 outside the kitchen window on a late summer morning, it was not clear where I began, and the hawk ended. Or, as I watched the full moon juxtaposed against an eastern pink sky (shown in Fig. 1.1), it seemed my body28 and the sky might stretch out into each other through a touching in togetherness. Relational agency is relevant not only to sensational encounters, but also mundane, insignificant moments. For example, as I prepared my beloved cat’s (Felis catus) dinner each evening, I was becoming-with cat food through bodily states of sensessensing generating a physical response (gagging at the stinky fish smell) and an emotional response (love for our furry friends) within the given moment. Or, as I chopped a bright red home-grown tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) for a quick lunch, I was becoming-with knife and tomato through bodily states of senses-sensing generating a physical response (hunger pangs) and an emotional response (there’s something about the tomato which takes me to romantic imaginaries of an Italian cucina) within the given moment. Or as I read news articles that described the catastrophic bush fires raging across arid Australian landscapes, or as I watched wildlife fund videos plea to public appeal to help curb habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation in the Arctic—I was becoming-with the Anthropocene through bodily 27

When referring to place, plant, and animal species of Canada, in their first-time use in each chapter I adopt the Nêhiyawak (Plains Cree First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada), Métis/Michif (distinctive peoples encompassing Indigenous and European heritage across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, and Northwest Territories in Canada, and Montana and North Dakota in the USA), and Settler (English) terms. I grappled with this decision for some time, given the importance to trouble colonial narratives and taken for granted language use. Yet it was equally important that I maintained integrity and respect to First Canadians/Australians in avoiding cultural appropriation of their languages from Settler subjectivities. In addition to Nêhiyawak language, I also acknowledge the many different Indigenous languages spoken in Saskatchewan, including but not limited to variations of Cree dialect; for example, Nêhithawak (Woodland Cree First Nation that covers northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and Nêhinawak (Swampy Cree First Nation that covers northern Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan), and Nahkawininiwak (Saulteaux First Nation that covers Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia in Canada), Nakota (Assiniboine First Nation that covers Montana and Dakota in the USA and Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta in Canada), Dakota (Sioux First Nation that covers Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota in the USA and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada), and Lakota (Western Sioux First Nation that covers North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the USA, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada), and Denesuline (Dene or Chipewyan First Nation that covers Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories in Canada) (Heritage Centre of Cree Nations, 2022; Office of the Treaty Commissioner, 2018; Stonechild, n.d.). I still don’t know if it was the appropriate decision to include the Indigenous terms; especially since there are so many variations that could inevitably compromise accuracy. In any case, I am accountable and response-able to how this decision will produce different relationships. For all plant and animal species, I also include their scientific Latin name that categorises their genus and species. This is a strategy to highlight the ubiquity of scientific discourse in these times of Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016). 28 I meet a tricky tension here: As posthumanist performativity displaces a static, stable, fixed, and rigid identity, the idea of a me, or my, becomes muddled through entangled/differentiated subjectivities as I transform through intraactions with broader ecologies of the world. However, to dismiss the idea of my body returns me to universalising accounts of the body. Thus, I invite you, dear Reader, to consider how our bodies are individuated, but not individualised.

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Fig. 1.1 Touching the sky. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

states of senses-sensing generating a physical response (a tightening of my stomach through anxieties of climate change) and an emotional response (despair, anger, guilt, shame…and perhaps a glimmer of hope). As relational agency does not imbue the world, or Land/Country/Place/ environment/outdoors as a resource to learn about, but as a vibrant and lively co-actor that we learn, live, and become-with, the inextricable interdependence and interconnection with Other(s) is not confined to the human species but expands to include nonhuman or earthly critters (Burkitt, 2016; Grossberg, 2010; Somerville & Green, 2015). Relational agency, therefore, troubles sustainable development discourses as it breaks down the idea of how teaching and learning can imbue an autonomous, independent, self-contained, and self-determined individual with the correct knowledge for behavioural change towards more sustainable lifestyles. Alternatively, relational agency initiates a focus on response-ability to what kinds and types of stories and worldmaking practices are necessary in these times of the Anthropocene.

1.4 Book Organisation

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1.4 Book Organisation Exploring relational agency through stories imbued with biological, ethical, sociocultural, political, and ecological forces29 (material/discursivities) that emerge within, and between, intraacting a Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings, this book is guided by the provocation, How and why do material/ discursivities within, and between, intraacting Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings (re)story human/Earth relationships? This book does not intend to dismiss social and environmental crisis narratives. Rather, it seeks to expand on these narratives to include stories of discomfort and stories of amazement, wonder, and delight in illuminating lively, vibrant matter through sensory, affective engagement that conjures the grace and gift of daily life (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). This renewed worldly (re)enchantment, as Crinall and Somerville (2020) wrote, might not save the planet, but it can work to “hold a space for continuing, specific, fleeting, relational encounters for and with the abundance of the various other bodies we are and are with daily” (p. 1321). This book also does not intend to provide a critical analysis, reversing oppressions and suggesting better ways of teaching and learning in environmental education, nor does it aim to break down and resolve dominant discourse working to oppress Other(s). Rather, this book seeks to hold conflicting and contrasting stories together through a different logic that attunes and attends to what stories are gathered, used, and shared for future (re)storying and future (re)worldings (Adsit-Morris, 2017). As an ongoing inquiry into possibilities for environmental education, this book also does not intend to uncover unknown truths; nor does it seek to interpret experiences. In this way, I am not interested in linear, conclusive, or static definitions representing knowledge as fixed and stable because I am not looking for definitive solutions to problems. Alternatively, in feeling/gathering/muddling/musing/thinking/wondering, this book is a thought experiment that does not begin with logic but from a place of not knowing; from a place of response-ability to social and environmental crisis narratives in these times of the Anthropocene (Somerville, 2008). Opening to what I do not know was a rather perplexing and puzzling process, as I had to shed years upon years of educational processes that suggested learning needed to yield some form of correct answer to definitive and closed questions. Grappling with this challenge, I committed myself to opening to all possibilities in the shifting unfoldings of this book. As such, this work is the culmination of current understandings, which in no way can be rendered static, complete, nor inescapable from further in/evolutions. It is a partial knowing (Haraway, 2008), 29

By biological force, I am referring to the material instrument by which things are produced; by ethical force, I am referring to what cultures, societies, and individuals care about and the social and cultural laws/lore that govern/s behaviours; by sociocultural force, I am referring to normalising social protocols that influence and inform a person’s day-to-day experiences within broader cultural discourses; by political force, I am referring to governmentalising structures and systems that influence citizens within any given municipal, provincial, federal, and/or international jurisdiction; and by ecological force, I am referring to broader planetary processes that could be biological (with life) or non-biological (without life) in origin.

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situated within events (Fox & Alldred, 2015), and contextualised within Researcher/ Teacher/Environmental Educational Worldings (of contexts and relationships), as afforded by Lily (the teacher collaborator), the school community, the Land in Saskatchewan, and broader discourses in environmental education and Western education (Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings is shown in Fig. 1.2). This book is assembled into three interrelated and intersecting clusters, which include, Inspiring (comprising this chapter and Chap. 2), Performing (comprising Chaps. 3–6), and Becoming (comprising Chap. 7). Although each cluster and chapter appear as discrete, separate, and categorised under neat headings, the idea that these machineries of text are held together in a relational assemblage means that they form a simultaneous part and a whole (holonic) of this book. Just as this book and I wrote each other through a mutually constitutive unfolding, you (as the Reader) and I (as the Author) are also a composite of unique and different threads interwoven through a common ground of relating. This means that you are not

Researcher Worldings Exploring the (micro) political of location as Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist. Organised through journal writing, photographs, and sound recordings

Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Four multisensory researcher/teacher enactments with Grades 4 and 5 class: 'Mindful Walking,' 'Mapping Worlds,' 'Eco-art Installation,' & 'Photographic Encounters.' Organised through journal writing, photographs, sound recordings, and transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes

Researcher/Teacher Worldings Collaboration exploring historical accounts; conceptions and practices of environmental education, and conceptions of relational teaching practices in environmental education; and the potential for the future. Organised through journal writing, curriculum policy documents, teacher drawings, and transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes

Fig. 1.2 An assemblage of Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings

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separate and detached from these pages, reading them as a passive bystander looking in. Rather, you are a very part of the complex and dynamic relational assemblage of this book. As such, I hope these ideas might resonate and stretch out into you, as these ideas form new assemblages and new worlds as taken up in you and through your body. How and why might you also be a part of these stories?

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Tuck, E. (2014, April). A turn to where we already were? Settler inquiry, indigenous philosophy, and the ontological turn. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Philadelphia, PA. Tuck, E., McCoy, K., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.877708 Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research: Theory, methodology and methods. Routledge. UNESCO see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2017). Education for Sustainable Development goals: Learning objectives. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247444 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2021). UNESCO and Sustainable Development Goals. https://en.unesco.org/sustainabledevelopmentgoals Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and nonhumans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1). Wooltorton, S., Poelina, A., & Collard, L. (2021). River relationships: For the love of river. Authorea. https://doi.org/10.22541/au.162808788.80097672/v1 Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Harper One.

Chapter 2

Environmental Education in These Times of the Anthropocene

Abstract In this chapter, I show how the concept of nature has changed meanings in Western thought throughout recent history, to its position as separate from the human through Cartesian representational knowing in the seventeenth century leading to Latour’s Great Divide in the twentieth century. I then explore the evolution of environmental education, following its roots back to progressive education of the sixteenth century (and reinvigorated in the twentieth century), the nature-study movements of the early twentieth century, and the conversation movements of the 1960s. By the latter half of the twentieth century, environmental education sought to develop informed, skilled, and action-oriented citizenry towards responsible environmental behaviour (Greenwood, The Educational Researcher 34(1):71–107, 2004; Orr, Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. First Island Press, 2004), heralding the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) from 2005 to 2014. I end this chapter with an examination of ESD in the Canadian context and show how sustainable development is taken up in Grades 4 and 5 curricula in Saskatchewan. Here, I note inherent tensions in sustainable development discourses that continue to exacerbate binary classifications and the separation of the human from the Earth in environmental education. Keywords Nature · Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) · Cartesian representational knowing · Latour’s Great Divide · Human/earth separation

2.1 The Concept of Nature Meditations on the nature of nature in Western worldviews have a long history and can be traced back to Biblical times. In the myth of the Garden of Eden, God’s first nature park (Genesis 3:23–24) was a pristine garden full of everything man [sic] could need (Haraway, 2008). For the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Nature was seen as the essence of a thing that made it behave the way it did (Merchant, 1980; Winter & Koger, 2004). By the fourteenth century, in late medieval society another interpretation of nature began to emerge in response to natural disasters © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_2

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and the consequences of the Black Death throughout most of Europe. Nature was understood as a vital or inherent force that directed the world of human beings, and self, society, and the cosmos were understood as interdependent (Greenwood, 2005). At this time, the metaphor nurturing Mother was adopted to describe the cosmos as female (Howell, 1997; Merchant, 1980). By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the scientific revolution unfolded, Francis Bacon’s New Philosophy celebrated the ubiquity of mechanistic science, technology, and capitalism as necessary to master and control nature. Unlike the previous view of nature as a domestic force, Bacon viewed nature as an elusive antagonist, in which her wild, uncontrollable, violent, and chaotic dispositions were vexed, prodded, controlled, and tamed (Merchant, 2010; Roszak, 2001). Her secrets and material resources were to be exploited and extracted for the benefits of man [sic]. Through Baconian hubris, men [sic] became closer to God as the Lords and possessors of nature while women’s stories of care were subordinated (Bai, 2009; Howell, 1997). The Enlightened man believed humans should have dominion over nature; they wanted to discover unspoilt nature and at the same time improve it agriculturally or aesthetically through Western civilising and colonising processes (Greenwood, 2005; Wildcat, 2005). Crucially, it was in this time that binary classifications between mind and body, nature and culture, man and woman, thought and senses, reason and emotion were given their modern expression in the philosophical works of René Descartes signalling the beginning of Cartesian representational knowing in Western metaphysics (Jickling, 2009). In his book, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour (1993) believed that the rise of science has irrevocably changed the world in separating the human from our primitive, premodern ancestors. Latour referred to modernity’s separation of (human) culture and (nonhuman) nature as the Great Divide. But Latour claimed that modernity is caught in a double bind. Modernity has generated many entities that expand a hybridised culture/nature (climate change, for example), yet at the same time, modernity tries to maintain the purity of culture and nature by keeping them separate through binary classifications. The contradictory effect of this double bind, then, is the proliferation of culture/nature hybrids while the separation between culture and nature is kept alive. For Latour, a separate culture and nature do not exist, but are composed together to form co-created and interconnected nature-cultures; thinking otherwise, in his view, propagates a delusional Great Divide. So, reader, you may be wondering what these shifting meanings of nature have to do with my project. I would say everything! The Great Divide, and binaries classifications associated with it, have, and continue to shape Western worldviews in just about every sphere of our intellectual, cultural, social, political, and cultural lives. Not surprisingly, this is true for scholars and educators who are charged with the responsibility of developing curriculum in environmental education: What should students learn about the environment? and how should they learn it? are foundational questions. To answer these questions, these practitioners critically examine the underlying values that often form part of the hidden curriculum. Ideas about environmental education do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by the larger cultural, social, political, and economic context. Since the 1970s, with the growing awareness of environmental issues, governments and non-governmental organisations have

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been developing frameworks and setting goals for sustainable development. These ideas and practices have filtered down from the global, to the national, and provincial levels and in conversation with government policy-makers. Ultimately, some of these concepts have been incorporated into government curriculum goals, while others have been modified or rejected.

2.2 Evolution of Environmental Education Modern-day iterations of environmental education are a confluence of articulations and contributions from environmental activists, ecologists, conservationists, biologists, environmental scientists, outdoor educators, and geographers. Its roots can be found in progressive education movements beginning with the 1763 publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Emile. In this book, Rousseau proclaimed that nature is the child’s best teacher through its capacity to activate their natural interests and curiosity. This idea was taken up in the nineteenth century by German pedagogue, Friedrich Froebel, who created the children’s garden, or kindergarten, to promote child-centred and first-hand experiences that connected learning with nature (Cutter-Mackenzie et al., 2014; Malone et al., 2020). In the mid-twentieth century, renowned educator, John Dewey, also championed progressive education. In his 1938 book, Experience and Education, Dewey (1997 [1938]) called for an education that prioritised the organic connection between personal experience and education. Dewey believed experiencing a lived connection with the world through experiential approaches in the local environment would enhance student’s learning (Gwekwerere, 2019; Taylor, 2013). Environmental education also was influenced by the nature-study movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. For example, Scottish biologist Sir Patrick Geddes connected the quality of education with the quality of the environment through a focus on education of the whole person that brought learners in direct contact with the environment (Palmer, 1998). Then, in the social revolutions of 1960s, the conservation movement gained momentum with Rachel Carson’s (2002 [1962]) profoundly influential book, Silent Spring. Its publication was a global wakeup call for burgeoning worldwide environmental catastrophe. In response, non-governmental and governmental organisations at the global, national, and local levels began to formulate environmental education policy. At the 1968 Biosphere conference in Paris, France, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN, now known as the World Conservation Union) created national organisations to establish environmental education curriculum materials and provide technical training to enhance awareness of global environmental problems (Gough & Gough, 2015). With growing awareness of the deleterious impacts of techno-industrial progress on the health of human and nonhuman communities, environmental education was first conceived as a practice to develop informed, skilled, and action-oriented citizenry towards

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responsible environmental behaviour (Greenwood, 2004; Orr, 2004). Environmental education was guided by the belief that if human actors pursued their enlightened self-interests in understanding and appreciating the environment through direct experiences, then rational behaviour towards sustainable living would be sure to follow (Gough, 2012; Pavlova, 2013; Stevenson, 2007). Thus, in the 1970s, environmental education emphasised personal and social development in relationship to the environment through education in, about, and for the environment (Lane et al., 1995; Lucas, 1973; Palmer, 1998). In 1970, the IUCN provided a classic definition of environmental education: the process of recognizing values and clarifying concepts in order to develop skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate the inter-relatedness among man [sic], his culture, and his biophysical surroundings. Environmental education also entails practice in decision-making and self-formulation of a code of behaviour about issues concerning environmental quality. (Palmer, 1998, p. 7)

In 1972, Stockholm, Sweden, the IUCN recognised the importance of immersing young people in environmental education, leading to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UNESCO/UNEP International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) (Palmer, 1998). Since the goal was to help young people create new patterns of behaviour for the benefits of the greater society, IEEP sought to foster clear awareness of, and concern about economic, social, political, and ecological interdependence in urban and rural areas (Union of International Associations, 2022). As environmental education gained momentum on a global scale, IEEP produced the first intergovernmental statement in 1975, known as The Belgrade Charter— A Global Framework for Environmental Education. This document was followed by the Tbilisi Declaration developed by UNESCO in cooperation with UNEP at the first intergovernmental conference on environmental education in 1977, in Tbilisi, Georgia (Marcinkowski, 2010). As a result, the environmental education field expanded to include a concern for the development of economic, social, political, cultural-historical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions within human/nature relationships (Pavlova, 2013). This statement was the beginning of direct links being made amongst sustainability, development, and education. These ideas were consolidated through Agenda 21 developed at the 1992 UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, n.d.). As a comprehensive plan to build global partnerships to improve human lives and protect the environment, Agenda 21 was actualised through the programme headings of Sustainability Education (SE) and Education for Sustainability (EfS). Heralding the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development from 2005 to 2014, the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) was established. Focused on the need for education to reflect the economic and social needs of youth, ESD sought to incorporate concepts of environmental awareness and sustainable development throughout the curricula, expand vocational training, and implement innovative methods aimed at increasing practical skills such as environmental scouting (UNESCO, 2017).

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2015 was a landmark year for international policy shaping in environmental education, leading to the adoption of several major agreements including: the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development, Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. From 2015 to 2019, the Global Action Programme (GAP) on ESD was established as a vision put forward by the UN’s Decade of ESD to continue the work towards positive societal transformation. As an ESD scale-up programme, GAP focused on integrating sustainable development into education and integrating education into sustainable development. Its two overarching objectives were designed to: 1. Reorient education and learning so that everyone had an opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes that empower them to contribute to sustainable development. 2. Strengthen education and learning in all agendas, programmes, and activities that promote sustainable development (One Planet Network, 2022). UNESCO’s commitment to ESD now includes the global framework called, Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs or ESD for 2030, in which seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (as highlighted in the Chapter 1) are positioned through an interrelated focus on the 5 Ps: • People refers to the world’s determination to end poverty and hunger. • Planet refers to protecting the planet for present and future generations considering climate change. • Prosperity refers to aims that ensure all humans enjoy fulfilling lives. • Peace refers to goals to foster just and inclusive societies. • Partnerships refers to a global solidarity that crosses geographies and sectors (Brown & Rasmussen, 2019). The 5Ps are important to the SDGs, as a focus on people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnerships positions humanity in a meaningful way to respond to the most pervasive global threats and injustices to future generations that include climate change, biodiversity collapse, mass migration, and food and water shortages (Hopkins & Kohl, 2019).

2.3 Education for Sustainable Development in the Canadian Context In 1990, the federal government established the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which included a task force dedicated to education. This led to the formation of the Talloires Declaration (University Leaders for a Sustainable Future). As a result, sixteen universities committed to addressing sustainable development in postsecondary education by signing the Halifax Declaration and Action

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Plan in 1991 (Elliott & Inwood, 2019). Simultaneously, two non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF)1 and the Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication (EECOM)2 formed in 1991 and 1993, respectively, to actualise commitments to ESD. The Council of Ministers for Education Canada (CMEC)3 also has produced several documents relating to ESD recommendations for Canadian education. For example, in 2000, CMEC published Educating for Sustainability: The Status of Sustainable Development Education in Canada (CMEC, 2007, 2010); and as a strategy to enhance Canada’s education systems, CMEC included ESD as one of the key activity areas in Learn Canada, 2020. However, there are no formal educational frameworks that sanction provinces/ territories to engage with these recommendations. Although education played a key role in the sustainable development agenda, the Canadian government in 2005 surmised that the attention of the federal government should address practical sustainable development strategies and raise public awareness. The focus of the federal government turned to convincing individuals of the need for sustainable development, which in turn would lead to a willingness to alter their own behaviour accordingly (Government of Canada, 2005; Nazir et al., 2009). In 2008, the Canadian government implemented the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy (FSDS) through the Federal Sustainable Development Act. Under this legislation, the principles of sustainable development are based on: (a) An efficient use of natural, social, and economic resources through integrated environmental, economic, and social factors in governmental decision-making. (b) Intergenerational equity, in which the needs of the present are met without compromising the needs of future generations. (c) Accountability and public engagement through openness and transparency. (d) The involvement of Aboriginal peoples and their traditional knowledge and connection to Canada’s lands and waters. (e) Collaboration in the pursuit of common objectives. (f) Through a results and delivery approach, measurable targets are met through key indicators reporting on progress (Government of Canada, 2022). ESD also was promoted in the province Saskatchewan. In the 2009/2010 annual plan, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education prioritised environment, conservation, and sustainability through K-12 (Kindergarten to Grade 12) curricula. In the 1

Through a focus on key sustainable development issues (e.g., climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, poverty reduction, and sustainable consumption), LSF promotes the role of education to empower children and youth with the knowledge, skills, values, perspectives, and practices towards sustainable communities and sustainable futures (LSF, n.d.). 2 Extending beyond its affiliation with the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE), EECOM seeks to develop a more concerted effort to environmental education in striving to promote environmental literacy for Canadians through engaged environmental stewardship for a healthy, sustainable future (EECOM, 2015–2019). 3 CMEC was formed in 1967 to provide a forum for provincial and territorial education ministers to have a national voice on prominent issues. This is particularly important for Canada given that education policy is provincially and territorially mandated (Nazir et al., 2009).

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more recent 2020–2021 plan, policy has highlighted government goals pertaining to a strong economy, strong communities, and strong families (particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic (Government of Saskatchewan, n.d.). In Saskatchewan, a regional uptake of ESD is coordinated by the Regional Centre of Expertise (RCE). Located in the province’s capital, Regina, the RCE seeks to promote ESD in Saskatchewan and around the globe through alignment with the UN’s Education for All (RCE, 2022). Environmental education for Grades 4 and 5 in Saskatchewan is currently taken up through sustainable development in the Resources and Wealth (RW) goal4 of the Social Studies curriculum. This framework seeks to develop student’s sense of self as active participants in their world (personal, local, national, and global) through the study of people and their relationships with their social, physical, and technological environments. The Social Studies curriculum in Grade 4 focuses upon the historical, cultural, geographic, economic, and contemporary societal perspectives within the province of Saskatchewan while in Grade 5, the emphasis is broadened to the Canadian experience (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010a, 2010b). The Saskatchewan Social Studies curriculum is organised around three pillars of Broad Areas of Learning: • Lifelong Learners encourages students to develop a natural curious about their world to build a positive disposition towards learning. • Sense of Self, Community, and Place encourages students to develop a keen awareness of a pluralistic society with different worldviews, and the capacity to think critically about contemporary and historical ideas, events, and issues from diverse perspectives. • Engaged Citizens encourages students to develop values and attitudes, knowledge and understanding, and skills and processes that support active and responsible citizenship that contributes to the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of local, national, and global communities (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010a, 2010b). Table 2.1 shows the specific aims and goals of Grades 4 and 5 Social Studies curriculum and learning outcomes of the Resources and Wealth goal. Table 2.1 shows that the Resources and Wealth goal is focused on economic and sociocultural aspects of inquiry. Further, the environment is depicted as something that challenges humanity in the Grade 4 curriculum and something to be managed in the Grade 5 curriculum. As global sustainable development discourses

4

While I am attempting to offer a mere descriptive account of environmental education in Saskatchewan curriculum policy, sustainability, global warming, and climate change are, indeed, geopolitical and political issues (Braidotti, 2019). Thus, I cannot turn away from a critical account of this positioning, which is to say that environmental education in mainstream Saskatchewan curriculum is currently steeped in neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial ideologies. I will note with interest, however, that environmental education is also taken up through specialist Grade 8 programs, Eco-Justice, Eco-Quest, and Let’s Lead/N¯ık¯an¯et¯an, the Grade 9 Off the Grid program, and the Grade 11 Outdoor School program; programs that are out of the scope of this book.

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Aims/Goals

Table 2.1 Aims and goals of Grades 4 and 5 Social Studies curriculum and learning outcomes of the Resources and Wealth goal (Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010a, 2010b) Examine various worldviews about the use and distribution of resources and wealth in relation to the needs of individuals, communities, nations, and the natural environment, and contribute to sustainable development

Learning Outcomes

Grade 4 RW4.1 Analyze the strategies Saskatchewan people have developed to meet the challenges presented by the natural environment RW4.2 Investigate the importance of agriculture to the economy and culture of Saskatchewan

Grade 5 RW5.1 Explain the importance of sustainable management of the environment to Canada's future RW5.2 Hypothesize about economic changes that Canada may experience in the future

RW4.3 Assess the impact of Saskatchewan resources and technological innovations on the provincial, national, and global communities

stretch, reach, and firmly plant in Saskatchewan curriculum frameworks, environmental education is grounded in the prevailing idea that economic growth and the rational, secular pursuit of techno-scientific innovations can provide solutions to global socioecological crises narratives. This strategy encompasses utilitarian values, driven by unsustainable consumerism, commercialisation, and ecological modernisation (González-Gaudiano, 2005; González-Gaudiano & Buenfil-Burgos, 2009; Pavlova, 2013); strategies endemic in Western education models prioritise objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, achievement, and performance within liberal, capitalist notions of community, often without collective responsibility. In this instance, human life is distilled into economic models rather than kin relations (Bang, 2020; Hart, 2002; Sauvé et al., 2005) and human bodies are separated from nature as the environment becomes a resource to learn about, and perhaps even something to grapple with and control (Bell & Russell, 2000; Kopnina, 2012). Moreover, global sustainable development policies are interpreted differently and their uptake at the national and local levels is filtered through complex political agendas (Hursh et al., 2015; Kopnina, 2012, 2015; McKenzie, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2015). This problem is particularly apparent in Canada where education is the responsibility of ten provinces and three territories, and curriculum goals must consider its vast and diverse geopolitical landscapes with varying historical, cultural, and linguistic affordances (Nazir et al., 2009). But what if there was a different way to understand human relationships with Earth? What if, environmental education could be a site in which learners had the opportunity to delve into global socioecological crises narratives, as positioned within the reaches of each person’s response-ability. Not through the lens of staunch individualism as presented by sustainability discourses but through individual accountability, obligation, and response-ability to enact good relations with all Other(s). What happens if, and when, we are overwhelmed by despair, guilt, anger—or even apathy and indifference set in—when we realise that socioecological crises narratives, threats, and injustices are too big, too far gone, and not possible to be reconciled

References

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at the individual micro-political level (Shiva, 2008)? Moreover, as sustainable development agendas emphasise individual empowerment as autonomously established under the right conditions of teaching and learning, what happens when the motivations for achieving/obtaining agency are stifled, arrested, and distorted because social arrangements do not facilitate agency to be actively cultivated by any one individual or groups of people? I certainly do not propose to have the answers to these wicked problems in this book. Nor do I propose that we can overturn centuries of thought that separate humans from nature, what Latour (1993) referred to as the Great Divide. I also cannot negate the ubiquity of sustainable development in modern-day iterations of environmental education which is our present reality in Saskatchewan curriculum and as evident in the context of Western education models throughout the world. Yet understanding that we, as humans, are not separate and detached from socioecological crisis narratives; nor are we outside of globalised and neoliberal structures of extractive capitalism and colonial relations with Land, the project of this book is to cast a critical lens upon human exceptionalism and supremacism that runs rampant in sustainable development discourses of environmental education in Saskatchewan. In what follows, I look for openings within the performances of Researcher/Teacher/ Environmental Education Worldings to deconstruct my own anthropocentric and humancentric positionings, environmental education pedagogy and curriculum, and broader Western education models that perpetuate schooling as a training ground for children to become active participants in the global economic wheelhouse. The effort here is to reconstruct the nature of the human in all its different constitutions and worldly relations in generating different lines of flight towards new stories, new worldings, and new assemblages in/for environmental education.

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Kopnina, H. (2012). Education for sustainable development (ESD): The turn away from ‘environment’ in environmental education? Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 699–717. https:/ /doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.658028 Kopnina, H. (2015). Neoliberalism, pluralism and environmental education: The call for radical reorientation. Environmental Development, 15, 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2015. 03.005 Lane, J., Wilke, R., Champeau, R., & Sivek, D. (1995). Strengths and weaknesses of teacher environmental education preparation in Wisconsin. Journal of Environmental Education, 27(1), 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.1995.9941970 Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Learning for a Sustainable Future. (n.d.). About us. https://lsf-lst.ca/about/ LSF see Learning for a Sustainable Future. Lucas, A. M. (1973). Environment and environmental education: Conceptual issues and curriculum implications (PhD thesis, Ohio State University, OH). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED0 68371.pdf Malone, K., Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2020). Theorising posthuman childhood studies. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5 Marcinkowski, T. (2010). Contemporary challenges and opportunities in environmental education: Where are we headed and what deserves our attention? Journal of Environmental Education, 41(1), 34–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958960903210015 McKenzie, M. (2012). Education for Y’all: Global neoliberalism and the case for a politics of scale in sustainability education policy. Policy Futures in Education, 10(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/ 10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.165 McKenzie, M., Bieler, A., & McNeil, R. (2015). Education policy mobility: Reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 319–337. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13504622.2014.993934 Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology and the scientific revolution. Harper. Merchant, C. (2010, May 4). Environmentalism: From the control of nature to partnership. University of California Bernard Moses Lecture. https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/envhist/Moses.pdf Nazir, J., Pedretti, E., Wallace, J., Montemurro, D., & Inwood, H. (2009). Climate change and sustainable development: The response from education, the Canadian perspective. International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes (IALEI). https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu One Planet Network. (2022). Global Action Programme (GAP) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). https://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/knowledge-centre/projects/global-act ion-programme-gap-education-sustainable-development-esd-0 Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. First Island Press. Palmer, J. (1998). Environmental education in the 21st Century: Theory, practice, progress and promise. Routledge. Pavlova, M. (2013). Towards using transformative education as a benchmark for clarifying differences and similarities between environmental education and education for sustainable development. Environment Education Research, 19(5), 656–672. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622. 2012.736476 RCE see Regional Centre of Expertise. Regional Centre of Expertise. (2022). RCE Saskatchewan. https://saskrce.ca/ Roszak, T. (2001). The voice of the earth: An exploration of eco-psychology. Phanes Press. Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2010a). Saskatchewan curriculum: Social studies 4. https:/ /curriculum.gov.sk.ca/bbcswebdav/library/curricula/English/Social_Studies/Social_Studies_E ducation_4_2010a.pdf Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2010b). Saskatchewan curriculum: Social studies 5. https:/ /curriculum.gov.sk.ca/bbcswebdav/library/curricula/English/Social_Studies/Social_Studies_E ducation_5_2010b.pdf

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Sauvé, L., Brunelle, R., & Berryman, T. (2005). Influence of the globalized and globalizingsustainable development framework on national policies related to environmental education. Policy Futures in Education, 3(3), 271–283. Shiva, V. (2008). Soil not oil: Environmental justice in an age of climate crisis. South End Press. Stevenson, R. B. (2007). Schooling and environmental education: Contradictions in purpose and practice. Environmental Education Research, 13(2), 139–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/135046 20701295726 Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. The Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication. (2015–2019). Welcome—EECOM. https://eecom.org/ UNESCO see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Union of International Associations. (2022). UNESCO/UNEP International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP). https://uia.org/s/or/en/1100055846 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (n.d.). Agenda 21. https://sustainabled evelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agenda21 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2017). ESD for 2030: What’s next for Education for Sustainable Development? https://en.unesco.org/news/esd-2030-whatsnext-education-sustainable-development Wildcat, D. R. (2005). Indigenizing the future: Why we must think spatially in the twenty-first Century. American Studies, 36(3–4), 417–440. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40643906 Winter, D. D., & Koger, S. (2004). The psychology of environmental problems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

Cluster Two: Performing

Chapter 3

Researcher Worldings: Lady/Backpacker Storytelling

Abstract This chapter is about edge places and the situational structures of knowing/ being/thinking/doing/feeling from Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist subjectivities (Braidotti in Metamorphosis: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Polity Press, 2002). Growing up on the shores of the Bass Strait oceanscape, I explore how I negotiated my gender as female, not always fitting in within the androcentric (male-centred) context of surfing in Australia. Then, (im)migrating from Australia to Canada as an adult and beginning postgraduate studies, I immersed myself in Barad’s (Barad in Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, 2007) agential realism and cartographic and diffractive storytelling, and since then, my views of the world have never been the same. Agential realism helped me to live with the tensions inherent in the diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting White/ Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist subjectivities. Learning with the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River, I show how I dwelled in the middle space of these subjectivities, moving between categories, boundaries, and borders like the ecologically embedded, ecotone. Keywords Research apparatus · Cartographic knowledge practices · Agential realism · Figurations · Ecotone · Diffraction

3.1 Researcher Worldings Apparatus The Research/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings that I explore throughout the next four chapters of this book are all set within their own apparatus. Apparatuses act as boundary-making practices for data collection working to identify specific methods used. Yet apparatuses do not probe the sociomaterial context towards a I grappled with whether I should use italics to denote a change in voice between academic scholarship and personal reflection through these moments of rupture. Taking up Lisa Mazzei (2016) articulations of voice to (re)imagine voice as an ontological unit that is not linked to the I of a humanist subject, there is no longer a voice, only voice. As such, I decided not to use italics. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_3

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deterministic outcome but are the various, plural, and diverging characters of material/discursive practices within any given context. Due to the uptake of materiality in apparatuses, therefore, I do not stand independently outside the apparatus intervening in its workings; thus, I am consequently written into these worldings (Mazzei, 2016). As Barad (2007) wrote: humans do not merely assemble different apparatuses for satisfying particular knowledge projects; humans are part of the configuration or ongoing reconfiguration of the world—that is they/we too are phenomena. In other words, humans (like other parts of nature) are of the world, not in the world, and surely not outside of it looking in. (p. 206)

So, to begin a (re)storying of human/Earth relationships, it is important that I can work to understand how my own subjectivities as a Female/White/Western/Settler/ Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist, amongst an array of other subjectivities, are implicated in this (re)storying. As such, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the productive (potential) and restrictive (potestas) forces that pull (with) and push (against) different lines of flight generating different assemblages and worldings (Braidotti, 2013; Massumi, 2015; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). First, I grapple with female subjectivities, and how my gendered self was constrained and restricted within the androcentric (male-centred) context of surfing along the shorelines of Bass Strait, Australia. Then as an adult taking up postgraduate studies and posthumanist and new materialist scholarship within my doctoral studies, I show how Barad’s (2007) agential realism helped me to deconstruct a separation between the categories of things through vitalist ethics. As I (im)migrated to Saskatchewan, Canada, agential realism also helped me to grapple with diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist subjectivities. Sharing my lived stories from my positionality, I show how dwelling in the middle space between the categories of things provides an important way forward for socioecological justice in these times of the Anthropocene.

3.2 Edge Places As a teenager, I always preferred to be moving between the sand and sea of Boon wurrung Country in south-eastern Australia. I remember wild winter days, whipping wind tearing at my jacket, and the thundering shore-breakers crashing and tumbling forth to greet me. I would stand on rain-drenched rolling shorelines and fix my gaze over jagged and turbulent gun-metal grey horizons. There was a whole world out there. I would trail rain-pegged golden dunes and notice hooded dotterel (plover-Thinornis rubricollis) nests amongst the coastal heathlands, before returning to the edges of the shoreline to not encroach too deeply into their territory. In the summer, deep bottle-green seas transformed to a tropical aqua. The waves curled softly, bringing forth whips of salt air along with scents of sunscreen that clung to sunburned skin. As the waves peeled forward, they were laced peacefully with white fringes of seafoam. It was hard to believe they could ever crash violently from ten feet

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peaks, tugged by the crescendo of a swirling storm. Summer was a different time. The world seemed to move in slow motion; even the marauding gulls full of beach-goer’s left-over fish and chips hung in the indigo skyline at dusk. I was always mystified by the changing colours, watching, witnessing, waiting, as the water danced with the sky’s moods. I wondered what would happen next since nothing in this Place along the edges of Bass Strait seemed to stay the same for long. It was, after all, an edge Place; susceptible to dynamic change and transformation from both the salty tides ebbing, flowing, crashing, collapsing and the terrestrial landscapes of rock pools and clinging Neptune’s Necklace (Hormosira banksia), undulating sand dunes full of kidney weed (Dichondra repens) and marram grass (Ammophila arenaria), and the bitumen car park that was usually in overflow with surfboard-packed utes from December to March. Resonating with the transitional nature of the tides, the dunes, and the summertime visitors, the shifts upon this edge Place always brought a sense of rich contentment to a turbulent teenage body. These moments of pleasure were especially important when I seemed to meet the limits of myself gendered as female, signified by my choice to wear the boys’ uniform to school because it was more comfortable! I came to this realization in the summer of my fifteenth birthday when I went surfing with my friend one day after school. Paddling out through the rolling waves, somewhat clumsily but with full of enthusiasm, I knew I didn’t belong; or more accurately I didn’t fit the straitjacket of girl/woman, nor was I allowed to don the mantle of male privilege. Colloquially, us girls were known as Skegs, which meant someone who pretends to be into surfing signalled by their apparel and certain surfy attitudes. But what calling us Skegs really meant, was that our participation in surfing could never be as authentic (i.e., read masculine) as it was for the boys. What was open to me was the lady identity that did not involve surfing. But, as the borders of gender identity began to close in on me, I wasn’t sure that I was performing lady well enough. Instead, relegated to the shores, I was more accepted as a bikinied clad onlooker, as a supporter of the boys who could fulfil their manly pursuits of adrenalin pumping adventure. As a result, I always felt on (the) edge. I sought refuge in the windswept beaches of this wild, edge Place. Looking out across the packet of waves responding to wind and water currents, sandbars, troughs, and rock obstacles, I marvelled as the water crashed and thrashed forward, and then, without warning, suddenly change direction. Clashing with retreating turbulent water, and then conjoining together again, the waves synergistically created new paths of least resistance. This messy and violent display of commotion and chaos was governed by the gravitational powers of lunar cycles. Yet as the waves forged forward, they showed that change was not only okay, but inevitable. While I didn’t know this as a teenager, I tell you now because these were the first moments that I sensed my body’s porous boundaries as I seemingly merged with the ocean. Melding with its cacophony of colours, sounds, smells, and shifting sands, now as an adult, I understand how the ocean was the pulse firing new understandings of myself as something of the world. Through its dynamic flow of tides and sand dune

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drifts, the oceanscape taught me ways of embodying the always changing and transitional nature of things. It was these experiences as a teenager that led me to assume ecofeminist approaches through Narrative Inquiry in my Masters research in 2012. Seeking to trouble androcentric (male-centred) and adventure hegemonies in Australian Outdoor & Environmental Studies, I explored environmental ethics through mindfulness activities with Grade 10 students during 5-day hiking expedition. Yet in this study, I met the limits of anthropocentrism and humancentrism that position the human species as superior to nature (plants, animals, energies) and the White/ Western human as superior to all others (Indigenous, People of Colour, Minority Ethnic, etc.) (Rosiek & Snyder, 2020). Engaging with Jo-Ann Archibald’s (2008) Indigenous storywork, which resonated with narrativity and posthumanism through storytelling with other-than-human agencies, I began the turn from the anthropocentric and humancentric undertows of narrative inquiry to explore agent ontologies and ethics of earthly materiality within postqualitative (e.g., Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre et al., 2016), posthumanist (e.g., Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Haraway, 2016), new materialist (e.g., Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012), and Deleuzo and Guattarian (1987, 1994) scholarship.1 ,2 This is not to say that the stories from my Masters research3 were no longer relevant or meaningful to such posthumanist turn; but they were a lively, vibrant part of the new stories that eventually evolved from my thinking in, and with, the posthumanist scholarly context of this book. In fact, as stories reach into rich pasts, they sustain thick presents as the stories continue to shape me as I shape them (Haraway, 2016; Rosiek & Snyder, 2020). Thus, stories of the past are never undone or erased but expanded upon through other stories that generate different trajectories of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling. Crucially, if I am becoming-with my stories through entanglement with the phenomenon in the stories, then I have a response-ability to what the story is doing. As such, relating, knowing, thinking, worlding, and telling stories with/through other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinking, and yearnings, stories from my Masters research are indeed an absent presence in the stories of posthumanist performativity in this book that seek to enact an ethical and political project in challenging the status quo of social 1

(Re)Turning to Footnote 25 of Chapter 1, I explain why I take up scholarship that originates from the Eurocentric cannon as a White/Western/Settler researcher, to not appropriate or extract from Indigenous scholarship that runs parallel, but is not always commensurate with, posthumanism and new materialism (Rosiek et al., 2020). 2 I note that throughout this book I often couch approaches of posthumanism/new materialism from Baradian (science) and Deleuzian (humanities) together. Yet I emphasise that they are approaches marked by patterns of difference and that they are not always commensurate with each other. Without intending to conflate these two different approaches to understanding the world, my intentions are productive in using them together through a diffractive methodology (more on this later in the chapter). Putting Barad and Deleuze in conversation with each other does not mean that can be compared or contrasted through binary classifications that separate them in oppositional and dualistic difference but read through each other in a relational way (Murris & Bozalek, 2019). 3 To see these stories shown as a ‘Results Chapter’ in a Pathbrite Portfolio, please visit: https://pat hbrite.com/portfolio/Ph6tFPxKw/chapter-4-a-storied-landscape.

3.3 Introducing Agential Realism

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constructs and power relations (Haraway, 2016; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017). It is not intended that the stories presented in this book provide a catharsis or cure for socioecological injustices and threats in these times of the Anthropocene; nor do I seek to enact self-reflexivity to legitimise my own preconceived notions and biases (Clough, 2002; Pillow, 2003). Rather, to critically understand the (often uncomfortable) implications of my beliefs, values, and attitudes (worldviews) derived from my subjectivities as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist, storytelling in this book is taken up as a method to speak to the heart of social consciousness; to reveal radical, moral, and political phenomena through the discursive/material entanglements emerging in the situated context of this work. As I began to thread stories from past, present, and still possible futures as relevant to my Masters and doctoral research, I acknowledged that stories are implicated in a complex understanding of time, history, and futurity (Rosiek & Snyder, 2020); and thus, are very much implicated in Barad’s (2007) agential realism. And in digging with/through agential realism in commencing my doctoral studies, my world has never been the same. Suggesting a life force runs through everything, agential realism employs a vitalist ethics to establish an ecological interconnectedness amongst all earthly beings. In philosophical accounts of agential realism, worlds are composed by, and comprised of, a dynamic, continual, and reiterative co-creating and co-constituting as humans emerge in relation with Other(s) (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016). As such, agential realism refuses anthropocentric and humancentric logics and the inadvertent definition of Other(s) as separate and detached; and it rejects binary classifications that position the human (subject) as separate and detached from the world (object), or the learner (subject) as separate and detached from inquiry (object). While I would, and still do, often fall into traps of anthropocentric and humancentric thinking (old habits die hard!), agential realism was the catalyst that made the flesh of my body feel porous and not so lonely. Isolation as a human navigating impoverished socioecological systems and structures of a planet deteriorating into death and decay, seemed to shift to a bounding-in-togetherness. I understood myself as a living, breathing composite of dynamic discursive and material forces stitched together.

3.3 Introducing Agential Realism As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, the dominant philosophy that has guided Western thought is based on Cartesian representational knowing. This system is built on dualistic and hierarchical thinking that separates the individual from the object of inquiry, Cartesian representational knowing suggests that an individual can obtain knowledge when provided with the right tools for learning. Separating the knower from the known also renders the object as objective; that is, Cartesian representational knowing is produced and perceived to be universal and value-free. The power of rational knowledge is that its production and the producers who created it are erased. Seemingly neutral and free of bias, Cartesian representational knowing is deemed as legitimate, correct, or viable when compared to local, experiential knowledge, or

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the written word to the oral. Thus, Cartesian representational knowing sets up social hierarchies in which certain knowledges are considered valid, and only appropriate for, and accessible to, particular learners. Grappling with the findings of Neils Bohr’s experiments on the nature of light, Barad provided a (re)configuring of ontology (how the nature of reality is understood), epistemology (how we might go about understanding the nature of reality), and axiology (the ethics involved in understanding the nature of reality). Bohr showed that under some conditions light behaves like a particle and in other conditions it behaves like a wave. For Bohr, it was impossible to know position and momentum of matter simultaneously, given that there are no determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously. Through Bohr’s principles of positionmomentum indeterminacy, electrons are neither particles nor waves; rather they behave differently under different conditions relating to the corresponding apparatus measuring it. Drawing on these insights, in their seminal text, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Barad argued that matter and culture are not discrete entities, nor in opposition to one another, but are mutually constitutive. Proposing a new approach to empiricism, Barad contended that we don’t make sense of the world through knowledge acquisition, but through senses-sensing; we are of the world, emerging as part of the world through discursive (social) processes and materiality (nature) forming moment-to-moment worldmaking practices. Barad adopted the term agential realism to describe human agency as no longer existing as separate and discrete from matter. For Barad, human agency was not a cognitive property of the empowered human but emerges through intraactive relationships with Other(s) in any given moment. As a result, Barad argued that things are not of themselves; nor are things behind phenomena; rather things come into being through intraactions, or what Barad called, things-in-phenomena. As there are no inherent static, stable, fixed, and rigid attributes of objects, but rather, objects are materially/discursively co-constituted through relational properties; the division between the world we are trying to understand (ontology), how we might go about understanding the world (epistemology), and the ethics involved in understanding the world (axiology), fall away to reveal an ethico-onto-epistemology. This approach is different from Cartesian knowledge claims that separate the nature of reality (ontology) and our knowledge of it (epistemology). In contrast, Barad’s ethico-ontoepistemology is defined by connectivity rather than hierarchy and separation. Relationships are mutually constituted. They do not exist because we are accountable to them through specific actions (like behavioural change models within sustainable development discourses would suggest); rather, worldings are constituted by these relationships (Barad, 2007; Liboiron, 2021; Malone, 2016). Following this logic, if we are of the world through mutually created and co-constituted lived realities, then difference amongst categories, boundaries, and borders is no longer seen as dualistic and oppositional. Rather, difference is seen as affirming because through difference, the other comes into being; or in other words, identity is affirmed through difference (Braidotti, 2009).

3.4 Figurations

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Leaving the oceanscapes of Boon wurrung Country and one settler colonial society in Australia as an adult, I sought to make a new home in another colonial settler society in Canada. As I flung headfirst into Canadian ecological, political, cultural, social, and material landscapes, I was unmoored and unanchored from solid and fixed foundations of knowledge set in sameness and familiarity in Australia. While these de-attachments certainly brought internal tensions, the fact that I was living difference meant I was afforded with so many possibilities and potentialities regarding who I thought I was, or who I thought I should be, in relation to the peoples, Place, and Land of Saskatchewan. To grapple with a de-centred self and the situated perspective of living in this in-between space, I took up the concept of a figuration to understand myself as a site of material/discursive knotting where diverse material bodies and social meanings come together to co-shape worldmaking practices (Haraway, 2008b).

3.4 Figurations Figurations are not a figurative way of thinking, nor are they metaphors or ways to suggest that there is a correct, right, or universal, way of knowing/being/thinking/ doing/feeling. Rather, figurations are a highly specific living map4 that account for power relations, agency, and corporeality. Through a theoretical and political reading of the present, figurations offer a collective figure of speech through present and situated expressions. In this way, figurations are imbued with cartographic practices for knowledge production as a method to map differences between normalising and alternative stories in locating constraining and disciplining, and empowering and affirmative politics of location (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Hughes & Lury, 2013). For example, constraining and disciplining politics of location exist through gendering as female (surfing did not seem like a natural thing for me growing up as a girl in the 90s), and empowering and affirming politics of location exist through currency as a White/Western/Settler (I could travel and relocate to another country, not out of need or necessity but out of choice and desire; after all, I was referred to as an expat and not an (im)migrant). Crucially, as the questions change from descriptions of reality, within representations (e.g., mirrors of nature or culture), to doings and actions within performative accounts, cartographic mapping practices call for closer attention to the practices involved in mapmaking in acknowledging the contextual orientations of the mapmaker (aligning with storytelling in this book as an ethical and political project in this book, as I previously explored) (Boria & Rossetto, 2017). 4 Thinking-with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), I differentiate between tracing and mapping. Tracing is an essentialised, stabilised, and universal practice that reproduces the discovery and representation of a structure (of thought) through alleged competence (e.g., research findings taken up in traditional research methods). Conversely, mapping is a contingent, unpredictable, and productive performance, as maps are open, connected, detachable, and reversible with many entryways and pathways (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013). Tracings should not necessarily be abandoned but critically considered and placed on the map by the mapmaker.

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Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s (1989) carrier-bag theory, later adapted by Haraway (2016) and Adsit-Morris (2017) as Bag-lady Storytelling, I adopt the figuration of a Lady-Backpacker to cobble and stitch together stories of worldmaking practices from the (micro) politics of location as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist. These stories, however, go beyond me through the idea that we share a single worldly community based on a shared morality in efforts to compose a more liveable cosmopolitics in/for environmental education (Braidotti, 2011). Lady/Backpacker Storytelling in this chapter seeks to offer alternative stories to transmission-based and transactional views of teaching and learning common in sustainable development discourses. To begin, I enact a learning-with the South Saskatchewan River.

3.5 Learning-With the Kisiskâciwani-Sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River One of the first things I did upon arriving in Saskatchewan, was to venture to the trails by the South Saskatchewan River and go for long and exhausting runs along its winding, tree-clad paths. The South Saskatchewan River is a large, transboundary river, with its watershed spanning 146,100 km2 across Montana in the USA, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada (Wheater & Gober, 2013). At 1392 km in length, the South Saskatchewan River basin encompasses three different biogeographic realms, including the Montane Cordillera in the asinîwaciy/Rocky Mountains of Alberta, the prairies in south-eastern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, and the boreal plains in northern Saskatchewan (Canadian Council of Ecological Areas, 2004) (see Fig. 3.1). Its headwaters are formed by the junction of the ahcâpîwi-sîpiy/ Bow River and aýisiýiniw mitêwiwin sîpiy/Oldman River in the asinîwaciy/Rocky Mountains, Alberta. The South Saskatchewan River then travels north-east before its confluence with the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/North Saskatchewan River at the forks in kistapinân/Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. At this confluence, the South Saskatchewan River becomes the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/Saskatchewan River, flowing through the Saskatchewan delta and on into w¯ınip¯ek/Lake Winnipeg. It eventually drains into wînipekw (Eastern Cree Southern dialect) or wînipâkw (Eastern Cree Northern dialect)/Hudson Bay through the powinigow or powinini-gow/Nelson River (South Saskatchewan River Watershed Stewards, 2021). Along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River is kâ-misâskwatôminâhtakâhk/ Saskatoon, a city affectionately known as the Paris of the Prairies or the City of Bridges. I would often take in the idyllic skyline and watch the river slowly carve its path through the heart of the city. After the winter thaw in spring and through summer and autumn, I would see amisk/aen kaastor/beavers (Castor canadensis) (see Fig. 3.2), wâpâyôs/shoovreu/white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), kihci-niska/ zway/Canada geese (Branta canadensis), kiyâsk/aen nwayzoo di mayr/gulls (Larus canus), cahcahkiw/aen nwayzoo avik enn graan boosh/pelicans (Pelecanus), and to

3.5 Learning-With the Kisiskâciwani-Sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River

SASKATCHEWAN MANITOBA

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Lake Winnipeg

Medicine Hat

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NORTH DAKOTA

Fig. 3.1 Map of the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River basin. Source and Drawing credit Kathryn Riley

my delight, kâkwa/aen portipik/porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum). In the cold, white winter months, I would stumble upon mistâpos/aen lyayv di prayrii/white-tailed jack rabbits (Lepus townsendii), kicikîskosîs/chickadees (Poecile hudsonicus), and on the odd occasion, a pack of mêscacâkanis/aen pchi loo/coyotes (Canis latrans) wandering the frozen river. I have delighted in what E. O. Wilson has called mega-fauna, or media-popular animals; yet there are also a host of invasive pests dwelling within the South Saskatchewan riparian zone including, for example, a native beetle to East Asia, the Emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), the cloning Prussian Carp (Carassius gibelio), and non-endemic flora varieties including European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) (Meewasin Valley Authority, 2021). There was also an abundance of trees and plants lining the trails of the South Saskatchewan River including, just to name a few endemic varieties of the region: mîtos/Li Traamb/trembling aspen/white poplar (Populus tremuloides), mahihkanâhtik/li sool li loo/wolf willow (Elaeagnus commutata), akwâminakasiy/li rooz di no piyii/wild rose (Rosa acicularis), âhâsiwiminâhtik/aen naarbr si koom aen nipinet avik lii gren vyalet/creeping juniper (Juniperus horizontals), misâskwatômina/lii pwayr/saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia), maskomin/lii grenn di noor/bear berry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), sâpôminâhtik/lii groo zel/gooseberry (Ribes oxyacanthoides), and takwahiminâhtik/lii grenn/choke cherry (Prunus virginiana). Juxtaposed against romantic perceptions of a pristine, albeit urban, landscape, however, I soon learned that Saskatchewan had its own versions of socioecological crises narratives. For example, flagrant urbanisation in Saskatchewan is exerting

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Fig. 3.2 Delights of the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

heavy pressures on prairie ecosystems and native grasslands; areas that are more exposed to human impacts are also inundated with a higher proportion of invasive species. Further, due to an over-reliance on coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels, Saskatchewan’s ecological footprint is above the Canadian average with the highest greenhouse gas emission rates (City of Saskatoon, 2014; Government of Saskatchewan, 2013). Saskatchewan is also home to the largest potash5 miner, Nutrien, formally known as the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan before it amalgamated with Calgary-based Agrium in early 2018. As of December 16, 2021, Nutrien had an enterprise value of 40.34 billion US$ (Macrotrends, 2021); yet economic prosperity is often pitted against long-term social, cultural, and environmental impacts that include changes to the landscape, water contamination, excessive water consumption, and air pollution (UNEP, 2001). These issues, amongst others, culminate in the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s definitions of the South Saskatchewan River as Canada’s most threatened river 5

Extensively mined and manufactured throughout the Canadian prairies, Potash is a salt containing potassium buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface. It acts as an agricultural fertiliser to improve water retention, yield, nutrient value, taste, colour, texture, and disease resistance food crops. As Canada exports 95% of its potash to over 50 countries around the world, it is literally feeding the world (Western Potash Corp., 2018).

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(WWF, 2009), with 30% of its water drained for human use (South Saskatchewan River Watershed Stewards, 2021). Like other large-scale rivers throughout the world, the South Saskatchewan River exemplifies global water security6 challenges despite perceptions that Canada is a water-rich country. These challenges include: the provision of drinking water, with almost 50% of Saskatchewan’s provincial population relying on the South Saskatchewan River for its daily needs; the quality of drinking water for Indigenous communities7 ; balancing industrial (e.g., potash mines) and natural resource development with the needs of agriculture; the allocation of water for flood and drought management; and the mitigation of discharges from agricultural production and major cities (Strickert et al., 2016). These issues are compounded by the decline in the magnitude of river flows because of retreating glaciers in the Rocky Mountains and changing rain/snow balances. Downstream in the prairies, global warming has led to the increasing prevalence severity of floods and droughts. These changes have threatened crop production and husbandry practices, and thereby the livelihoods of farmers, as well as destroying wildlife habitat and endangering some animal species (Wheater & Gober, 2013). Given that ecosystem destruction, degradation, and fragmentation of the South Saskatchewan River Valley is occurring on many First Nations and Métis Lands, these changes are very personal for Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. Seventytwo First Nations live within Saskatchewan’s borders (including linguistic groups that were highlighted in Footnote 27 of Chapter 1). Treaties Two, Four, Five, Six, Eight, and Ten encompass the province of Saskatchewan (Government of Canada, 2010).8 Many communities rely still in whole or in part on the land for agriculture, hunting, fishing, and trapping (Strickert et al., 2016). But neoliberal and capitalist land development practices, ecological resource management, and pollution not only threaten these traditional subsistence activities, but the physical dislocation and displacement of the land is deeply implicated in the silencing and erasure of Indigenous culture, cosmologies, and spiritualities. In the face of stress and shocks, however, Indigenous communities across Saskatchewan, Canada, and throughout the world 6

As a new concept, water security has contested meaning and is subject to divergent definitions. Yet at its core, water security is assuring an available and clean water supply for humans and the environment (Strickert et al., 2016). 7 As of March 18, 2023, in Saskatchewan there are currently 183 “boiled water” advisories (the 2nd highest across provinces after British Columbia) and 6 “do not consume” advisories in Saskatchewan (the 3rd highest across provinces after Quebec and British Columbia). Monitored by Indigenous Services Canada, some of these “boiled water” advisories are also deemed long term, meaning they have been in place for more than one year, with each one of them located within Indigenous reserves (Water Today, 2022). Issues of chronic boiled water advisories are a result of a collapse in jurisdictional and institutional responsibilities for source-water protection, given that water quality on Indigenous reserves is the responsibility of the federal government. What is needed, is for federal governments to unify with local solutions and initiatives that are designed around policies adapted to local needs and perspectives (Wheater & Gober, 2013). 8 Taking place in 1876, these treaties are a formal agreement between Indigenous sovereignties and the Crown, in which both parties must fulfil obligations and expectations that guarantee a co-existence between treaty parties within mutually beneficial arrangements (Office of the treaty commissioner, 2018).

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have demonstrated unwavering resilience that has led to adaptations, persistence, and transformational responses to environmental changes (Ford et al., 2020). For example, the Indigenous-led social movement, Idle No More, commenced in 2012 amongst Treaty people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to protest the federal government’s dismantling of environmental protection laws and build a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky (Idle No More, 2020). My engagement with the Saskatchewan River revealed the complexities and layers of the meanings of the river. Water is life. The river is life. It provides drinking water and food for humans and animals alike. It is a site of wondrous beauty and potential devastation and harm. It is a source of prosperity, profit, and a dumping ground for effluent for human waste and contaminated chemicals. We humans tell different stories about the river. These are lived stories as derived from the contextualised, emplaced, and situated strengths and needs of the individual in relationship with broader ecologies of the world. For me, learning-with the South Saskatchewan River, meant opening to the complex, diverging, and converging intersections of subjectivities as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist in all their pullings (with) and pushings (against). Accustomed to salt whipping and drifting from navy and aqua blue oceanscapes, the meandering South Saskatchewan riverscape was new to me. Awash with fern and sage greens that turned into a spectrum of mud-infused browns during a summer storm, or steely grey in the depths of winter, the South Saskatchewan River was nothing like the crash and boom of chaotic ocean waves of Boon wurrung Country and Sea. I was struck by the river’s seemingly wise sense of knowing as it silently carved its way across the prairies. I began to learn about the many moods of the South Saskatchewan River. Sometimes it seemed like the river was flowing to me and sometimes it seemed like it was flowing away. But in the middle of summer when I placed my feet in its cool and crisp waters, it was flowing through me. As impermanent as the marks of Bass Strait waves on sand-sponged shorelines, I could never touch the waters of the South Saskatchewan River twice. It was always in dynamic and reiterative transition onto something different, becoming something new as it moved through other currents and across sandbars, drainpipes, rubbish, beavers, seagulls, fish, logs, twigs, leaves, stand-up paddleboards, canoes, kayaks, paddles, and pruney fingers and toes trailing its currents. As I returned to this new edge Place time and time again to dwell with its multispecies of transitional plants and animals and play along its banks and ever-changing flow, I was enacting subjectivities as an Outdoor Recreator. Yet while I enjoyed the benefits of the river’s resources for my own health, wellness, and pleasureseeking activities, this standard of living is also predicated on the exploitation of these resources. Concerned for the fragility of the South Saskatchewan ecosystem, subjectivities as an Outdoor Recreator, therefore, pushed (against) subjectivities as an Environmental Activist.9 At the same time, as a White/Western/Settler, I assumed I could 9

I am reminded of Aldo Leopold’s (1987 [1949]) striking paradox, “The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long since marred by the discords of misuse. Overgrazing first mars the plants and then the soil. Rifle, trap, and poison next deplete the larger birds and mammals;

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readily access the peoples, Place, and Land of Saskatchewan through a colonial imaginary.10 While maintaining my positionality as an Environmental Activist, I simultaneously sought to stand-with11 Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty while I recognised that I was settling on Lands with troubled histories of settler colonialism. White/Western/Settler subjectivities were literally emblazoned on my wellworn backpack that had accompanied me across many corners of the globe. Adorned with national flags from each country I had visited over the years, my cherished backpack suggested I was a nomadic free spirit; the type of person who sought opportunities for romantic wanderlust in across different cultures and landscapes. Afterall, as a true-blue Aussie, international adventure and exploration was an important rite of passage grounded in the colonial imaginary that the world was out there, across the seas, waiting to be discovered. My portable carrying device was full of tools, props, and provisions, including a passport, a visa, multiple credit cards, a laptop, an iPhone, an iPad, and a Fitbit amongst many other technological gadgets and gizmos; they, however, also me as marked by white, Western, middle-class advantages (McIntosh, 1988). Through the acute, confronting, and jolting realisation that I was indeed complicit in social and ecological injustices and threats, I was catapulted into a reckoning that sought to unsettle myself between, and across diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting subjectivities as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist. Learning to negotiate the back-slash (/) that connects (not separates) categories, I activated a crossing of categories to move into the space between boundaries and borders through the concept of the ecotone12 (Krall, 1994). Thinking-with/through ecotones helps me to do two important things in this book. It helps me to dismantle hyper-individualisation and Cartesian representational knowing, while also raising important questions about structures of power and ethics within border-making practices (Taylor et al., 2013). Just as the water then comes a park or forest with roads and tourists. Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise” (pp. 149–150). 10 According to Nxumalo and Cedillo (2017), a colonial imaginary enacts a storying of Place “as a mute site awaiting settler inscription and capitalist property-making” (p. 103). 11 This is a term from Kim TallBear (2014) that expands beyond giving back, to suggest openness and willingness to transform through co-constituted knowledge production. 12 Synonymous with ecotones is the concept of contact zones. Mary Pratt (2008) described the contact zone as alike the colonial frontier, in which a contact perspective emphasises how subjects are co-constituted with, and by, their relations. As a social space where cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, colonisers and the colonised in the contact zone are not separate and detached; but exist in co-presence with each other through interlocking understandings and practices generating a continuous (re)making-with each other as they zigzag and cut across the in-between, creative, overlapping, and multiple territories of affecting and becoming; albeit within radical asymmetrical relations of power (Land et al., 2019). As precarious, messy, and complex knottings of morethan-human, queer worldings, the space between the categories of things in the contact zone is understood as connective rather than as separative. However, this space is highly political and richly confrontational (Haraway, 2004, 2008a). Cathy Van Ingen and Joannie Halas (2006) provided an interesting article on schools as the archetype of contact zones, arguing that schools are “places where the values, ideologies and practices of cultures are brought together, often at the expense of the non-majoritarian culture” (p. 380).

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of the South Saskatchewan River meanders, falls, swirls, and collects according to its environment, I (and you!) also change through dynamic flux in constitution with our socioecological environments and contexts. Moreover, due to their ecological embeddedness, I enact a thinking-with ecotones to bring relevant and meaningful environmental education content into the fold.

3.6 Dwelling in the Middle Space of Ecotones In an ecological sense, ecotones are highly productive biological edges and places of meeting. For Florence Krall (1994), ecotones are the ecological location where diverse ways of being pulled (with) and pushed (against) each other. Called the edge effect, biotic communities of ecotones experience change more abruptly than centrally located ecosystems due to the dynamic interchange and the multitude of tensions as these diverse worlds ebb and flow. Ecotones, however, are not just the blending of two separate ecosystems, but they act as a transition zone between two or more biological communities; they not only contain species from each community, but unique new species emerge in any given ecotone. Importantly, while ecotones include the biological and physical elements of an ecosystem, ecotones also are constituted by social, cultural, economic, and political processes and relations (Krall, 1994). As a Lady-Backpacker, the concept of ecotone helped me to understand the network of relations within the ecological worlds that I inhabit. I am webbed within a complex and mutually dependent co-reality that is constituted through intersections of biological, ethical, sociocultural, political, and ecological forces (material/ discursivities). Just as ecotones are not discrete, bordered, and self-contained, I am not an isolated, independent, and autonomous individual; rather my body is continually undergoing a reiterative affected/affecting relationship with Other(s). As we engage with the world, the body becomes marked by a preconscious visceral force, or affect, that exists beneath and alongside conscious knowing and intellectual (re)cognition. Moving throughout the in-between spaces of embodied encounters, the material intensities of affect drive us towards thoughts, emotions, and movement (line of flight) as we become otherwise through the relational encounter (Pedwell & Whitehead, 2012). Affect is not to be confused with subjective feelings and emotions. Rather, bodies become marked by a preconscious visceral stirring, feelings, and emotions arise from the body state of affect (Massumi, 2015). They can motivate us to take up new pathways of many possibilities within Deleuze’s (1988) plane of immanence. Further, because affect resides within preconscious visceral forces, it is not concerned with discursive labels of right/wrong or good/bad; there are no positive or negative binaries in affect, only productive (potential) and restrictive (potestas) forces that pull (with) and push (against) the body towards different lines of flight generating different assemblages and worldings (Braidotti, 2013; Massumi, 2015; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Attending to affective materiality in worldmaking practices does not completely remove me from discursive regulation. To suggest so would indicate that sociocultural

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positionings have no influence on how I understand myself as a human in the world; as a human, I am almost certainly influenced by the culture and society in which I live. Further, I do not intend to demote rationality or objectivity; after all, I gleaned so much knowledge about the biological, ethical, sociocultural, political, and ecological aspects of the South Saskatchewan River through engagements in text to learn about these issues. Thus, working in tandem as an iterative practice, worldmaking practices are comprised of material and discursive forces. A focus on affective materiality does indeed offer a powerful lens to promote socioecological justice in these times of the Anthropocene. Through affective materiality, I do not need to reconcile the discordant and dissonant natures between subjectivities as a Female/White/Western/ Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist because as bodies connect and overlap with the materiality of the world, they are simultaneously doing something to each other. Thus, I am always implicated with Other(s), which means I am always response-able to the types and kinds of worlds that are co-constituted irrespective of the categories discursively assigned to me. Through the situated labour of affective materiality initiating a singular and dynamic act of cutting-together-apart as one, affective materiality enacts a livingwith/through Other(s), which in turn, works to dismantle Cartesian cuts of dichotomy that separate categories (Barad, 2007). In Fig. 3.3, I show how cutting-together-apart is enacted by my human body, as my feet obstruct the flow of water in the river as two opposing water currents from the river come together over my feet to form a new wave. In this example, my body is (re)constituting water currents, bringing forth new worldings, new assemblages, and new stories of water travelling within the broader systems and structures of the river. The image shown in Fig. 3.3 depicts the science of diffraction, which describes the interference and diversifying of light waves as they encounter obstacles and pass through a narrow opening: bending, spreading, merging, and overlapping towards becoming something new (Rautio, 2013). Diffraction does not refer to reflection, which results in the mirror of sameness. Rather, metaphorically, diffraction can be used to think about differences that matter in attending to a variety of agents in their crisscrossing relations to each other (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1997; Rautio, 2013). In a diffracted way of understanding, thinking, seeing, and knowing are not isolated, but rather, affected through different forces coming together (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013). Through a diffractive way of understanding, I do not know, or learn, about the South Saskatchewan River by standing at a distance but through the implicit entanglement of knower (myself), knowledge (embodied resonance), and known (South Saskatchewan River), I am becoming-otherwise; I am becoming-with the South Saskatchewan River (Haraway, 1988). Crucially, a diffractive way of understanding troubles dominant narratives in (environmental) education that suggest a learner must learn about the world in order to advance their knowledge, skills, and aptitude based on normalising and competitive benchmarks and standards, to suggest that we know because our skin has met the porosity of Other(s); and thus, through this collaborative endeavour set in coimplicated entanglements, we are at the same time a little bit more and a little bit less. If this be the case, there are no hierarchies of knowing/being/thinking/doing/

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Fig. 3.3 Cutting-together-apart. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

feeling but we are all immersed in moment-to-moment unfoldings with the world enacted from our own (micro) politics of location. In this chapter, the changing, dynamic, flowing, shifting, and transforming patterns of converging and diverging water has taught me about becoming-with. As a teenager, I dwelled in the ecotone of the Boon wurrung shorelines. Then, as an adult, dwelling in the ecotone of the South Saskatchewan River, I found new ways of knowing/ being/thinking/doing/feeling as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/ Environmental Activist. I am not a Lady/Backpacker in the static, stable, fixed, and rigid sense, but like the fluxes and flows in the always changing, dynamic, flowing, shifting, and transforming waterscapes, I am always in a state of becoming Lady/ Backpacker. From the standpoint of female subjectivities set within constraining and disciplining politics of location, there is so much beauty and freedom in this moniker! But, from the standpoint of White/Western/Settler subjectivities, I am part of the dominant category situated within empowering and affirming politics of location. And here is an ugly and abrasive rub that both benefits and harms me, and perhaps you.

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In the next chapter, I grapple with my subjectivities as a White/Western/Settler through a learning from otherness with my teacher collaborator, Lily, and how as a researcher/teacher, we learned from otherness through our co-created and co-implemented researcher/teacher enactments.

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Pratt, M. (2008). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. Routledge. Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013. 812278 Rosiek, J. L., & Snyder, J. (2020). Narrative inquiry and new materialism: Stories as (not necessarily benign) agents. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(10), 1151–1162. Rosiek, J. L., Snyder, J., & Pratt, S. L. (2020). The new materialisms and Indigenous theories of non-human agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), 331–346. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Duke University Press. South Saskatchewan River Watershed Stewards. (2021). About the South Saskatchewan River Basin. https://southsaskriverstewards.ca/south-sk-river/ St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 99–110. Strickert, G., Chun, K. P., Bradford, L., Clark, D., Gober, P., Reed, M. G., & Payton, D. (2016). Unpacking viewpoints on water security: Lessons from the South Saskatchewan River Basin. Water Policy, 18(1), 50–72. TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2). http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371 Taylor, A., Giugni, M., & Blaise, M. (2013). Haraway’s ‘bag lady story-telling’: Relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape.’ Discourse, 34(1), 48–62. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01596306.2012.698863 UNEP see United Nations Environment Programme. United Nations Environment Programme. (2001). Environmental aspects of potassium and potash mining. https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8071/-Environmental%20A spects%20of%20Phosphate%20and%20Potash%20Mining-20011385.pdf?sequence=2 Van Ingen, C., & Halas, J. (2006). Claiming space: Aboriginal students within school landscapes. Children’s Geographies, 4(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280601005856 Water Today. (2022). Advisory maps. https://www.watertoday.ca/index-wt.asp Western Potash Corp. (2018). What is potash? https://www.westernpotash.com/ Wheater, H., & Gober, P. (2013). Water security in the Canadian prairies: Science and management challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 371. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). (2009). Some Canadian rivers are at risk of drying up. https:/ /www.wwfca.org/?176681/Some-Canadian-rivers-at-risk-of-drying-up WWF see World Wide Fund for Nature.

Summer’s flourishing. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley. Today by the Summer tree, cottonlike cumulous clouds drifted by as the Land comes alive with the humming and buzzing of bumblebees, bess beetles, cicadas, and mosquitos. Chirpings of western meadow larks and song sparrows, amongst many other bird species, communicate to their mate across the spiky green and yellow fields. And the geese! Soaring overhead with their wings beating in unison, I think of Leopold’s (1987 [1949]) beautifully crafted prose that brings the (un)ethics of unbridled capitalism encroaching into the heart and soul of educational ideologies into sharp view. As Leopold states in his rhetorical question, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers” (p. 18). Watching the geese fly above in their v-formation juxtaposed against deep blue skies, each bird is relationally affected to function with response-ability in taking turns at being in the front and falling back when they are tired. I am aware that these geese are anything but reckless or foolish; they have a system in place that protects the integrity of the individual in relationship with the integrity of the collective gaggle

Chapter 4

Researcher/Teacher Worldings: Relationships with Land and Pedagogy

Abstract In this chapter, I show how I negotiated a shared space of entangled/ differentiated existence with my teacher collaborator, Lily, with Land, and with pedagogical events in the researcher/teacher enactments, Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds. Exploring how Lily and I underwent a settler reckoning with what it means to assume access to the P/places and L/lands we call home, this chapter activates an anticolonial praxis in/for environmental education (This anticolonial praxis is at the forefront of relational (re)configurations of myself as a Female/White/Western/ Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist [as I explore in this chapter] and enactments of environmental education pedagogies and curriculum policy in the researcher/teacher enactments [as I explore in Chaps. 5–7].) that relationships to, and with, Land/land begets for a White/Western/Settler researcher/teacher living, learning, researching, and teaching on Land/land with troubled histories of settler colonialism. For Lily and me, this meant grounding our environmental educationtype teaching practices within pedagogical events imbued with agentic assemblages that are relationally inclusive of all bodies (human, animal, and Earthly materialities) and discursive practices (ethical, sociocultural, and political constructions) (Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things, Duke University Press, 2010). Thus, pedagogical events opened us to relational care ethics as an ontological (re)conceptualising of how individuals are relationally positioned with broader ecologies of the world, not just as individuals in the world. Keywords Anticolonial praxis · Multispecies relations · Pedagogical events · Relational care ethics · Becoming-with · (Micro) politics of location

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_4

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4.1 Researcher/Teacher Worldings Apparatus Collaboration with Lily extended over a one-year period from May 2017–April 2018. I was introduced to Lily through relations within environmental education networks in Saskatoon; it was suggested Lily would be a good fit for my research endeavours. My collaboration with Lily sought to understand both productive (potentia) and restrictive (potestas) forces that pull (with) and push (against) Researcher/ Teacher Worldings. I had three 60–90-min conversational meetings with Lily, designed to elicit historical accounts of Lily’s childhood encounters with Land (that perhaps informed her current day teaching practices as mapped with Saskatchewan curriculum policy); conceptions of multisensory researcher/teacher enactments that we implemented with the Grades 4 and 5 class over 10 months; and whether Lily might continue to practise the researcher/teacher enactments after our collaboration. As presented in Table 4.1, the researcher/teacher enactments were called, Mindful Walking, Mapping Worlds, Eco-art Installation, and Photographic Encounters.1 While I came to these meetings with specific questions in mind, they served as more of a provocation2 for open-ended conversations. Following Honan’s (2014) descriptions of method as messy, my provocations sought to generate layered, disorderly meanings3 of Lily’s subjectivities pertaining to gender, race, class, personal biography, and other background cultural patterns that would influence and inform our researcher/teacher collaboration. As Renold and Ivinson (2014) suggested, present-moment events carry affective traces from the past. As Lily gathered and shared her stories with me, our relationship unfolded into an entangled/differentiated researcher/teacher; our individual and independent stories now included traces of each other as we were becoming-with Other(s) and becoming unfamiliar with self (Rautio, 2017; Somerville, 2007). In this chapter, I explore two of the four researcher/ 1

I introduced all the researcher/teacher enactments to Lily, garnered through professional teaching and research experiences, and through practices gleaned at various conferences. For example, in past research, I had focused on the role of mindfulness practice in a 5-day outdoor education expedition to prompt a more meaningful environmental ethic and sense of connection to Nature. In the presentday researcher/teacher enactments, however, as I was interested in bringing commensurate attention to matter, ideas of mindfulness were grounded in a material/discursive focus and, specifically, the lively, vibrant, affective pulls of the body in relationship with broader ecologies of the world; rather than a discursive focus set in what counts as socially meaningful regarding the efforts and extent of earthly transcendence generating evolved internal functioning; akin to, for example, deep ecology (I will take up a critique of deep ecology in much more detail later in this chapter, and in Chaps. 5 and 6). Embedding mindfulness practices in the researcher/teacher enactments were taken up with enthusiasm by Lily, given that so many examples of her environmental education-type teaching practices worked to facilitate a quiet engagement with Land. Thus, the first researcher/ teacher enactment, Mindful Walking, was conceived. Mapping Worlds, Eco-art Installation, and Photographic Encounters and were also similar to environmental education-type teaching practices that Lily was already engaging with the Grades 4 and 5 class. While I typically instigated the ideas within the researcher/teacher enactments, they took form and shape through our collaborative co-implementation. 2 For the full list of provocations, please see Appendix A. 3 What Haraway (2004) called, thick meanings, which are multimodal, multidisciplinary, and historically situated in their translation.

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Table 4.1 Summary of the researcher/teacher enactments Multisensory Researcher/Teacher Enactments Mindful Walking Children were invited to move out across the field and silently map their steps, paying attention to how their body moved as part of the Land

Eco-Art Installation In groups of 4–5, children were invited to forage for materials on the land (e.g., twigs, leaves, pinecones, feathers, rubbish etc.). Meeting inside, groups could choose a variety of cut-out words pertaining to human/Earth relationships to include on their Eco-Art Installation

Mapping Worlds Children were invited to lie on their backs with their eyes closed, and with a piece of paper on their chests/stomachs to map the Land around them

Photographic Encounters In groups of 4–5, children were provided a disposable camera and invited to look for examples of how Land might show them emotions that were feeling in that present moment

teacher enactments, Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds (Eco-art Installation and Photographic Encounters will be explored in Chaps. 5 and 6). However, before I recount the researcher/teacher enactments, I explore the space4 in which we conducted them, considering that discussions of space were the first of many messy and sticky knottings in our collaborative relationship. Since Lily and I grew up in two different geopolitical contexts in two different continents and hemispheres, Lily expanded my understandings of Place (and Country) to include a focus on Land, as understood by Indigenous peoples of North America. As a newcomer to Saskatchewan and as a White/Western/Settler, I had preferred the term Place because I was concerned about appropriating Indigenous ontologies of Land and culture, especially since I did not have pre-existing relationships with Indigenous community members in Saskatchewan. This is not to say that Lily wasn’t concerned about cultural appropriation; but as a self-proclaimed relational teacher committed to social and ecological justice, she adopted a deep civic engagement with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers to promote decolonising approaches in her Grades 4 and 5 teaching practices. Her vision was to create a community of learners that included the peoples and Land of Saskatchewan 4

Space is understood as something heterogeneous, relational, contingent, and active (Massey, 2006). From classical Newtonian perspectives, how we orient ourselves within the world has involved an understanding of how space and time defines us. Space has been known as a container, or the map-making process that locates us within specific coordinates in relation to the world. Similarly, time has been conceived to march along as a succession of evenly spaced individual moments, as an external parameter backgrounding the human experience. Typically, time has taken on a trajectory of continuous fashion, in which there is an origin (a beginning), and a completion (an end). Within the ethico-onto-epistemological (re)orientations of posthumanist performativity, however, affect, force, and movement travel in all directions, in which phenomena are dynamically diffracted, and thus, spatially and temporally distributed across multiple spaces and times (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). In this book, therefore, space and time are enfolded (enclosed together) within matter’s dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative becoming (Hughes & Lury, 2013).

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(transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2017). So, what would we call the space in which we conducted the researcher/teacher enactments? Place? Land? Something different? To work with/through this tension, I turned to Somerville’s (2015) methodology, Thinking through Country5 (contextualised in Australia) to locate the researcher/teacher enactments in account of Thinking through Land.

4.2 Thinking Through Land According to the Oxford English Dictionary, land refers to “The solid portion of the earth’s surface” (Oxford University Press, 2022). This definition captures its materiality, but as a noun, it signals its static, bounded, and universal nature. In contrast, land is a verb in Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being, signalling the ongoing interrelationships and interconnections of material landscapes (soil, water, plants, trees, animals) and the histories, events, kinships, and spirits (Liboiron, 2021). An Indigenous view of land is marked by the particularity and specificity of these relationships (Deloria, 1999). Land is defined through and by its material, emotional, spiritual, physical, and sensuous contours. As Liboiron (2021) wrote, “Defining Land by typing it out on a page is like defining your favourite aunt as your mother’s sister” (p. 42). Land in the North American context has the deepest possible meaning for Indigenous peoples (Coulthard, 2014). Land holds the memories, bones of the ancestors, the fire, water, earth, air, and spirit; it is an extension of the Native mind and, thus, defines Indigenous peoples (Cajete, 2000; Kimmerer, 2013). Indigenous relationships to Land contradict that of the dominant White/Western society. Embedded in capitalist and patriarchal relations, White/Western societies understand land as property, as something to be possessed, dominated, and appropriated, and thus, Indigenous views of Land, however, have been subjected to ongoing and pervasive impact of colonialism in Canada (and Australia and most of the Western world). For instance, Watts (2013), Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan, Six Nations of the Grand River, claimed that the colonial agenda has silenced and corrupted “Indigenous ways of relating to land [that] are based on an essential and literal connection to the feminine” (p. 31). Understanding that Land is one of the primary ways in which identities are formed for Indigenous peoples, Land educators call into question educational practices and theories that affirm settler occupation and 5

For Somerville, Thinking through Country simultaneously troubles the idea of a generalised knowledge of the environment and a human-centric focus on place. They show that specific material landscapes have their own life force, energies, and connections because these material landscapes embody all entities that exist within them. Thinking through Country confronts the separation of nature and culture in Western binary classifications and calls for their unification—what Somerville calls natureculture. Somerville’s work was crucial to my work with Lily because it provided an example of the ways in which teaching and learning in environmental education can indeed change the pervasive nature/culture split. Sommerville’s approach moved away from views of the world out there, as an object to learn about. Rather they called for an understanding of place to take on embodied and material engagement with the world. This approach is resonant with Indigenous cultural and spiritual ontologies of Land which are imbued with frameworks of relational reciprocity.

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the maintenance and reproduction of settler colonial projects (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; Tuck et al., 2014). Recentring Indigenous cosmologies (e.g., human/Earth relational reciprocity), Land education provides opportunities to name particular realities and corresponding ideologies missing in mainstream models of Western education (e.g., pervasive and dominant narratives of humans as separate and detached from the Earth, which simultaneously work to marginalise and subjugate Indigenous ontologies of Land and culture) (Ahenakew, 2016; Bang, 2020; Bang et al., 2014; Calderon, 2014; Wildcat et al., 2014). Central to Land education is the need for decolonising the curriculum. Yet decolonising is not a metaphor that allows for settler evasion and moves to innocence in rescuing settler futurity; nor is decolonisation Indigenous assimilation into the settler state (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Rather, within the repatriation of Indigenous life and Land, the decolonisation that I refer to here is a settler reckoning with what it means to assume access to the P/places and L/lands we call home; activating an anticolonial praxis through relational accountabilities, obligations, and responseabilities that relationships to, and with, Land/land begets for a White/Western/Settler researcher/teacher living, learning, researching, and teaching on Land/land with troubled histories of settler colonialism. That is, while decolonisation suggests an appropriation of Indigenous resurgence and survivance, an anticolonial praxis lets us standwith in the pursuit of good relations6 (Liboiron, 2021; TallBear, 2014) through praxis as the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realising, or practising a theory, lesson, or skill in an embodied way (Page, 2002). To understand the tensions between Indigenous and dominant Western approaches to Land education, let us begin with an account taken from the first researcher/teacher enactment, Mindful Walking.

4.3 Mindful Walking: A Teacher/Crow Story In one of the first conversations with Lily, she told me about Mojo,7 the âhâsiw/enn kornay/crow (Corvusbrachyrhynchos)8 that she had befriended one summer. As Lily said: 6

By good relations, I am referring to the grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded practices of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling that cultivates, maintains, and sustains affirmative relationships with Other(s), and to account for our relations when they are not good (Liboiron, 2021; TallBear, 2014). 7 The term, mojo has roots in the word, moco, meaning shaman or traditional healer in the West African language, Fulani. Mojo first appeared in the 1920s to mean magic, as spoken by the Gullah (Creole) people of South Carolina and nearby islands. 8 Demonstrating the diverse, contrasting, and often conflicting worldviews between Western and Indigenous perspectives, crows from Western perspectives are often met with a suspicious disregard, in which cultural connotations often depict them as annoying pests or birds of ill omen. For example, crows were taken up as mythical characters of death in mainstream storytelling, namely Stephen King’s, Children of the Corn in 1977, which was made into a short film titled Disciples of the Crow in 1983. In contrast, crows are prominent figures in Indigenous ontology, revered as intelligent guardians of the animate world. To illustrate this, Blue Cloud (1989) from the Mohawk Nation tells a story of the Winter Crow:

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4 Researcher/Teacher Worldings: Relationships with Land and Pedagogy I have a wild crow. His name is Mojo. Five or so years ago at the Lake, I noticed that Mojo had hurt himself. I found him in the bush. I wouldn’t let anyone kill him, because don’t you dare—he is a spirit animal too, and you’re not killing Mojo. I don’t know why I called him Mojo. The next morning, he hopped across our lot into the neighbour’s front yard and one of the dogs found him. I wailed, “Leave Mojo alone!”. Another crow sat and watched us. Then, two, then three of them came and watched the commotion. The following morning, I saw Mojo had made his way to the beach. I saw him in a low branch of a tree. I talked to him every day: “Mojo, what’s going on, man. I’ve got your back. Mojo, it’s good!” And I would say to the other crows, “Crow man, it’s good, he’s safe with me, you just stay there, and I’ll keep him safe here. You take care of him at night, I’ll take care of him during the day”. We shared responsibility. This was when I was forty, not when I was twelve, and everybody let me do it! My whole family! And then, Mojo was gone. I was writing my Masters thesis the next year and low and behold, I was sure it was Mojo. He’d come back and nested in around the trees at the Lake. The trees were like, “damn crows!” Mojo brought his family, and while I was writing on the deck, Mojo’s babies would be on the back of the chair—they’d talk with me. I would listen to them talk in different voices to their babies. They learned how to fly right in front of me. Now, every time I am out with the kids, I see Mojo. Well, not really, but this is the story that you tell. And all the kids in our class know that Mojo is around—“Look! There’s Mojo in the tree!” (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2017)

Lily’s ‘Mojo story’ shows how she engaged a human/crow relationship through a shared response-ability and multispecies taking care of (Rautio, 2017). We don’t infer that Mojo benefited directly from any intraactions with Lily (to do this is to slip back into anthropocentric and humancentric logics). From a relational agency perspective, however, the teacher/crow relationship demonstrated shared co-existences in which Lily’s subjectivities transformed to include stories of human/crow relations. And then, almost serendipitously at the beginning of the Mindful Walking researcher/teacher enactment in the Fall (Autumn) of the new school year, Lily was provided an opportunity to discuss multispecies relations when the Grades 4 and 5 class stumbled upon a decomposing kêhkêhkaen/mwaanoo/house sparrow (Passer domesticus) in the school yard. Some of the children were openly curious about this sparrow, some of them seemed indifferent, and others were clearly distressed. As Lily retrieved a newspaper to clean up its remains, I asked her why she did not discuss the topic of death with the children. I wondered whether she could draw on her stories of Mojo as a point of relational connectivity. In response, Lily was adamant that she would not delve into conversations about death because she was concerned that this could lead to discussions about religion. Since the children belonged to a I touched the frosted landscape of my windowpane and left a huge dark bird etched there. Winter’s Crow was brother to the moon. He followed the hunters of a people in silence, he was concerned for the hunters. He saw far ahead of them what they sought and gave to them the vision I had borrowed from Creation. Each of us, Crow and myself, were content in our present meaning. (pp. 17–18)

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variety of religious denominations, a discussion of the mystical and esoteric worldviews relating to the decomposing house sparrow might offend one or more of these religious beliefs (most likely the parents’). In turn, Lily might have been reported to her principal/school board because she violated her professional ethical standards set out by her teaching certificate and rules of conduct set by the school board. Unfortunately, in our society death is equivalent to religion. If I go into deep conversations about death, then I would need to start addressing some religious doctrines…maybe it’s spiritual, maybe it’s what God says, maybe there’s a heaven, maybe there’s a hell, and maybe there’s purgatory…The kids would have lots of questions. We mostly have a Christian idealism in our school, and a bit of Hindu and Muslim, but I am not in any kind of position to start teaching about the ethics of these religions. Just like conversations of death, there is too much at stake. So, I go to that more scientific thing, because then it eliminates the religious part of it. I don’t believe it’s my duty, or my place to teach the kids about these topics. I’m okay with ideas of spiritualism in terms of who they are as a spiritual being, but not regarding their higher powers. The topic is very tenuous… Let’s turn this around to Mojo. Mojo is all about life. Mojo is about building relationships. Mojo is about having friends and having people that follow you, who are with you as your people. Mojo is my people and if you talk about an animal—that spirit of life—then you don’t talk about spirituality as in God or Allah, or Buddha, you talk about the spirit of those relationships. The relationship with Land, and the relationship with animals, and the relationship with a vibrant and alive Nature, instead of death. Now you and I both know, and I truly feel, that death doesn’t have to be a difficult, controversial topic, but in our society, that is what it is. So, I steer away from that to protect myself. (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2017)

Despite Lily’s concerns which frame her story, she disrupts the impact of professional and bureaucratic discourses by returning to her relationship with Mojo, who clearly brings joy, hope, and vitality. Reflecting upon this teacher/crow story, Lily confirmed that her environmental education-type teaching practices were typically taken up through an ecospiritual lens in which ideas of animism contributed to her ecological worldviews. For Lily, Land was the locus in which she could develop important relationships with emotion and spirituality, relationships with learning, and relationships with family and friends. The energy of Land connects to the energy of a person and the rhythm of the earth influences the rhythm of the body. (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2017)

In Lily’s cosmological understanding, Land and humans co-exist through spiritual energy and is felt materially in the Earth and the human body. The boundaries between them are fluid, and mutually affecting/affected—thus, the health and wellness or alternatively the sickness and dis-ease of one entity shape the other. In this sense, Lily’s environmental education-type teaching practices bring to mind the ecospiritual undertakings of deep ecology as pioneered by Arne Næss in the 1970s. Spurred by the Age of Ecology (Sessions, 2014) or the Ecological Turn (Tinnell, 2012), deep ecology seeks to return to planetary wholism, and notions of the earth as a single, sacred organism. At its fundamental level, deep ecology calls for individuals to achieve self-realisation and enlightenment through the healing powers of nature. The identification with nature, laying foundations for the development of an ecological identity (e.g., Thomashow, 1995) and spiritual solutions to modernist worldviews

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and the anthropocentric mastery of nature. Yet some ecofeminists,9 namely Val Plumwood and Ariel Salleh have pointed to the limits of deep ecology. Plumwood (1991), for example, argued that, however well-meaning it appears to be, deep ecology is embedded in an Edenistic view of nature in which humanist self-interests prevail while nature remains black-boxed. For Salleh (1992), deep ecology lacks a fully rounded political critique, and thus, needs to become more critically reflexive of its sociohistorical groundings in patriarchal and classist discourses. The search for the lost part of one’s self, often represented as the feminine is in Salleh’s view, rooted in a middle-class and individualistic imaginary that is set in flagrant self-indulgence of the cosmic transpersonal Self.10 As a result, deep ecology perpetuates the very binary classifications it opposes (e.g., the human as separate and detached from nature) (Sessions, 1991). Finally, as deep ecology is opposed to the industrialisation of the earth and the development of high technology, this perspective is not particularly helpful in challenging and responding to current socioecological crises (Braidotti, 2013, 2019). Within the ecocentric turn of the environmental education field, some scholars might also perceive a resonance between Mapping Worlds and the concept 9

Ecofeminism was born out of the feminist movement that gained momentum in the social revolutions of the 1960s. Emerging as an important philosophical lens to broaden an understanding of females as political actors within social contexts, feminist thinkers critically explore embodied knowledge while interrogating objective knowledge and the gendered nature of the reason/emotion dualism, given that throughout history, this has marginalised and subjugated women and other bodies outside the white, masculine mainstream (Pedwell & Whitehead, 2012). For example, feminist standpoint theory takes up notions of embodiment within the situated (micro) politics of location to emphasise a more accurate analysis of power differentials (Braidotti, 2011, 2013; Haraway, 1988). This has been most famously taken up by feminists Cixous (1976), Irigaray (1985), and Butler (1993, 2007). 10 Salleh’s critique of deep ecology asks us to consider how the route for recovering an interconnected sensuous self through meditation and outdoor leisure activities compares with biocentric and hands-on experiences of the African subsistence farmer who tends to her land with astonishing knowledge of seeds, water habits, and insect catalysts—all while continuing to bear children from her body. Like other ecofeminists (e.g., Gaard, 2011, 2015; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1991, 2001; Warren, 2000, 2002), Plumwood and Salleh critically acknowledge the systemic oppression of women and nature, in that if there is going to be an ecological future, then the connection between women and nature needs to be prioritised.Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, nature was a treacherous terrain for feminism, as ecofeminism was charged with essentialism in claims that it equated all women with nature (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Gaard, 2011). In response, some ecofeminists exemplified that ecofeminism was not about gendered essentialism, within the biology of male and female, but a question of sociocultural positioning emerging from historical perspectives. For example, Warren (2002) proposed strategic essentialism to broaden the understanding of females as political actors, departing from essentialised gender to take the historicity of the subjugation of women as a platform from which to enact socioecological change. Moreover, ecofeminism has much to offer the posthumanist/new materialist turn in educational research; particularly given some of the critiques of posthumanist/new materialist scholarship that suggest it is blinded by anthropocentricism, hubristic, conceited, and/or resentful undertones. While ecofeminism typically features other-than-human animacy differently, taking up feminism with ecology through a material/ discursive analysis could be useful to advancing both posthumanism/new materialism and ecofeminism. For example, via posthumanist/new materialist’s care ethics as relational (more on this later in this chapter) and ecofeminism as already explicitly grounded in the human (Gough & Whitehouse, 2018).

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of slow pedagogy (also known as ecopedagogy) developed by Payne and Wattchow (2009). In their call for developing alternative styles of reflection, including the poetic and silence, Payne and Wattchow argued that slow pedagogy allows us to pause and dwell for a while in the places we inhabit to receive a more meaningful sense of connection with place. The focus on embodied practices working towards uniting mind and body in environmental education are typically grounded in philosophical positionings of ecophenomenology, as focused on the structures of consciousness and experiences.11 Through our entangled researcher/teacher entanglements, however, the focus of the researcher/teacher enactments departed from an anthropocentric and humancentric gaze concerned with how people experience the world, to consider the complex relational constitutions and entanglements with Other(s), in which the self enacts a dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative undoing/redoing, or reconfiguring, with Other(s). Further, as part of the anticolonial praxis of the researcher/teacher enactments, Lily and I were cognisant of appropriating and extracting Indigenous versions of animist Land. We were gravely aware of the messy, sticky, and uneven knottings within Settler/Indigenous relationships, in which settler emplacement stories work to co-opt and (re)appropriate Indigenous perspectives through romanticised, idealised, essentialised, and universalised versions of animist land, while at the same time, superseding and silencing Indigenous perspectives (Morgensen, 2009; Tuck & Yang, 2012). As Settlers to Treaty 6 Territory, therefore, we needed other ways to illuminate relationships with an ecological community of kindred beings; ways that destabilise dominant Western worldviews imbued with anthropocentric and humancentric logics and avoid appropriating and co-opting Indigenous cultural and spiritual ontologies of Land. I show how Lily and I actualised this in the second researcher/ teacher enactment, Mapping Worlds.

11

Phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, suggested that the human conceptual system consists of an intersubjective we, in that there is no objective perception but that every individual will perceive the world in a unique way and have their own unique experiences; we do not perceive a world, but the world is what we perceive (Husserl, 1991). Within the phenomenological school of thought, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued for the reorienting of ontological dualisms, claiming that we are our bodies, and that lived experiences unite mind and body towards a body-subject (Reynolds, 2004). However, while the body-subject is conceived of as enacting dynamic interactions in many directions within the flesh of the world, this idea prioritises human perception within human experiences through a focus on how the human is positioned in the world. It is also important to add here that Lily is the first to admit that her Land-based learning endeavours have traditionally been set in the learner’s experience(s) with N/nature, L/land, P/place, the outdoors (as were mine before engaging in posthumanist work!). This speaks to the ubiquity of humancentric and anthropocentric logics in education; especially experiential education, in which these modes of learning are so often set. Here, I will note just how generative my relationship was with Lily, in that she brought a wealth of educational knowledge to this project, yet through collaboration with me as a posthumanist researcher, the affects and effects of this relationship were symbiotic in that Lily’s sensing of the world also shifted to a more posthuman account.

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4.4 Mapping Worlds: Becoming-with Land As the Grades 4 and 5 children sprawled across the field, I watched them with clean white sheets of paper tentatively positioned on their stomachs while they gripped their coloured pencils and sought to map the world around them. I saw Lily perched on top of the hill, and then one by one, I noticed them abandoning the task and begin to hover around her. The children appeared impatient and frustrated. After a moment, Lily called the class to gather into a circle to discuss their frustrations as a group. In the discussion that ensued, it was clear the children were finding Mapping Worlds to be challenging. Because they were engaged in an unconventional drawing practice and their eyes were closed, the students were not able to perfect their pictures and draw something that was visually assessed and evaluated by their own standards and benchmarks for what a perfect picture might look like. That is, While Lily nodded her head and listened to each story attentively, I wondered what she would do next. Would she remind the children to persevere and continue as planned? Would she adapt and scaffold learning in some other way to garner more motivation from the children? Would she abandon the activity entirely and move onto something else less? Lily was at a crossroad: she needed to address the lack of children’s engagement, but she was also committed to the task and its experimentation that would hopefully lead to new patterns of growth and for new stories, assemblages, and worldings. Sitting in a quiet circle, Lily asked the class to close their eyes and listen to the silence in a gentle space of reverence. Lily invited the children to explore the inbetween spaces, the stillness between movements, and their situated emplacements with Land. In Lily’s view, children are too busy to appreciate the world around them. Her goal is to encourage the children to be mindful, to experience Land in time and place, and through their senses, and provide them with new ways of thinking and doing. The kids are too activated in our society and in school. The school runs at a high level and kids need to know how to have that mindful discussion with themselves. I think it’s important that kids know how to be mindful of quietness, because our Land needs us to be quieter. Our world needs us to be quieter. Don’t get me wrong you can be loud and crazy too, but we need to slow down and be in that still place, in peace, so that we can look upon the Land, look at what we’re doing, and make decisions about these things. I want to be the teacher that goes to the Land with children in the Grades 4 and 5 class and help them learn how to quiet themselves on the Land, to see the seasons change and count the geese, to talk about how we are infringing on their territory. One of the things that we do when we go out to a quiet space—I don’t care if it is winter or summer, or spring or fall—they go and lay in the grass. And they would do art or write. I don’t believe that my voice is going to change development. But I do believe that my voice will help kids think in a different way. At least giving them a baseline opportunity to rethink things that they are seeing, doing, and hearing around them. To give them another way to think, and another way to look, and another way to sit upon the Land, and to not always rush and run to the next thing. (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2017)

4.4 Mapping Worlds: Becoming-with Land

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Then, back at the field on this late September day, Lily asked the children to open their eyes and look closely at the world around them while prompting them to consider how the Land seemed to appear as perfectly imperfect. Why are people worried about the perfection of their picture? What else around us might be perfectly imperfect? The trees are lopsided, the clouds are messy, the benches over there are symmetrical, but they have graffiti on them, and the metal poles have chips in them. Even this hill is lopsided and there are different colours in the grass. Do you think the Land out here speaks a different language to us and that the clouds bumping into the sun might be their way of greeting, of relating to each other? (Fieldnotes, 2017)

As Lily spoke with the children, she touched upon the messiness of nature and humans as both unique and relational entities that are perfectly imperfect in their co-existing alongside and with each other. Inviting children to dwell quietly in a co-created world of perfect imperfection, the goal here was for children to sit with their anxieties and their frustrations without resolution; to understand that they are complete beings in that moment and, therefore, there was no need to extract from, or consume, L/land to portray that they could do well in the task. Attuning-with Land was an important practice for Lily, as she said above, because in understanding just how intimately connected we are to Land, then perhaps there will be an impetus to live more in more coordinated ways with the resonating rhythms of Land. This was Lily’s way of teaching away from consumptive capitalist and neoliberal behaviours, while also locating teaching and learning within hands-on, experiential, and emplaced ways away from globalising trajectories of policy discourses. After some time, I watched the children wander back to their positions lying in the field to try Mapping Worlds again. This time, however, they did not appear to be hurried or scattered, but rather, contemplative and deliberate. There was a slowness to their movements, as bodies and Land entangled together through an interconnected network of earthly pulses and cadences. The tangible outcomes of Mapping Worlds included a deep sigh of relief from a hardworking teacher (Lily had the children back on task); a host of crumpled sheets of white paper showing a tangled mess of squiggly lines (some had blown from children’s hands and were fluttering about along the grass as children chased after them like bounding kittens after a butterfly); and tear-stained cheeks (with the odd grass-stained knee). But crucially, what Mapping Worlds did do, was expand the children’s familiarity of developing a relationship with Land through touching, listening, smelling, and intuiting Land. Enacting what Haraway (2008) called, otherworldly conversations, the children came to know Land through their senses-sensing, and thus, they had come to know Land through themselves in moment-to-moment accounts of becoming-with Land (Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Rautio, 2017). So, what did I learn through enactments of Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds with Lily? And why is this important for the field of environmental education? I will explore these questions in the final section of this chapter.

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4.5 Pedagogical Events in Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds: Opening to Relational Care Ethics When the teaching and learning focus shifts to moment-to-moment accounts of becoming-with, practices are situated within pedagogical events. Crucially, imbued with agentic assemblages that are relationally inclusive of all bodies (human, animal, and Earthly materialities) and discursive practices (ethical, sociocultural, and political constructions), the pedagogical event opens us to relational care ethics (Bennett, 2010). Relational care ethics have vast implications for (re)storying human/Earth relationships, because they extend beyond a care ethic of self (e.g., Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self), a care ethic for other as a separate entity (e.g., Emmanuel Levinas’s care ethic for others), or a care ethic for the externalised environment (e.g., Aldo Leopold’s land ethic) to be grounded in accountability, response-ability, and obligation through attachments within infrastructures of inequity (Liboiron, 2021). What I mean by this is that, relational care ethics move us from politicised accounts of performance affinity and activism (in the pursuit of democratic citizenship and social and ecological justice grounded in the rights of the oppressed) to locate complicity and response-ability within the (micro) politics of location; and thus, we are entirely accountable to the structures and systems we co-create and co-constitute. Relational care ethics have much more profound implications for how we enact knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling in these times of the Anthropocene than behaviour change doctrines akin to sustainable development discourses. Relational care ethics are an ontological (re)conceptualisation of how we, as individuals, are relationally positioned with broader ecologies of the world; not just as individuals in the world. For example, through relational care ethics in the pedagogical events of Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds, while it could be suggested Lily was responsible for Other(s) (particularly regarding the children’s physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional safety), relational care ethics suggest she was response-able to Other(s) through expanding care outwards in the co-shaping of relationships (Barad, 2012; Pedwell, 2012). In Mindful Walking, Lily negotiated her relational obligations to professional ethical standards set out by her teaching certificate and rules of conduct set by the school board and to the children in the Grades 4 and 5 class; in Mapping Worlds, Lily negotiated her relational obligations to me and our intentions for this researcher/teacher enactments and to the children in the Grades 4 and 5 class. In this way, Lily moved between both productive (potentia) and restrictive (potestas) forces that pulled (with) and pushed (against) her educational philosophies and practices, calling herself into12 good relations with all Other(s). Mapping subjectivities as relationally situated and contextualised within specific accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities of (micro) politics of location as a White/Western/Settler researcher/teacher living, learning, researching, and teaching in educational P/places and L/lands with troubled histories of settler colonialism, 12

Calling-in, as opposed to calling-out, is a practice gleaned from Liboiron (2021) to suggest we are entangled in relational accountability, response-ability, and obligation, rather than suggesting someone is apart from, or outside of relational ethics within good relations.

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both Lily and I sought to prioritise environmental education as a site of hope for Indigenous futurity.13 This was acknowledging that any examination of human/Earth relationships must first seek to understand the ways in which these relationships have been colonised by Settler practices in the erasure of differently located Indigenous cultural and spiritual ontologies of Land (Bang et al., 2014; Belcourt, 2015). In these times of the Anthropocene, stories of anthropocentric and humancentric hubris that appropriate and co-opt Indigenous ontologies of Land and culture need (urgent) revisions; and thus, perhaps the most important learning for me is in this chapter is how we might initiate these revisions by placing our bodies on the wounded Land and feeling its earthly textures and contours laden with ghostly hues of death and decay and translucent colours full of birth and life. Land is wild, tamed, beautiful, and ugly; it is vulnerable, and at times, invisible. But Lily and I are all these things too. In the next chapter, I turn to an exploration of entangled/differentiated relationships between a lived curriculum and Saskatchewan curriculum guides. It cannot just be about me, or just about Lily and me; it is, after all, impossible to extricate ourselves from worlds we inhabit. Best we learn how to flourish with these worlds—and all the ecologies and policies that run through them.

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Plumwood, V. (1991). Nature, self, and gender: Feminism, environmental philosophy, and the critique of rationalism. Hypatia, 6(1), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb0 0206.x Plumwood, V. (2001). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Taylor & Francis. Rautio, P. (2017). A super wild story: Shared human-pigeon lives and the questions they beg. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 722–731. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417725353 Renold, E., & Ivinson, G. (2014). Horse-girl assemblages: Towards a posthuman cartography of girls’ desires in an ex-mining valleys community. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(3), 361–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.888841 Reynolds, J. (2004). Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining embodiment and alterity. Ohio University Press. Salleh, A. (1992). The ecofeminism/deep ecology debate: A reply to patriarchal reason. Environmental Ethics, 14(3), 195–216. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics199214317 Sessions, G. (2014). Deep ecology, new conservation, and the Anthropocene worldview. Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, 30(2), 106–114. Sessions, R. (1991). Deep ecology versus ecofeminism: Healthy differences or incompatible philosophies? Hypatia, 6(1), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00211.x Somerville, M. (2007). Postmodern emergence. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), 20(2), 225–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390601159750 Somerville, M. (2015). Children’s place learning maps: Thinking through country. In M. Somerville & M. Green (Eds.), Children, place and sustainability (pp. 64–84). Palgrave Macmillan. TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2). http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371 Thomashow, M. (1995). Ecological identity: Becoming a reflective environmentalist. MIT Press. Tinnell, J. C. (2012). Transversalising the ecological turn: Four components of Félix Guattari’s ecosophical perspective. Deleuze Studies, 6(3), 357–388. https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2012.0070 Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernandez, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72–89. https://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/art icle/view/411/pdf Tuck, E., McCoy, K., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.877708 Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research: Theory, methodology and methods. Routledge. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1–40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/ view/18630 Warren, K. (2000). Ecofeminist philosophy: A Western perspective on what it is and why it matters. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Warren, K. (2002). Response to my critics. Ethics and the Environment, 7(2), 39–59. https://www. jstor.org/stable/40339036?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and nonhumans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1). Wildcat, M., McDonald, M., Irlbacher-Fox, S., & Coulthard, G. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), I–XV.

Autumn’s letting go. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley. The mornings in Autumn glistened with dew as vibrant greens give way to yellow hues before a deep burnt orange takes hold of the landscape. There is a quiet departure this time of year, as the geese start preparing for their southward journeys to warmer climates, their honking just echoes reverberating through smoky grey and rain speckled skies. Leaves falling from limbs remind me of the impermanence of things, like my summertime tan that fades with memories of riverside splashing. I had lived large that summer, intimately inhaling and exhaling with every drum, rhythm, and staccato that danced upon the Land. Boisterous and raucous laughter now softened into humble, knowing smiles. Letting go of everything I knew to exist; new patterns of life emerge. Life happens in a different way every time

Chapter 5

Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Negotiating a Lived Curriculum

Abstract This chapter begins with an exploration of pedagogical events in the Eco-art Installation researcher/teacher enactment that prompted considerations of top-down curriculum policy to be relationally entangled/differentiated with a lived curriculum. Bringing forth transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum that are grounded in lived, embodied, and embedded practices between, and across, disciplinary categories, boundaries, and borders, this chapter explores Deleuze and Guattari (in: Massumi (trans) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1987) ecosophy of becoming that begets performance-causality relationships, and thus, relational accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities to Earthly systems and structures by inhabitants within these Earthly systems and structures. Keywords Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum · Ecosophy · Curriculum-as-plan · Lived curriculum · Performance-causality relationships

5.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus I came to the Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education assemblage saddled with some preconceptions about the ways in which normative definitions of environmental education might inform certain types of teaching practices. For instance, policy-driven discourse of pragmatics that tended to neglect sensuous felt encounters with Land (as I described in Chapter 1). I was interested in understanding how master stories laden in curriculum policy might confine and limit the way Lily, and I approached and implemented environmental education-type teaching practices through the researcher/teacher enactments with the Grades 4 and 5 class. I was driven to disrupt settled concepts and theories and destabilise essentialist meanings regarding who teachers are or their practice (Sellers & Gough, 2010).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_5

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As the Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings apparatus took form, it continually changed shape as Lily and I became immersed in the dynamic, contextual, and contingent nature of teaching and learning (and researching!). Remaining flexible and open to how the researcher/teacher enactments might unfold, we did not dismiss and or negate the importance of planning and preparation towards a thorough and well-thought-out teaching practice (also managing physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and social risk factors), but we leaned into the messiness of situational affordances in teaching and learning. In this chapter, I explore the third researcher/teacher enactment, Eco-art Installation.

5.2 Eco-Art Installation: Tools, Toys, and Friends Travelling to meet Lily on a cold and dark January morning, the trees stood in solid defiance, stark and naked against mellow, beautiful skies. There was no sound of kihci-niska/zway/Canada geese (Branta canadensis), iýinisip/li kanaar/ mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos), pihpihcêw/enn griiv/robins (Turdusmigratorius), oskanêw/aen pchi twayzoo zhoon/finches (Haemorhousmexicanus), or mîtos/ Li Traamb/trem bling aspen/white poplar (Populus tremuloides) groves. I heard the occasional coo and caw of the âhâsiw/enn kornay/crow (Corvusbrachyrhynchos) and saw the odd footprint of mistâpos/aen lyayv di prayrii/white-tailed jack rabbit (Lepus townsendii) when it left imprints across the snowy yards of smoke-billowing neighbourhood homes. The Land was quiet; frozen in silence (shown in Fig. 5.1). The barometer indicated a chilly −24 °C that morning; if it got any colder, there was every chance we would not be able to journey outside to implement the Eco-art Installation.1 By 11 am, however, temperatures were stable, and we bundled up to trek across town to the University of Saskatchewan on the local bus. We arrived and huddled together upon a snowy field, as Lily began talking with the children about different tools they might use for their learning: pens, paper, and books being obvious choices. Then, asking the children to form small groups, she sent them off to gather tools for their learning; artefacts they might find on Land for their Eco-art Installation (with only one rule: do not pick anything that is still growing!).

The average temperature for January in Saskatoon is −17.9 °C (Government of Canada, 2018). It is common for temperatures to consistently hover around −30, with extremes in January and February reaching up to −50 (with wind chill). As an Aussie accustomed to +30 during January, this was hard to take! The School Division has policy mandates in place for schools to remain indoors in temperatures below −27 °C (with wind chill). Some schools implement the Polar Bear Club for children that are equipped with adequate clothing to play outside at recess and lunchtime, of course with parental approval and consent. Safety, of course, is the priority here; yet thinkingwith Foucault’s (1991) notion that “nothing is evil in itself, but everything is dangerous”, I wonder about the dangers of these policies institutionalising outdoor learning and/or privileging those who have access to adequate clothing.

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5.2 Eco-Art Installation: Tools, Toys, and Friends

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Fig. 5.1 Frozen in silence. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

Watching the children scatter like a flock of seagulls, Lily and I chatted about her environmental education-type teaching practices as juxtaposed with, and against, Saskatchewan curriculum policy. For Lily, her relational connections in environmental education were established through curriculum applications of civics and citizenship, which were demonstrated through community engagement with diverse sociocultural and material communities (people and Land) in Saskatchewan. For instance, Lily extended the classroom to include community Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and educators; Lily and the Grades 4 and 5 children regularly attended First Nations and Métis community events, while she also collaborated with Indigenous community members within her classroom teaching practices. Lily’s relationships with Indigenous community members helped to enact culturally responsive pedagogy while her teaching practices sought to embody Saskatchewan’s mandatory treaty education (Government of Saskatchewan, 2008). Lily gave me an example of how she implemented these relationships and requirements through a project-based learning inquiry in her Mining Project. I am very familiar with the curriculum. This is crucial. And then I look for connections, seeing the curriculum as a living body, as an ever-changing, ever-moving kind of thing. I don’t look at curriculum as something static, in a “what does my textbook tell me to do next” kind of way. When I look from the perspective of the curriculum as a living body, the connections come very, very naturally. So, I first look at learning through a project and then I find the links to curriculum. I look through a lens of Land, through an Indigenous lens, or a community lens, and I find ways to connect the kids with what we’re learning from a book; linking practice with theory, which then informs more practice, I suppose. For example, in the Mining Project, instead of teaching rocks, minerals, and mining out of a textbook or as dictated by what the curriculum prescribes to me, I approach it more wholistically…

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5 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Negotiating … The project will involve cooking together to make a cake. Inside the cake is going to be the things that the kids are going to mine. I will bring in community members to talk with the kids. For example, someone from BHP Billiton, and North Rim Mines will come to talk about rock and geology. The Saskatchewan Environmental Society will come and talk about rehabilitation of Land and discuss some prevailing environmental concerns. A First Nations Elder will visit with us to talk about the connection of First Nations with Land and with mining. And I will also have someone from the local government come and talk with the kids about policy-making on these matters. Then, we will go outside to Land and go on a rock-hunt to find rocks. We will then use my rock tumbler and try to clean up and identify the rocks. Some of the kids have even turned these into jewellery! We are looking at relationships between humans and humans, and humans and Land. We are community building. Because all these people are members from our community, bringing ideas of connections to Land. we will ask questions like, “What are we doing to our Land?” Through the river of knowledge, this Mining Project will then bring us right into Indigenous Day, which in Canada, is the first day of summer (June 21). For me, that’s how I engage the whole system, because the kids are not just engaged in that paperwork stuff, but they are engaged with their community. They will notice what they see and hear in the news and be able to connect that information to that time they sat on the Land. (Transcribed researcher/ teacher meeting notes, 2018)

In the Mining Project, Lily drew on formal knowledge presented in books with experiential knowledge from a variety of perspectives including Elders, representatives from mining communities (BHP Billiton and North Rim Mines), local government, an environmental activist organisation (the Saskatchewan Educational Society), as well as the children’s own encounters with the Land and rocks. Lily did not privilege one form of knowledge over another; she implemented a broad view of environmental education that engaged the children in an iterative process where practice and theory informed one another. Consciously working across disciplinary categories and practices, Lily’s environmental education-type teaching practices sought to prioritise an organic, systemic, wholistic, and ecological learning about rocks, geology, and their connections to mining and the communities impacted by this industry, and these relationships with Land. Lily’s priorities and approaches to environmental education are synergistic with traditional purposes and meanings of environmental that typically seek to understand local and global interdependence through organic, systemic, wholistic, and ecological approaches to teaching and learning (Steen, 2003). However, as I highlighted in Chapter 1, environmental education is co-opted by sustainable development discourses set in policy-driven discourses of pragmatics. As a result, the field has moved to a more instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic approach to learning about the world rather than prioritising kin relations in which children are a part of the world, and thus, learn with the world. Curricular tensions of technocratic objectivity, rationalism, and instrumental reason have been at the forefront of environmental education scholarship for decades now (e.g., Huckle, 1999; Robottom, 1991), with extensive critiques further arising from environmental education’s turn

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to ESD (e.g., Hursh et al., 2015; Kopnina, 2012, 2015, 2018; Kopnina & Meijers, 2014; McKenzie, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2015). Yet these tensions do not only reside within the field of environmental education (perhaps due to the ubiquity of scientific discourse in this particular field of inquiry) but scholarship in other fields of inquiry also illuminates the ubiquity of a technocratic objectivity, rationalism, and instrumental reason. For instance, scholarly critiques of the physical education curriculum in Canada point to an overemphasis on normalising and universalising functions of developmentalism that prioritise technical skills for physical activity and sport performance (e.g., Land, 2022; Melnychuk et al., 2011; Riley & Proctor, 2022). Beyond these few examples, curriculum making in Canada cannot be separated from the overarching effects of globalisation and neoliberal agendas purporting standardisation and competition through the unfettered flows of hegemonic policy discourse (Kumar, 2018; Pike, 2015; Schuetze et al., 2011). For Ted Aoki (1993), as teaching and learning practices prescribed by curriculum policy are set within homogenising, institutionalising, generalising, and outcomes-focused ideals, they are understood through the meta-narratives of curriculum-as-plan. Differentiating between curriculum policy as a mandate prescribed to teachers and notions of a lived curriculum, in which teachers subscribe to contextualised and relevant curriculum agendas, Aoki brought the curriculum-as-plan and the micro-narratives of a lived curriculum into a togetherness relationship. Although Aoki’s lived curriculum is embedded within phenomenological accounts of the stories and languages people speak and live, I align with Aoki’s troubling of difference between curriculum-asplan and a lived curriculum in this book showing how Lily and I lived in the midst of a multiplicity of curricular through dwelling at the borders of difference. As Lily and I sensed our way along the edges, boundaries, and borders of environmental education in Eco-art Installation, we wanted to (re)invigorate an organic, systemic, wholistic, and ecological approach to environmental education by exploring the meanings of and giving artistic expression to the material artefacts that the children. We introduced these strategies across the areas prescribed by the curriculum policy: through the foraging of raw materials found on Land, Eco-art Installation involved creating artworks (Arts Education); presenting artworks through the expression of unique ideas (English Language Arts); learning and enacting good relations (Health Education); examining the interdependence of humans, plants, and animals and the ways in which urban development is perpetuating habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation (Science) and settlement patterns that have exacerbated social and ecological crises narratives (Social Studies). Eco-art Installation also tapped into cross-curricular competencies in its project-based learning inquiry approach, namely developing thinking, developing identity and interdependence, developing literacies, and developing social responsibility. Table 5.1 illustrates the complete range of curricular outcomes for Grade 4 and Grade 5 that were not

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only relevant to Eco-art Installation, but also to the other three researcher/teacher enactments, Mindful Walking, Mapping Worlds, and Photographic Encounters. Thinking about Grades 4 and 5 environmental education presented in Saskatchewan curriculum through outcomes, RW4.1, RW5.1, and RW5.2 (as shown in Table 5.1), I asked Lily the ways in which these outcomes related to her environmental education-type teaching practices. I think it’s [sustainability] more infused through specific teacher autonomy than [policy] directed. Yet it is still not in a bright light. It’s coming in with some teachers, because whenever we think of Land, we inevitably come back to sustainability. There are projects that some teachers have, but we’re still living in oil country after all. In my teaching over the last few years, I have certainly tried to teach the kids how to be thinking in a sustainability frame of mind or thinking about how we are connected to the Earth and affected by it. I try to give them at least some baseline stuff, as best I can; to get them out to the Land and have them see that, “this is you, and this is where you live. This is what’s happening; how do you feel about that?” But I am not out there to teach kids to rage against the machine. I just want them to look at Land, perhaps how our ancestors looked upon Land, or how First Nations people look upon the Land. How to love the Land. How to listen to the Land. Stewardship, sustainability, and community building are all linked, because if you are a steward, you’re going to have more ideas relating to sustainability, and that is going to build community. And people talk about the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), or is it the 5Rs now (refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle)? I don’t know…Anyway, they do projects on carbon, and electricity, and water use, which are all greatly important and we need to have a baseline knowledge of these things. BUT! It is much, much more important to link this back to practices of touching, listening, feeling, and living with Land. I think we’ve gotten away from this in our culture….and in the curriculum. I mean we were Land-driven people in Saskatchewan and now with all these easy lifestyles that we’ve got AND with the superficial, kind of technical approaches to curriculum that don’t really consider the whole child…we have lost something with this focus on how to manage the land for sustainable exploitation (lol). (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2018)

As can be seen in the outcomes for RW4.1, RW5.1, and RW5.2, the Saskatchewan curriculum focuses on pragmatic and technical inquiries into land use (i.e., students conduct projects on carbon, and electricity, and water use). Lily understands the importance of these competencies, but in her view, student engagement with Land through a multisensory and embodied teaching and learning practices (touching, listening, feeling, and living-with Land) is a more appropriate and vitally important approach to environmental education in these times of socioecological precarity. From Lily’s perspective, these practices seek to promote the development of the whole child through intellectual, kinaesthetic, and affective learning engagement. Lily and I both understood the commonplace understanding of sustainability, and the political and economic contexts that pose limits to environmental education-type teaching and learning practices. Yet, as Lily indicated, raging against the machine is not a helpful strategy to transform constraining and disciplining narratives of instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic curriculum structures. Rather, transformational

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English Language Arts Learning Contexts: Comprehend and Respond (CR) and Compose and Create (CC)

Arts Education Learning Contexts: Creative/Productive (CP) and Critical Responsive (CR)

Cross-Curricular Competencies

Table 5.1 Grades 4 and 5 Saskatchewan curriculum policy taken up through the researcher/teacher enactments2 Developing Thinking: thinking and learning contextually, thinking and learning creatively, thinking and learning critically. Developing Identity and Interdependence: understanding, valuing, and caring for oneself, understanding, valuing, and caring for others, understanding and valuing social, economic, and environmental interdependence and sustainability. Developing Literacies: constructing knowledge related to various literacies, exploring and interpreting the world through various literacies, expressing understanding and communicating meaning using various literacies. Developing Social Responsibility: using moral reasoning, engaging in communitarian thinking and dialogue, taking action: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters Grade 4 Outcomes Grade 5 Outcomes CP4.7 Create visual art works that express own ideas and draw on sources of inspiration from Saskatchewan: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

CP5.8 Create art works using a variety of visual art concepts (e.g., positive space), forms (e.g., graphic design, photography), and media (e.g., mixed media, paint): Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

CP4.8 Create art works using a variety of visual art concepts (e.g., organic shapes), forms (e.g., kinetic sculpture, mural), and media (e.g., wood, wire, and found objects): Eco-art Installation CR4.1 Analyze how dance, drama, music, and visual art works represent unique ideas and perspectives: Mapping Worlds Eco-Art Installation Photographic Encounters Grade 4 Outcomes CC4.2 Create a variety of clear representations that communicate straightforward ideas and information relevant to the topic and purpose, including short, illustrated reports, dramatizations, posters, and other visuals such as displays and drawings: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters CC4.3 Speak to present and express a range of ideas and information in formal and informal speaking situations (including giving oral explanations, delivering brief reports or speeches, demonstrating and describing procedures) for differing audiences and purposes: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

Grade 5 Outcomes CC5.1 Compose and create a range of visual, multimedia, oral, and written texts that explore identity (e.g., What Should I Do), community (e.g., This is Our Planet), social responsibil54ity (e.g., Teamwork), and express personal thoughts shaped through inquiry: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters CC5.2 Demonstrate a variety of ways to communicate understanding and response including illustrated reports, dramatizations, posters, timelines, multimedia presentations, and summary charts: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters CC5.3 Speak to express and support a range of ideas and information in formal and informal speaking situations (e.g., giving oral presentations and reports, retelling a narrative, explaining a display to others, working in groups) for particular audiences and purposes: Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

(continued)

2

Diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment to measure how children might address the learning outcomes depicted in Table 5.1 was outside of the scope of the researcher/teacher enactments and overall research project. While I recognise there are many opportunities to attend to assessment in diverse ways, I am not seeking to demonstrate the product, or the outcomes, of children’s engagement with the researcher/teacher enactments but to bring relationships between, and across, disciplinary categories, boundaries, borders, and practices into sharper focus.

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Table 5.1 (continued)

Science Learning Contexts: Scientific Inquiry (SI), Technological Problem Solving (TPS), STSE Decision Making (DM), and Cultural Perspectives (CP)

Health Education Learning Contexts: Understanding, Skills, and Confidences (USC)

Grade 4 Outcomes USC4.3 Examine healthy interpersonal skills and determine strategies to effectively develop new relationships and/or negotiate disagreements in relationships: Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

Grade 5 Outcomes USC5.7 Assess the importance of self-regulation and taking responsibility for one's actions: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

USC4.4 Determine basic personal responsibility for safety and protection in various environments/situations: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters USC4.5 Examine how identity (i.e., self-concept, selfesteem, self-determination) is influenced by relationships that are formed with others: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters USC4.6 Assess healthy stress management strategies (e.g., relaxation skills, stress control skills, guided imagery, expressing feelings, exercising): Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters Grade 4 Outcomes

Grade 5 Outcomes

Life Science: Habitats and Communities (HC)

Earth and Space Science: Weather (WE)

HC4.1 Investigate the interdependence of plants and animals, including humans, within habitats and communities (CP, SI): Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

WE5.1 Measure and represent local weather, including temperature, wind speed and direction, amount of sunlight, precipitation, relative humidity, and cloud cover (CP, SI, TPS): Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-Art Installation Photographic Encounters

HC4.3 Assess the effects of natural and human activities on habitats and communities, and propose actions to maintain or restore habitats (CP, DM) Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

(continued)

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Table 5.1 (continued) Social Studies Learning Contexts: Interactions and Interdependence (IN), Dynamic Relationships (DR), and Resources and Wealth (RW)

Grade 4 Outcomes

Grade 5 Outcomes

DR4.1 Correlate the impact of the land on the lifestyles and settlement patterns of the people of Saskatchewan: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Photographic Encounters Eco-art Installation

IN5.1 Demonstrate an understanding of the Aboriginal heritage of Canada: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

DR4.2 Explain the relationship of First Nations and Métis peoples with the land: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

DR5.1 Analyze the historic and contemporary relationship of people to land in Canada: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

*RW4.1 Analyze the strategies Saskatchewan people have developed to meet the challenges presented by the natural environment: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

DR5.2 Assess the impact of the environment on the lives of people living in Canada: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters *RW5.1 Explain the importance of sustainable management of the environment to Canada's future: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters *RW5.2 Hypothesize about economic changes that Canada may experience in the future: Mindful Walking Mapping Worlds Eco-art Installation Photographic Encounters

Source Saskatchewan Ministry of Education (2010) *Denotes environmental education

change happens from within the system; from the stories derived from the grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded (micro) politics of location. I come from a very strong Indigenous way of thinking. Yet I don’t believe it is only an Indigenous way of thinking, it’s a thinking-with Land. We need to give kids more space and time, and not sit them in a classroom, at a desk, in a row - they’re kids! They need to grow out there on the Land, in the sunshine, in the snow; engaging in learning that helps them touch, listen, feel, and live with Land. That is where change will happen, when the children implicitly know they are part of something much bigger, and much more important than themselves. But first they have to touch it, listen to it, feel it, and live-with Land; embodying all of the Land’s rhythms as their own (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2018)

According to Lily, teaching and learning practices that enact touching, listening, feeling, and living with Land are important to help the children embody a lived connection with all that sustains and nourishes them, and it worked. As the children returned to the huddle with their arms bundled full of artefacts (pinecones, feathers, sticks, Smarties boxes, broken apart Tim Hortons coffee cups3 ), I overheard one of 3

The children were not limited to foraging for only natural artefacts but were also encouraged to find evidence of human activity. This was a strategy to show the children that humans are entangled with the Earth and that the Earth is entangled with humans; there cannot be a separation of the two.

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them call out excitedly when they were going to start building their eco-art installation; it was almost like the children actively wanted to know their relationship with nature was real, tangible, and connected in a way that they could viscerally feel. And then something marvellous happened! Lily began to discuss the ways in which these the artefacts might be toys rather than tools for learning. With quizzical expressions, the children scoffed at this possibility; they contended that these artefacts were nothing like the manufactured toys they had at home. In response, Lily asked the children if they thought their pets or plants at home (or at a relative or friend’s house) might be seen as a toy? The children unanimously responded with a resounding “Noooo!”: they explained that tools were used to create something) and that toys were used to play with. The children suggested that while you might play with a pet, you don’t really control it yourself like you would a tool or a toy, and thus, through their deductive reasoning, pets and plants were not tools or toys. Lily then asked the children if the pets and plants at home weren’t a tool or a toy, then what were they? More quizzical looks passed around the faces of the children and after a long pause, Lily asked them whether plants and pets could be seen as a friend? As the children contemplated this idea, murmurs circled around children that indicated, yes, perhaps they could! Recognising an opening into new stories, assemblages, and worldings, Lily went on to suggest that all the items we learn with are not necessarily instrumental tools or toys but friends. Bound within human/Earth relationality, if plants and pets help to shape who we are when we are around them, then we must help them be who there are in all their natural expressions—like we would our human friends. Lily and the children talked about not using friends, because that is self-centred, hurtful, and harmful, but that we should support our friends and help them be the best version of themselves. Yet as one child insightfully asked, how do we know how to support our plants and pets if we don’t speak the same language and know what they need to be supported? To which Lily said, “We do our best to act in integrity; always asking yourself: are your actions for you, them, or us?”4 (Fieldnotes, 2018). By exploring learning artefacts, plants, and pets as friends, Eco-art Installation sought to provide the conditions for possibility for the Grades 4 and 5 children to develop a loving and listening relationality with people, flora, fauna, and Land. In doing so, Eco-art Installation was focused on broadening the understanding of sustainability in Saskatchewan curriculum. Positioning Saskatchewan curriculum as just one of the vital threads entangled within environmental education teaching and learning practices, we did not approach teaching and learning through silos (separate and detached units of inquiry) as prescribed by the government’s curriculum

In these times of the Anthropocene, every corner of the Earth has been touched by humans, enough to say that the very idea of wilderness is a contested term; it is the terra incognita of people’s minds (Hendee & Dawson, 2002). 4 Lily had a way of posing questions without needing answers, opening hearts and minds to all possibilities without foreclosing a solution. But for those wondering on the correct answer, my bet is us; but a differentiated us.

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policy; but rather, Lily and I dwelled in the middle of a multiplicity of curricular through transdisciplinary approaches that expand across borders of difference between curriculum-as-plan and a lived curriculum (Aoki, 1993).

5.3 Transdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum: Dwelling at the Borders of Difference Between Curriculum-as-Plan and a Lived Curriculum Discipline divisions, in which subjects of inquiry are separate and detached, are rooted in Aristotelian philosophy and motivated by the idea that separating knowledge is a more efficient way of learning in its systematic attention to progressive mastery of skills. In contrast, interdisciplinary approaches to curriculum stem from Platonic ideals of unity. In an educational context, therefore, interdisciplinarity applies methodologies and languages from a multitude of different disciplines to explore (and bring together unity of knowledge) a central theme, issue, problem, topic, or experience (Jacobs, 1989). Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum, however, do not merely draw from an array of disciplines and institutions of knowledge (as taken up through interdisciplinary approaches). Rather, transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum highlight affective materiality; for example, the ways in which individuals at their subjective levels undergo relational (re)configurings with/through practices5 (Barad, 2007; Massumi, 2015). That is, the unit of analysis within transdisciplinarity methodologies seeks to analyse individual subjectivities in relation to the composite material/discursivities in worldmaking (Barad, 2007; Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, 2019). Transdisciplinarity should not be confused with interdisciplinarity. While integration or the synthesis of knowledge is the stated goal of interdisciplinarity, in reality, all disciplines are not equal but exist in a hierarchy in which formal knowledge is privileged over lived stories or local knowledges, and where the pure sciences are more highly valued than the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts.6 Thus, the integration of knowledge occurs when the theories, methodologies, and/or practices of the weaker discipline are incorporated into the corpus of the more powerful discipline. This process is endemic in colonisation. Importantly, for my purposes here, is the ways in which technical knowledge is privileged over informal, craft knowledge even though both forms are critical for learning in all disciplines—scientific or not. For example, would have the child excitedly called out across the group eager to begin assembling their eco-art installation if they were not given the opportunity to experiment with multisensory ways of connecting with Land? Although the ways in which this child embodied their learning in Eco-art Installation cannot be easily measured and assessed, every sign indicated that this child encountered a very 5

Unlike discursive rules for practices imbued with power differentials that dominate and colonise the Other(s). 6 It should be noted that hierarchies of knowledge exist within these categories, as well!

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real and transformative lived connection between their body and the Earth that day. These connections were evident in an exercise in which in their groups, the children were invited to choose as many of the cut-out words relating to terms and concepts of human/Earth relationships. I noted with keen interest and curiosity that not one group chose any cut-out words set in language indicating human/Earth separation (e.g., separate, humancentred, apart from). Most, if not all, groups chose words set in language indicating human/Earth interconnectedness (e.g., belonging, a part of, entangled). Alongside more affirmative emotions (e.g., hope), they also chose more difficult emotions to include in their eco-art installations (e.g., sadness, anger). An example of the cut-out words is shown in Fig. 5.2. Scientific disciplines focus on the development of technical skills (measurement, calculation, numeration, etc.), but they undervalue or fail to acknowledge the ways in which multisensory and embodied learning are necessary to learn these skills. In response to the limitations of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum do not prioritise formal ways of learning that focus on knowledge acquisition and linear realisations in learning (i.e., as indicated in Chap. 3, Cartesian representational knowing suggests knowledge is out there awaiting to be discovered). Rather, transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum accept that (even embrace) the ways in which senses-sensing, as derived from the affected/affecting relationship, is an equally important element of teaching and learning. For instance, as Eco-art

Fig. 5.2 Cut-out words for Eco-art Installation. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

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Installation expanded across Arts Education, English Language Arts, Health Education, Science, and Social Studies from the grounded, lived, embodied, embedded accounts of the Grades 4 and 5 children, they grappled with the discursive forces of each discipline (sociocultural protocols and habits of thought that delineate what counts as important knowledge) and material forces (modes of thinking, emotions, feelings, and actions that are derived from the bodily state of the affected/affecting relationship). Through Eco-art Installation’s approaches set within project-based inquiry, the children were provided with the conditions of possibility to expand across natural/social and science/art binaries from their (micro) politics of location; moving outwards across different branches of thinking in each curriculum area (e.g., arts, science, and philosophy), while these different branches of thinking simultaneously informed how they would negotiate their projects. Such approach shifted encounters with curriculum policy from something ubiquitously done to Lily and me (and thus the children) to curriculum policy as multimodal and multivocal enactments in relationship with the teacher’s and children’s lived stories. Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum do not disassociate from or seek to transcend assumptions, practices, and outcomes taken for granted in environmental education. That is, transdisciplinarity does not seek to replace localised issues (e.g., water security in Saskatchewan and Canada as explored in Chap. 3) with universal problems (e.g., oceans rising). Nor these methods seek to reveal the oppressive elements of environmental education, by examining how, or what might be silenced, hidden, and/or constrained in the field. That is, transdisciplinary approaches do not critique deficits of the curriculum by identifying the ways in which it fails to account for multivocal stories in environmental education. These examples are set within discursive narratives of what the curriculum should and should not look like. Rather, transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum seek to cultivate a rich and fluid dialogue between diverse epistemic, ethical, and political worlds; they transform either/or logics to logics of and…and…and…. Thus, a lived curriculum, with all its diverging qualities, does not compete with, nor become subdued by, broader curriculum policy objectives within curriculum-as-plan but they emerge together within an entangled/differentiated relationship; what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) referred to as an ecosophy of becoming.7

5.4 An Ecosophy of Becoming Ecosophy (Greek eco = oikos: nature, the environment, something larger than the domestic household and sophy: wisdom) expands on an interest in objects to suggest that the meanings of objects are shaped by the relations within which they are situated. I explored these ideas in Chap. 4. Here, my intention is to expand upon Arne

7

Isabelle Stengers (2005) referred to this as an ecology of practices; Donna Haraway (2008a) referred to this as becoming-with; and Brian Massumi (2015) referred to this as belonging-together.

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Næss’ concept of deep ecology; moving deep ecology from a philosophical abstraction to grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded practices that actively (and politically) address the current conditions of living in the Anthropocene. In Næss’ original formulation, he argued that a flourishing Earth has value in and of itself. The Earth is understood as wholistic, but at the same time, it is presented as an object outside of social relations. In my view, however, a flourishing Earth is constituted by relational accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities to Earthly systems and structures by inhabitants within these Earthly systems and structures. This approach eschews the liberal concept of the individual and autonomous self, detached from the Earth, to suggest a radical relationality as the subjective self is always undergoing a (re)configuring with broader ecologies of the world, and thus, the planet is composed by, and comprised of, multiplicities of entangled/differentiated becoming-withs. For Lily and me, radical relationality was taken up through pedagogies attuningwith in the researcher/teacher enactments. Enacting pedagogies attuning-with, we departed from inquiry into representations of/about the world as made by the phenomenological subject to focus on the infolding of contexts through affective intensities initiating an intuitive knowing of Other(s) from one’s grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded (micro) politics of location generating assemblages of relations (Blaise et al., 2016; Land et al., 2020; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016; Riley & White, 2019; Rautio, 2017). Such an approach demands that teaching practices move from trigger-causality relationships between curriculum policy and the teacher to performance-causality relationships. The former strategy argues that a teacher’s subjective perception and the subsequent construction of reality are triggered by environmental objects; for instance, curriculum policy (as an environmental object) works to determine what, or how, a teacher might teach in any given context. The teacher then adapts their teaching practice to single-handedly meet the curriculum indicators and outcomes. Not only does this approach attempt to normalise (i.e., discipline in the Foucauldian sense) students and teachers, it often erases their lived stories. The latter strategy, however, is based on the premise that subjective actions are co-constituted and co-implicated with objective changes in the environment. Thus, as Lily and I found, as we were affected by curriculum policy in Eco-art Installation, we were able to affect simultaneously the ways in which curriculum policy was understood and taken up through our teaching practices. Rather than projecting a self-defined, centrally controlled, homeostatic, autonomous, and predictable unit of ideas into the future through trigger-causality relationships enacting a planning for, performance-causality relationships enact a planning with through the body’s engagement with affective, worldly intraactions. As such, teaching and learning practices in Eco-art Installation did not resemble a homogenised, tidy, fixed, closed, or linear trajectory from not knowing something to knowing something through the cause and effect of children’s discovery of knowledge; after all, we did not probe, prod, test, manipulate, give voice and/or silence particular ways of knowing/being/thinking/doing/feeling (ways that are often derived from the social priorities in education). But, working our way to curriculum outcomes through dynamic, messy, layered, chaotic, and unorthodox teaching and learning

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practices in Eco-art Installation, there was literally no object8 to learn about. Rather, teaching and learning practices in Eco-art Installation were imbued with relational ethics that dissolved binary classifications of speaking subjects and mute objects. In other words, subjects and objects came into being because of, and through, their relationship with each other. By focusing on entangled/differentiated relationships between individuals/communities, cultures/species, and matter/discourse, Lily and I not only illuminated difference from Other(s),9 but crucially, how we are shaped by Other(s) (Haraway, 2008b, 2016; Whatmore, 2002). Because performance-causality relationships shift the focus in teaching and learning contexts from what should happen and what is happening a multiplicity of outcomes is always imminent; outcomes that are composed by, and comprised of, the micro-narratives of teachers and learners—what Aoki (1993) has called a lived curriculum. As Lily explained, however, enacting a lived curriculum is fraught with tension, particularly within Western education systems that are constrained and disciplined by policy-driven discourses of pragmatics. Curriculum is addressed in everything that we’ve done in our work together, and in everything that I do. But this is one of those rubs. When you do work like this, people are always questioning curriculum connections. Yet, Saskatchewan curriculum is based upon a very open way of thinking. Although there are indicators (specific accounts of what learners who have achieved outcomes should be able to do), you do not have to meet all the indicators that are suggested. The indicators in our curriculum are suggestions of how you could achieve the outcomes (broader accounts of what learners are expected to know and be able to do). This means that the curriculum outcome is the goal. I probably only touch on one or two of the indicators, but because people think you must check mark all these indicators, they believe that I am not doing the curriculum. Unfortunately, as a result, my credibility as a teacher is diminished through this lens. I think as teachers, we stall. For example, this is what a teacher should look like, this is what a classroom should look like, this is what a school should look like. It brings up issues like the idea that this is what we’ve always done, so this is what we’ll always do. So, within the structures of the school, the limitations are many…

8

It is not unusual for the field of environmental education to draw upon a landscape and/or upon another species as an object for inquiry. Yet this approach is steeped in an anthropocentric and humancentric instrumental relation of use, and thus, denies an ethical response that attends to relations of difference as infused with power and asymmetries (Taylor, 2013). 9 Other(s) being those typically held in dualistic and oppositional difference in anthropocentric and humancentric logics, but through posthumanist performativity, are held in entangled/differentiated relationships.

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5 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Negotiating … Sometimes it makes me mad thinking that the community can dictate what the kids need to learn. Am I not a teacher? Am I not there to teach to what we need to know about the realities of our community around us? You and I have talked about people who teach differently they live on the edge. Kids nowadays are also a factor that stop the types of things I want to do with my class, because they don’t have the gear! They show up to school without the right clothes to go outside, or they say no to this, no to that. They demonstrate a sort of privilege at times. I have also been called mean because I was holding the child accountable for what they were doing. I am not okay with this in my classroom culture. So, I will continue to address it, and address it, and address it. But I haven’t buckled. I have compromised a couple of things that really matter to me, in the language that I use and in the expectations that I have, but I want to give kids the ability to be accountable and strong leaders. I talk about these things with the kids. For example, calling them on what they did, and that I am not okay with it. Asking them why they think I am not okay with it. And I will shut my classroom down and get together on the carpet in a circle and we will talk before we do any academic learning. If you are going to be a strong leader, you must know what strength looks like. When you mess up, what does relational accountability look like? What does it mean to be responsible? We need to be able to learn from mistakes and feel safe enough to make them. And if I get my hand slapped, then I guess I deal with consequences. Because I also mess up and I want to be held accountable - just like my kids. (Transcribed researcher/teacher meeting notes, 2018)

In this narrative, Lily highlights how her credibility as a teacher is diminished when her teaching practice is viewed through the educational lens that emphasises policydriven discourses of pragmatics. At the same time, not surprisingly, she noted the education community was reluctant to embrace radical relationality that characterised her teaching and learning practices. Within this, policy-driven discourses of pragmatics tend to promote dogmatic compliancy, in which teaching practices yield to a higher authority as a way of substantiating their value. Yet at the same time, Lily discussed the need for accountability (by herself and by f the children in the classroom). Rather than flippant, nonchalant, and random practices set in ignorance and naiveté, Lily’s teaching and learning practices were based on strong, courageous leadership. They are required to modulate tensions between the curriculum-as-plan and the lived curriculum and the material/discursive forces that underpin each approach. Performance-causality relationships require teachers and learners to be critically engaged with and in continual negotiation with the ecological, political, cultural, social, and material conditions of the present. As I move to the end of this chapter, I ask you, Reader, how your life might be different if you knew with every fibre of your being and your day-to-day practices were indeed performance-causality relationships that implicated every earthly critter, forest, river, lake, mountain, ocean, plain, desert, and every other human inhabiting a breathing, pulsating, and vibrant, lively planet; understanding that an affective lifeforce threads all of us together through entangled/differentiated relationships. In Chap. 6, I explore an entangled/differentiated relationship between environmental

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education and broader Western education models, moving to a more ecological account of environmental education that includes Researcher Worldings (Chap. 3), Researcher/Teacher Worldings (Chap. 4), and Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings (Chap. 5).

References Aoki, T. (1993). Legitimating lived curriculum: Towards a curricular landscape of multiplicity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 8(3), 255–268. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bertelsen, L., & Murphie, A. (2010). An ethics of everyday infinities and powers: Felix Guattari on affect and the refrain. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 138–161). Duke University Press. Blaise M., Hamm C., & Iorio, J. M. (2016) Modest witness(ing) and lively stories: Paying attention to matters of concern in early childhood. Pedagogy, Culture, & Society 25(31–42). https://doi. org/10.1080/14681366.2016.1208265 Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. University of Chicago Press. Government of Canada. (2018). Daily report for January 2018. http://climate.weather.gc.ca/ climate_data/daily_data_e.html?StationID=47707&month=1&day=18&timeframe=4&Year= 2018&Month=1&Day=18 Government of Saskatchewan. (2008). Moving forward with mandatory treaty education. https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/news-and-media/2008/september/15/movingforward-with-mandatory-treaty-education Haraway, D. (2008a). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2008b). Otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 157–185). Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hendee, J. C., & Dawson, C. P. (2002). Wilderness management: Stewardship and protection of resources and values (No. Ed. 3). Fulcrum Publishing. Huckle, J. (1999). Locating environmental education between modern capitalism and postmodern socialism: A reply to Lucie Sauvé. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (CJEE), 36–45. Hursh, D., Henderson, J., & Greenwood, D. (2015). Environmental education in a neoliberal climate. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 299–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2015. 1018141 Jacobs, H. H. (1989). Interdisciplinary curriculum: Design and implementation. https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED316506.pdf Kopnina, H. (2012). Education for sustainable development (ESD): The turn away from ‘environment’ in environmental education? Environmental Education Research, 18(5), 699–717. https:/ /doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.658028 Kopnina, H. (2015). Neoliberalism, pluralism and environmental education: The call for radical reorientation. Environmental Development, 15, 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2015. 03.005

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Kopnina, H. (2018). Education for sustainable development (ESD): The turn away from ‘environment’ in environmental education? In Environmental and sustainability education policy (pp. 699–717). https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.658028 Kopnina, H., & Meijers, F. (2014). Education for sustainable development (ESD): Exploring theoretical and practical challenges. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 15, 188–207. Kumar, A. (2018). Curriculum in international contexts: Understanding colonial, ideological, and neoliberal influences. Springer. Land, N. (2022). Rethinking awkwardness made in collisions of physical and early childhood education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989. 2022.2123462 Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S. L., Brown, M., Danis, I., & Nelson, N. (2020). Doing pedagogical intentions with facetiming common worlds (and Donna Haraway). Global Studies of Childhood, 10(2), 131–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610618817318 Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Polity Press. McKenzie, M. (2012). Education for Y’all: Global neoliberalism and the case for a politics of scale in sustainability education policy. Policy Futures in Education, 10(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/ 10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.165 McKenzie, M., Bieler, A., & McNeil, R. (2015). Education policy mobility: Reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 319–337. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13504622.2014.993934 Melnychuk, N., Robinson, D. B., Lu, C., Chorney, D., & Randall, L. (2011). Physical education teacher education (PETE) in Canada. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue Canadienne de L’éducation, 34(2), 148–168. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Taylor, A., & Blaise, M. (2016). Decentering the human in multispecies ethnographies. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 149–167). Palgrave Macmillan. Pike, G. (2015). Re-imagining global education in the neoliberal age: Challenges and opportunities. In Contesting and constructing international perspectives in global education (pp. 9–25). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-989-0_2 Rautio, P. (2017). A super wild story: Shared human-pigeon lives and the questions they beg. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 722–731. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417725353 Riley, K., & White, P. (2019). ‘Attuning-with’, affect, and assemblages of relations in a transdisciplinary environmental education. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), 262–272. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2019.30 Riley, K., & Proctor, L. (2022). The senses/sensing relationship in physical literacy: Generating a worldly (re)enchantment for physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 1–12. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2022.2071860 Robottom, I. (1991). Technocratic environmental education: A critique and some alternatives. Journal of Experiential Education, 14(1), 20–26. Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2010). Saskatchewan curriculum. https://www.curriculum. gov.sk.ca/webapps/moe-curriculum-BBLEARN/Home?language=en Schuetze, H. G., Kuehn, L., Davidson-Harden, A., Schugurensky, D., & Weber, N. (2011). Globalization, neoliberalism and schools: The Canadian story. In In the shadow of neoliberalism: Thirty years of educational reform in North America (pp. 62–84). https://doi.org/10.2174/978 160805268411101010062 Sellers, W., & Gough, N. (2010). Sharing outsider thinking: Thinking (differently) with Deleuze in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 589–614. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500631 Steen, S. (2003). Bastions of mechanism, castles built on sand: A critique of schooling from an ecological perspective. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 8(1), 191–203. https:// cjee.lakeheadu.ca/article/view/246

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Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies: Natures cultures spaces. Sage.

Winter’s retreat. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley. Winter had well and truly settled across the prairies. Snow crusted fields crunch underfoot as cirrostratus clouds streaked the sky; their pieces of frozen water suspended in mid-air. When darkness descends early and lingers long into frosty mornings, I am called into relationships of dark interiors/exteriors, interrogating, and searching the knotty, messy, uneven relations of myself with broader ecologies of the world. Today I don’t sit by the winter tree, but as I crouch down to examine the snow-crusted earth with glove-clad fingers, I considered accounts of global warming claiming that the Saskatchewan winter is getting warmer with more extreme storms and unpredictable snowfall patterns. In this moment by the Winter tree, I couldn’t see the visible cause and effects of global warming, but I knew it existed—I was haunted by its beings and becomings. Global warming is not an abstract and distant event framed through biological and geographical discourses; it is something inside of me (Saari & Mullen, 2020)

Chapter 6

Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings: Agential Worldings Outside the Classroom

Abstract As pedagogical events in Photographic Encounters brought forth affective bodily markings of anxiety and discomfort, they illuminated problematic discursive constructions in Western education. Embedded within prevailing globalising and neoliberal risk societies, these discursive constructions include an overemphasis on objectives and outcomes, indoor learning held in hierarchical superiority, and a universal we that fails to account good local citizenship. Thus, outdoor learning within environmental education-type teaching and learning practices is seen as deviant to normalising practices, and subsequently subjugated and marginalised within the status quo of educational practices. In response, I explore sympoietic systems thinking in this chapter to show how individual entities in/evolve with the broader ecological communities. As such I aim to locate environmental education as entangled/differentiated with broader Western education models. Keywords Dominant discourses · Outcomes-focused education · Risk societies · Indoor/outdoor binary classifications · Sympoietic systems

6.1 Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings Apparatus The fourth researcher/teacher enactment, Photographic Encounters, was designed as part of a pre-planned outdoor learning day trip that Lily had arranged for the children. She had organised a three-group rotation, in which the children would move around activities led by her, myself, and a local conservation officer. As I will explore in this chapter, Photographic Encounters was co-designed to encourage the children to develop different ways of thinking about the ways in which the self emerges through worldly becomings. It was not an anthropomorphising project, in which children were asked to categorise their understandings and/or experiences

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_6

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of Land based on the isolated and inert structuring of the human experience; but in relocating agency to encompass intraactions between human relationships with Land, Photographic Encounters was interested in the patterns of difference that emerge with/through worldly intraactions. Photographic Encounters sought to attune-with entangled human/Earth relationships, inviting children to consider the ways in which they are a part of a vital and lively co-constituting of realities. To accomplish this task, the children were given disposable cameras. As digital natives, I wondered how they would grapple with the nuanced logistics of these cameras. After all, there was no editing features, or the capacity to check, delete, retake. Yet the disposable cameras provided opportunities for spontaneity, free expression, and inventiveness in the picture-taking, capturing the organic nature of real-world and real-life unfoldings. The cameras were not used as an instrumental tool to learn about the Land; nor were they taken up as a toy; but as an active participant in the co-shaping of relationships with Land, the cameras were imbued with relational agency and, as such, were a vibrant, lively part of children’s becoming-withs (Ergler et al., 2016; Land et al., 2019). I do note, however, that Photographic Encounters did come with its own set of tensions, including my own sense of burgeoning anxiety as to how this activity might stack up against normalising agendas and processes of broader education models.

6.2 Tensions in Photographic Encounters Wandering-with brilliant greens of prairie grasses dotted with mahihkanâhtik/li sool li loo/wolf willow (Elaeagnus commutata), a kaleidoscope of whites and greys washed across the luminous blue sky that peeked through holes in the blanket of clouds (shown in Fig. 6.1). An afternoon downpour was routine for this time of the year, reawakening a flourishing Land from months upon months of coldness and darkness. Meandering our way through the grasses and passing ponds full of iýinisip/li kanaar/ mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos), I looked up to see a new gun-metal grey housing development meet the eastern horizon. The ducks were seemingly unaware of the urban expansion encroaching upon their habitats; nor were the children. As I handed the children their disposable cameras, I watched them scurry about the wolf willow taking turns to capture their emotions in a photograph. Stumbling upon decaying animal bones and daisies in the grasses that represented both fear and joy to the children, I realised how incredibly insightful, perceptive, and creative they were. Some children even attempted to braid grasses together, to portray how their emotions comprised of many different feeling threads. They appeared free and happy. But not me. As the tentacles of urbanisation crept into this endangered prairie ecosystem, I felt as cordoned and controlled as the edges of the fragile landscape juxtaposed against suburban Canada. I was struck by the evidence that these children showed obvious enthusiasm for this unstructured learning opportunity and a clear affinity for Land (likely generated through Lily’s leadership and advocacy for Land-based encounters). But I was stuck in narratives of what it meant to conduct teaching and

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learning that should yield important outcomes as prescribed by the curriculum policy. Photographic Encounters did attempt to impart ecological knowledge of flora and fauna varieties in the area. For example, we worked to identify mostoso-wîhkaskwa/ l’aarbr a saent/fringed sage (Artemisia frigida), âhâsiwiminâhtik/aen naarbr si koom aen nipinet avik lii gren vyalet/creeping juniper (Juniperus horizontalis), and lilac fringed Moostoos ohtsi/lii fleur di prayrii/prairie crocus (Anemone patens). In this way, the children could trust the truth of these plant names and their properties and then claim that they know something for a fact. Yet, the children did not learn this knowledge in the traditional way (i.e., from a textbook); rather this information was conveyed orally to them and connected with the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch.

6.3 Indoor/Outdoor Binaries in Environmental Education In conversations with Lily about my anxiety about the reliability of Photographic Encounters, she also admitted that she had encountered similar tensions that had surfaced in her relations with administrators, other teachers, parents, and even within herself. Collectively, as can be seen below in her explanation, these groups did not see outdoor learning as a learning opportunity; rather they saw what took place within the (safety) of the classroom and through books (representing formalised knowledge) as real learning, while outdoor learning was perceived as fun, and therefore, could not be constituted as serious learning. At the same time, each group offered different perspectives on the problems with outdoor learning. The school administrators were concerned about the risks that outdoor learning posed to the children. When we go outside, other teachers don’t think I am teaching. There are also tensions between me and administrators. Some administrators don’t believe in what I do as a teacher. They want me to always be making curricular connections in the classroom and I am constantly having to justify why I teach through the outdoors. They think that sometimes the risk is too high in having kids out and about. All the what ifs and what ifs and more what ifs. And sure, there are risks to the outdoors - think about the weather here in Saskatchewan! If I am out and about somewhere, am I prepared? Are the kids prepared? Well of course! Unfortunately, teachers in the past have not been prepared and they have kind of ruined it for me. We have policies in place in our school system, because of people who haven’t done it the right way and have caused us to have policy problems. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

School boards have become increasingly concerned about liability issues, given Canadian (and other Western countries) becoming more litigious, on the one hand, and children (and parents) gaining more rights, on the other. As societies are interconnected across national borders as part of the globalising conditions of our time, risk discourses are embedded within the wider culture and result in what Ulrich

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Fig. 6.1 Amongst the wolf willow. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley

Beck has deemed the risk society (Beck et al., 1992). For Beck, the man-made [sic] effects of modernity have called society to grapple with the way it manages risk; the capacity to avert risk is highly dependent on knowledge conveyed through mass media, yet at the same time, as mass media makes risk visible (which now in 2022 includes social media), societies change in negotiation with risk through processes of reflexive modernisation (Beck et al., 2003). Whereas the industrial society was organised around the production and distribution of goods, the risk society is concerned with the management and distribution of danger—relating to physical risk but also organisational activity and social relations. Thus, in the instance of school boards

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embedded within broader cultural discourses of risk, educational practices that hold an element of risk are regarded with trepidation. Moreover, Lily’s colleagues saw that outdoor learning is just a fieldtrip, and thus, not as important to what constitutes real learning in the classroom. This was also true for parents, who were concerned about the validity of outdoor learning. I get frustrated when fieldtrips are seen as learning outings, because it is not just a fieldtrip to me, it is a learning adventure. We never just get on a bus and come back like it is an escape from learning. I see the outdoors as a critical part of the learning journey, just as the classroom is. There are also parent tensions, in that some parents don’t understand what we are doing and sometimes they don’t understand that their kids are learning something in a different way. They want them to remain in their classroom roles, because they know what education was like for them and they want it like it was, because they all know education, because they all were educated. So, there are certainly tensions in having to continuously explain and justify what I am doing. I have to continually find research that supports what I’m doing, so that when I explain it, I can explain with research. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

Because the parents were schooled primarily in the classroom, Lily’s unconventional approach challenged their understanding of what a good education is. Their experience was inculcated as Regimes of Truth (Foucault, 1988)1 that privileged indoor learning in the classroom. This model has become so normalised in the Western education that when teaching practices deviate from such normal practice, they are perceived as less-than. As a result, outdoor learning is pitted against indoor learning. At the same time, Lily relies on other forms of truth-telling, namely research, to validate outdoor learning. Because research is based on scientific epistemology and practice, a highly valued activity in Western education, these findings offer a power countermand to the accepted regimes of truth. Still, it was clear from the above passage that Lily was exhausted in trying to find credibility for outdoor learning. At the heart of her concerns was the overemphasis on testing children. Sometimes I think it would just be easier to sit in the classroom and do whatever out of the book, because it takes way less energy to do things like that, than it does me being outside, and on at all times, giving up my preparation time, giving up my lunch hour, and for what? For people to judge me, every time I go outside? And all this obsession with data, and this test, and that test! I’m a teacher, so don’t even talk to me about data not being important. You need to know your kids and know where they’re at. And you need some sort of formulised way of doing that. But so much time and energy is being used for the more traditional ways of thinking. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

Testing is not synonymous with learning or assessment. Underpinning the obsession with data articulated as testing is a set of calculative tactics in education that prioritise 1

Examining the relationship between truth, power, and self, Foucault’s critiques of the structure/ freedom binary critically examined technologies of power in knowledge discourse. Arguing that discourse transmits and produces power, Foucault claimed that the homogenisation and institutionalisation of schools served to legitimise, rather than challenge, educational practices. For Foucault, this was the ambiguous and obscure productions of truth, in which practices that are privileged and normalised transform themselves into factual systems of discourse.

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objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, achievement, and performance within liberal, capitalist notions of community, often without collective responsibility (Noddings, 2015; Stevenson, 2008). These strategies reinforce the notion of the sovereign subject who is successful (or not) due to their individual hard work, merit, and talent. What is concerning, therefore, is how outdoor learning in environmental education is mediated by broader discourses of education and how this in turn further mediates educational processes towards normative ideologies (Lloro-Bidart, 2015). Lily’s critique of traditional models of Western education also reveals the ways in which the binary classifications of indoor/outdoor learning structures teaching practices. When Lily took environmental education outdoors and onto Land, her actions were seen as deviant by administrators, her peers, and parents. She was stepping outside (metaphorically and literally) of the boundaries of normal educational practices. Indoor education was marked by formal learning acquired through books, a curriculum that more closely adhered to the government’s policy goals, and a structure that imposed more control over the children’s behaviour and attitudes. In contrast, Lily’s outdoor learning practices promoted free expression and unbounded inquiry; they were dirty, messy, and unconventional (perhaps one would even say risky). But not in a disorderly, dishevelled, or unsafe way, but in a feral way that upended boundaries of domestic and captive in interrogating and disrupting the disciplining constraints and of social limits; a feral way that was not afraid to excavate human hubris and the trash of the Anthropocene to create human humus2 full of vitality and life (Adsit-Morris, 2017; Fawcett, 2009; Haraway, 2016).

6.4 Teaching-with the Outdoors in Environmental Education The indoor/outdoor binary also maps on to culture/nature divide. The indoors are understood as socioculturally constructed, and the outdoors, by inference, are understood as natural, as in untouched by humans or pristine wilderness (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017; Preston, 2014; Zink & Burrows, 2008). Various denotations of culture/ nature can be enacted. When the outdoors is (re)appropriated as a natural space not marked by culture, it is seen as a context-free, empty site of learning. Indeed, in early history of prairies, the land was often characterised as empty. But, of course, the prairies were not empty; they have been inhabited by Indigenous nations for thousands of years, but it was only when settlers arrived that the prairies were seen as occupied, inhabited by White people. The indoor/outdoor binary also maps onto the civilised/uncivilised divide, which itself can veer from denotations of the pure/impure and superior intelligence, sophisticated, educated/the inferior/naïve/ uneducated. These binaries are well-woven into the fabric of colonial imaginaries 2

Humus is the Latin word for a rich and nutrient-filled soil (ground, earth). It is also the root word for human.

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and have been marked and reworked to divide Indigenous nations and White Settlers, affirming the latter’s superiority. As colonial imaginaries understand the outdoors as a blank slate awaiting cultural inscription, as a space in which culture plays itself out (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017), teachers and learners often privilege the natural as a purer, more authentic space to provide new and better ways of being in the world. By engaging in the natural, we can remove layers of social conditioning through heroic quests to find our ourselves and our true nature. Notions of deep ecology can fall into this trap, as I described in Chapters 4 and 5. This image of the natural, however, reinscribes the nature/culture divide because the free and independent individual remains separate and detached from the Earth and earthly systems. This quick review of the multiple meanings of nature demonstrates that this image is neither fixed nor stable. Nor is the concept of environmental education. Indeed, it also has been taken up in different ways. Because environmental educators have failed to grapple with the meanings of nature, it has become an empty signifier3 ; it has multiple meanings and means nothing at the same time. To grapple with tensions inherent within indoor/outdoor binaries is to move away from the idea that the outdoors is something continuous and given, as a neutral site in which culture acts itself out, to (re)turn to the lively, vibrant materiality of the outdoors. Lily did not view the outdoors as a place to find herself, or as a place for her students to find themselves; rather, she taught with the outdoors as a strategy to proactively challenge norms of policy-driven, instrumental, technicist, mechanistic, rational, and reductionist teaching practices. Her perspectives meant that she did not position environmental education as an empty signifier, because for Lily, the outdoors are not defined by social descriptions but constituted through social and material relations (Massey, 2006). As Lily gathered people and Land in her conceptions of community, it was through the outdoors and through affects emerging from intraactions with Land, that she become empowered. The more confident and rebellious I become about the structures of education, the more I get outside, and the more I do with the connections I make within our city. The limiting structures are almost the reason I AM going outside! To live a different way and give the children different opportunities for growth. And, as a result, it becomes more and more accessible for me to go and do things with more connections that I make with community. And on, and on, and on we go. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

Being outdoors freed Lily of the constraints and disciplining effects of normalising Western education practices. Indeed, the more Lily spent time outside, the more resolute she became. She was able to forge a stronger sense of accessibility to, and with, community. She was able to build networks of connections with the people and Land of Saskatchewan. In turn, these relationships fuelled her desire to share these intraactions with the Grades 4 and 5 children, deepening and expanding their 3

Set within discursive structures of the social milieu, a signifier is the sound or image associated with something and the signified is the idea or concept of the thing formulating a sign into a meaningful unit (Karrow et al., 2022; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). So, to be empty, therefore, is to suggest that a thing has not formed into a meaningful unit.

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learning by venturing into the social and material fabrics of Saskatchewan beyond the confines of the schoolground. In Lily’s pedagogical practice, the outdoors are an integral part of the relational community that she was seeking to cultivate with the children. As Lily challenged colonial imaginaries that worked to stamp that the outdoors (Land) with discursive (social) meaning, she leaned into possibilities for children to feel their bodies with, and alongside, pulsating rhythms of the Earth. It was always a priority for Lily to return the children to school with dirt under their fingernails, sweat on their brows, and pieces of grass stuck to their hair. She wanted the children to have bodily memories that housed smells of deep green conifer forests; sights of beaver heads bobbing curiously upon the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy/South Saskatchewan River, often alongside river banks awash with cigarette butts and long-forgotten about beverage containers; touches of snow cold against trembling fingers; sounds of chickadees gossiping in the forest, alongside the reverberating engines of semi-trailers barreling along adjacent ring roads; tastes of hot chocolate made from the heat of a child-made campfire; and an intuition that they were as much a part of Land, as Land was a part of them. In the current discussions about the socioecological crises, scientists, politicians, journalists, and beyond have exhorted us that we-are-all-in-this-together. But who is the ‘we’ in these times of the Anthropocene (Benessia & Funtowicz, 2015; Braidotti, 2019; Lloro-Bidart, 2015; Nelson et al., 2018; Sund & Öhman, 2014)? While we are all vulnerable to the effects of the Anthropocene, there is no universal experience; socioecological crises are not felt in the same way across the planet and too often the world’s most vulnerable nations suffer disproportionately as they endure the worst of human-induced climate change derived from the burning of fossil fuels in economically wealthy countries (United Nations, n.d). For example, as I write, climate change has resulted in unprecedented high temperatures in North-western India and South-eastern Pakistan. This heat wave has claimed at least ninety lives and has triggering flooding from glacial melting in the Himalayas, wildfires, and power shortages that has stunted India’s wheat crop, and thus, contributed to an emerging global food crisis (Fountain, 2022). Closer to home in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, a collaborative study between Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and local communities is researching seabird health in the northern waters that run between Canada and Greenland. As increased human activity in the Arctic generates economic opportunities, it is not without habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation for northern fulmars/qaqulluk4 (Fulmarus glacialis), black-legged kittiwakes/tiratira (Rissa tridactyla), thick-billed murres/atpa, akpa (Uria lomvia), and black guillemots/pittiulaaq (Cepphus grille). Moreover, the health of Inuit communities that depend on local food sources is at risk, as Arctic food chains become contaminated and unsafe for consumption (Government of Canada, 2021). Concerns over climate change have addressed in Canadian classrooms, connecting the local with global dynamics in which the poor, undeveloped countries are seen in need of Western help—even from the Grades 4 and 5 children. This narrative has 4

Native names are from the Asuilaak Inuktitut Living Dictionary (https://www.gov.nu.ca/in/search/ node/).

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been promoted by the Canadian We-Day charity, which organised events to celebrate youth empowerment in addressing local and global issues. Lily was troubled by the non-inclusive nature of we through a critique of We-day,5 noting the contradictions between the request for food and funds from children who are experiencing food insecurity. We [laughing aloud] need to be informed and make decisions about economics and futures. We need to give away the egocentricism. It is not the me but the us, not the we, but the us. I am not interested in the cheerleading palaver of We-day. This started off as a gracious, lovely thing where this young boy decided that he wanted to do a lot of work with helping people all over the world and then it became this big social media event. Meanwhile, I teach kids who struggle with food every day. And as the We-day campaign talked about global struggles with food, I looked upon the kids sitting next me who struggle--the very kids who were being asked to give food and money to others. Sitting next to me were the people in my community that needed help. It made me feel incredibly sad. We…are you serious [laughing aloud] …I am saying we again even though I am trying to negate the idea of, we! [laughing aloud]. Let me try again…you and I…and everyone else in our profession… need to rethink these things. So, for me, the we is about starting with no place like home. We should not forget about the world, there are a lot of global issues to think about and act upon, but we need to think about how our community might be suffering, engaging more with local issues, right here at our feet. And the biggest connection to community that you are going to have, is the connection with Land, the “ass on grass, feet on sand” kind of thing. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

Lily poignantly observes that the we in We-day is grounded a globalising discourse that negates contextualised, emplaced, and situated issues within local communities.6 For her, we begins at home within locally embedded approaches to rethinking socioecological justice. Critically acknowledging a universal we fails to consider what good local citizenship might look like through its instrumental relationship between learning, citizenship, and democracy, Lily adopted hands-on, experimental, and multisensory engagements with Land to forge local and emplaced citizenship (Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2014). Thus, rather than a we-are-all-one bumper sticker slogan,7 the dictum we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same 5

From 2007 to 2020, We-day was an annual series of stadium-sized events, organised by Canadian, We-Day charity, to celebrate youth empowerment in addressing local and global issues. 6 Alongside many other controversial critiques of We-Day associated with corruption and funding. 7 This idea is rooted in Murray Bookchin’s (1962) social ecology. For Bookchin, the ecological crisis is derived from a social crisis, and that the roots of ecological problems are sourced from a dislocation in society. Bookchin’s ecological consciousness was different to that of the transcendental nature of deep ecology, cautioning against notions of romantic nature worship within mystical approaches. Calling deep ecology a flippant abstraction of human individuality, Bookchin (1987) argued against all-encompassing definitions of community. Rather, in his critiques of industrialism and capitalism, Bookchin (1971) emphasised that the laws of the marketplace should reflect those of ecological systems integrating all living beings and their relationships within the biosphere. In his arguments that disastrous environmental consequences would inevitably prevail through the marketplace reducing the world to merchandise, Bookchin contended that decentralisation was crucial to deconstruct and overturn social hierarchies that gave rise to the domination of nature. Bookchin synergistically integrated liberal and socialist political understandings, drawing upon the importance of individual freedom within societal constructs (liberalist position) and equality within these

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(Braidotti, 2017) better captures the challenges that we face in these times of the Anthropocene.

6.5 Intraacting Me/Us Relationships in Sympoietic Systems To situate ourselves as part of the worlds we inhabit, therefore, is to hold together complex patternings of diverse, multiple, and often sticky, uneven knottings in all our worldly intraactions. Here, we open to sympoietic (from the Greek sym: collective and poieses: creation or production) systems, to imply that one is always worlding-with or making-with in company, as nothing makes itself (Adsit-Morris, 2017; Haraway, 2016). The concept of sympoiesis has its origins in alternate approach to evolution—symbiogenesis (sym: bringing together, bio: life, and genesis: to produce or create) proposed by Boris Kozo-Polyansky in 1921. Rather than emphasising individual competition and natural selection based on survival of the fittest, symbiogenesis theory proposed that these neo-Darwinist concepts should be replaced by stories of co-evolution within sympoiesis.8 As sympoietic systems are organisationally ajar; they have a degree of uncertainty as to when a system might change and to what it might change into, particularly since external sources only influence rather than determine the organisation of the system (Dempster, 2000). Change, however, occurs as the system acts in a self-determined manner (autopoiesis), which means that sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis through a generative unfurling and extending set in friction, but not opposition. In sympoietic systems, there is no central point of reference, as two heterogeneous ways of being need each other because without the other neither would be able to sustain its own longevity (Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 2005). Crucially, however, in the face of impoverished socioecological systems in these times of the Anthropocene, we are not all response-able in the same ways; differences matter through different scales of accountability and obligation for sustaining the integrity of systems for multispecies flourishing (Haraway, 2016; Liboiron, 2021). As this project unfolded, Lily and I were entangled in a sympoietic relationship with one another; but also, with the needs and demands of peers, the children, their parents, and administrators, and the local/global discourses in which they were embedded. Working with the tensions and contradictions generated by these social constructs (socialist position). In his later writings, Bookchin broke away from anarchistic positions, settling upon ideas of communalism through ideas of libertarian municipalism. 8 Sympoietic systems do not have self-defined boundaries but are complex, boundaryless, dynamic, and collectively producing systems in their making-with and becoming-with (Haraway, 2016). Systemhood in sympoiesis, then, synergistic behaviours that emphasise linkages, feedback, and cooperation (Dempster, 2000). Sympoietic systems differ from Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s (1980) explanations of the phenomena of living organisms, conceived of as autopoiesis (Greek auto: self and poieses: creation or production) in the 1970s. Autopoietic systems are organisationally closed in their internal reproduction of the same patterns of relations, through a continual recursive re-creation of self in determining their own autonomous spatial and temporal boundaries (Haraway, 2016). Because autopoietic systems are self-organising and contain their own patterns of organisation through boundaries of organisational closure, they restrict adaptation and change.

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entanglements, which included anxiety and frustration, such tensions and contradictions generated adaptation and transformation through dynamic, continual, and reiterative involution (as different to evolution). In this way, I encountered change through experiments with my own being in relationship with Lily, the Grades 4 and 5 students, the wider community of people and Land, environmental education curriculum policy, and broader discourses of Western education models. Undergoing change and transformation is not always a joyful experience; it can be fraught with violence, discomfort, anguish, and decay, and death (Barad, 2012, 2017; jagodzinski, 2021). (Re)Orienting ourselves across new and different mappings, patterns, stories, assemblages, and worldings away from the status quo can be daunting and scary. But it doesn’t mean we don’t feel the fear and do it anyway; after all, it is emotions that will often drive action within lived situations (Bright & Eames, 2022). Emerging in a togetherness relationship with all the converging and diverging stories of intersecting and overlapping worldings means that binaries no longer can be understood as categories that are dualistic, oppositional, and hierarchically organised. Indeed, the notion of binaries is undermined as distinctive boundaries are replaced by the idea of entanglements of difference. Thus, as there is nothing outside of us; nature is not outside of us. And if human/Earth relationships are understood as an entanglement of all life on the planet, then indoor/outdoor binary classifications that structure Western education models fall away to reveal agential worldings outside the classroom. As environmental education is imbued with the materiality of things enacted, or things-in-phenomena, the field is far from an empty signifier; it is far from proliferating through many contested meanings full of ambiguity. Rather, through the materiality of things enacted, the field is brimming with contextual relevance and situated meanings as bodies intermingle with worldly ecologies. Almost two decades ago, David Orr (2004) claimed that “all education is environmental education” (p. 13). This has never made more sense to me than now. As the spring merged into summer and school was dismissed for the academic year, my active collaboration with Lily came to a close. Yet my relationship with Lily didn’t end there but merely changed forms: we were no longer a researcher/teacher but something more like friends. Saying my goodbyes to Lily and the Grades 4 and 5 children, I drove away from the car park with a trunk full of stories, artefacts, pictures, photographs, scribbles, doodles, and official documents; etchings of our time together that would now help me go about (re)storying human/Earth relationships in this book. I know I left etchings upon Lily’s world too. For Lily, the researcher/teacher enactments were also a success because she continued to use them in her day-to-day teaching practices. These practices worked and will certainly show themselves again in time. The pictures [Photographic Encounters] were a beautiful way of expression, and in fact, we are using this activity in our community building, thinking around the work that I am doing with Truth and Reconciliation. I think the way that we gathered material things and built an Eco-Art Installation, and then had the kids explain why they chose those things, I liked that. We didn’t just make an Eco-art Installation, but it was purposeful connection building, and a very easy way for kids to be able to show their connections. We could also show deep learning connections to the drawings

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done in Mapping Worlds and printed photographs from Photographic Encounters. These are things you could describe to parents, to use as an assessment tool.

Not only did these projects offer creative opportunities connecting the children to other worldings, they also could be used as an assessment tool! That admission made me smile and shake my head; I now understood that I wasn’t concerned about the validity of Photographic Encounters for assessment but was caught up in the discursive mouse wheel and its incessant spinning of truth games that brought testing and data into the spotlight while casting embodied, sensual teaching and learning encounters into the pallid background. Lily was not only pleased with our researcher/teacher enactments in practice, but they affirmed her approach to teaching and that she was indeed having an impact on the children. This feedback was especially important because parents, administrators, and even her colleagues did not appreciate the possibilities that reside in outdoor learning within the field of environmental education. I think the conversations that we’ve had have been beneficial and to see what is being written about how I am affecting kids is powerfully humbling. It is intriguing to look at myself through your lens, and to understand myself through what you notice in my teaching, and what you are pulling out from this stuff. It’s confirmation of the things that I do within my teaching, because we don’t get a lot of handshakes, because people don’t understand, don’t believe, or don’t know how to do these things in environmental education. Anything that is new and scary, they will not look at. So, that has been very powerful for me. I think it’s also powerful in how easily the children connected and accepted our relationship. They have accepted you, and worked with you, so that makes my heart full, because I can see that I am helping them to be good citizens and I recognise the connections that we’ve made as a team of learners; so that when people join our team, they are welcome. For me, that is community. (Transcribed Researcher/Teacher Meeting Notes, 2018)

The most significant lesson I have learned from this work is that a (re)storying of human/Earth relationships is surely enacted from one’s own affective engagement with worlds (indoor, outdoor, and everything in between). As Lily said, with the “ass on grass, feet on sand”.

References Adsit-Morris, C. (2017). Restorying environmental education: Figurations, fictions, and feral subjectivities. Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, K. (2012). On touching—The inhuman that therefore I am. Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23(3), 206–223. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943 Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56–86. Beck, U., Bonss, W., & Lau, C. (2003). The theory of reflexive modernization: Problematic, hypotheses and research programme. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2), 1–33. Beck, U., Lash, S., & Wynne, B. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Vol. 17). Sage. Benessia, A., & Funtowicz, S. (2015). Sustainability and techno-science: What do we want to sustain and for whom? International Journal of Sustainable Development, 18(4), 329–348.

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Bookchin, M. (1962). Our synthetic environment. Knopf (published under the pseudonym ‘Lewis Herber’ [1975]). Harper & Row. Bookchin, M. (1971). Post-scarcity anarchism. Ramparts Press. Bookchin, M. (1987). Social ecology versus deep ecology: A challenge for the ecology movement. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-ecology-versus-deepecology-a-challenge-for-the-ecology-movement Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman, all too human: The memoirs and aspirations of a posthumanist Proceedings from the 2017 Tanner Lectures. Yale University. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/ Manuscript%20for%20Tanners%20Foundation%20Final%20Oct%201.pdf Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity. Bright, M. L., & Eames, C. (2022). From apathy through anxiety to action: Emotions as motivators for youth climate strike leaders. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2021.22 Dempster, B. (2000). Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: A new distinction for self-organizing systems. In J. K. Allen & J. Wilby (Eds.), Proceedings of the World Congress of the Systems Sciences and ISSS, Toronto. Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R., Witten, K., & Porter, G. (2016). Digital methodologies and practices in children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 14(2), 129–140. Fawcett, L. (2009). Feral sociality and (un)natural histories. In M. McKenzie, P. Hart, H. Bai, & B. Jickling (Eds.), Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education. Hampton Press. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self (a seminar with Michel Foucault at the University of Vermont, October 1982). In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. Tavistock Publications. Fountain, H. (2022, May 23). Climate change fuels heat wave in India and Pakistan, scientists find. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/climate/india-pakistan-heat-waveglobal-warming.html Government of Canada. (2021). Inuit Knowledge, science and ECCC: Collaborations for better understanding of northern ecosystems. https://science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/98330.html Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. jagodzinski, j. (2021). Quantum creativity: Afracting new materialism in the Anthropocene. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10778004211066633 Karrow, D. D., Fazio, X., & Zandvliet, D. (2022). What’s in a Name? The Signifiers and Empty Signifiers of Environmental Sustainability Education: Implications for Teacher Education. Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 31(2), 109–130. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. Verso. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S. L., Danis, I., Brown, M., & Nelson, N. (2019). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1574339 Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press. Lloro-Bidart, T. (2015). A political ecology of education in/for the Anthropocene. Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 6, 128–148. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2015.060108 Massey, D. (2006). Landscape as a provocation: Reflections on moving mountains. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1–2), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.jepm.2005.11.00 Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. D. Reidel Pub. Nelson, N., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Nxumalo, F. (2018). Rethinking nature-based approaches in early childhood education: Common worlding practices. Journal of Childhood Studies, 43(1), 4–14. Noddings, N. (2015). A richer, broader view of education. Society, 52(3), 232–236. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s12115-015-9892-4

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Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610617703831 Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment and the human prospect. First Island Press. Preston, L. (2014). Students’ imaginings of spaces of learning in outdoor and environmental education. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 14(2), 172–190. https://doi.org/10. 1080/14729679.2013.835167 Saari, A., & Mullen, J. (2020). Dark places: Environmental education research in a world of hyperobjects. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), 1466–1478. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 04622.2018.1522618 Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196. Stevenson, R. B. (2008). A critical pedagogy of place and the critical place(s) of pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 14(3), 353–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/135046208021 90727 Sund, L., & Öhman, J. (2014). On the need to repoliticise environmental and sustainability education: Rethinking the postpolitical consensus. Environmental Education Research, 20(5), 639–659. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.833585 United Nations. (n.d). On the frontline of climate crisis, worlds most vulnerable nations suffer disproportionately. https://www.un.org/ohrlls/news/frontline-climate-crisis-worlds-most-vulnerablenations-suffer-disproportionately Van Poeck, K., & Vandenabeele, J. (2014). Education and sustainability issues: An analysis of publics-in-the-making. In G. Biesta, M. De Bie & D. Wildemeersch (Eds.), Civic learning, democratic citizenship and the public sphere. Springer Science+Business Media. Zink, R., & Burrows, L. (2008). ‘Is what you see what you get?’ The production of knowledge in-between the indoors and the outdoors in outdoor education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 13(3), 251–265.

Cluster Three: Becoming

Spring’s offerings. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley. I rise from my dreams at dawn, as fragile leaves sprout upwards and rise to the morning sun. The days are becoming longer this time of year, as I meet a golden light, expanded perspectives, and energetic awakenings. Mapping lines of flight from one worlding to another, the politics and ethics of human/Earth relationships are under review. While human/Earth relationships are messy, dynamic, chaotic, and all too often imbued with an anthropocentric and humancentric gaze of what matters, one sentiment pulls at me like the tug of the Spring tree inviting me to stay awhile under its fresh branches: Just because we don’t see it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—although there are usually signs that something does exist, even the smallest traces. Under the Spring tree that day, I saw the roots snaking outwards and find their way to the underground. There was a whole lively, vibrant, and interconnected underworld beneath me. Thinking about dark earthly matter juxtaposed with luminous Spring glows above, I wondered what it might mean if we learned to live with our feet firmly planted between earth and sky; not escaping, transcending, or rebuking worldly realities, but grounded in, and with, all its hauntings and darkness

Chapter 7

Becoming (Partially) Posthumanist

Abstract To grapple with the research provocation offered in the Chap. 1, How and why do material/discursivities within, and between, intraacting Researcher/ Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings (re)story human/Earth relationships?, in this chapter, I draw on the moments of rupture storied in Chaps. 3–6 to bring stories forward into thick presents and still possible futures (Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016). Specifically, I draw on ecological, biological, ethical, sociocultural, and political forces that have generated moments of rupture to show how Lily and I, as a researcher/teacher collaborator, took up new and different lines of flight for new and different stories, assemblages, and worldings in/for environmental education. Such worldings worked to affectively and effectively navigate the middle space between identarian categories, boundaries, and borders to illuminate difference as affirmative through notions of relational agency; and, locate teaching and learning practices within contextualised, emplaced, and situated (micro) politics of location. Keywords Moments of rupture · Affect · Relational agency · Globalised localities · New and different stories

7.1 De/Recomposing Assemblages Once, when I was about 9 years old, I got stuck in a rip current. Growing up with the ocean, I was a strong swimmer from a very young age, and I always felt competent and confident in the Gunnamatta surf. Yet one hot January day, as the thundering shore breakers lost their high tide power and began their slow retreat into peeling, barrel waves, I ventured out into the water. Splashing around with 9-year-old delight, I was as free as a bird. Kicking sand beneath my feet, I duck-dived under the gentle roll of salty turquoise ocean, and tumble turned 360s like a hyperactive synchronised swimmer. But then suddenly, I realised I could no longer feel sand beneath my feet; nor the waves rolling in over my head. I was in a trough of very calm water; and in turning to look to the shoreline, I expected to see my Dad sitting directly behind © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2_7

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me. He was not there. Instead, he was frantically running down the beach flailing his arms to get my attention. I was slowly moving out to sea between the breaking waves; my heart reverberated in my ears. In a fit of panic, my 9-year-old brain told me to swim as hard as I possibly could against the rip current and try to force my way back to shore. As shoulders and arms collapsed under intense lactic acid build up, my breath was shallow and quick. I could hear my Dad yelling from the shore, “Kathy, don’t struggle, try to relax!!! Let the water take you! Swim along the angle of the shore!” It seemed like an impossibly hard task when all my inbuilt alarm sensors were screeching to do the opposite. My face awash with salty tears, and my throat stinging every time I gasped for air; somehow, I managed to locate some logic. Rolling over and beginning to backstroke diagonal along the shoreline, it was only a few moments before I was free from the rip current. As whitewash crashed over my face once again, I knew I was safe. The flow of the shore-bound waves would take me back to my Dad. Sitting back on the beach that day, wrapped in a towel and my Dad’s care, we watched a group of surfers paddle out along the same rip current that I had struggled against only minutes before. My Dad explained to me that surfers will often look for a rip current to paddle swiftly beyond the surf zone (colloquially known as the breakers), using the flow of the channel of water as a method to avoid the onslaught of oncoming waves. This way, they wouldn’t need to expend as much energy duck-diving through the surf. It was in this moment that I realised rip currents mean very different things to different people. Weaving this story of the past with stories of the present, I wonder how environmental educators might engage with difference, engage with their surfer-ness to get out past the breakers and generate different stories, assemblages, and worldings? We can resist the ecological forces that demand different stories in these times of the Anthropocene and do nothing: perhaps we sit on the shorelines, because to get our feet wet means we must touch all that it means to be living amongst socioecological precarity, injustices and threats. Another scenario is to rebuke ecological forces and get stuck in panic along a rip current, exhausting ourselves against the ecological forces of in this ocean of despair. In this scenario, we might even drown. Alternatively, and like the knowing surfer, we could respond to the ecological forces of the Anthropocene and follow the flows of difference that disrupt the powerful waves (literally and metaphorically) of globalisation, neoliberalism, capitalism, and colonialism that flood the shorelines in a perpetual and pervasive tidal pull. The goals of this book have been to offer a (re)storying of human/Earth relationships in environmental education for these times of the Anthropocene. Along with Lily, I have sought to trouble the grand narratives in environmental education, namely the ubiquity of sustainable development’s policy-driven discourses of pragmatics. We did not seek to overturn the system. Rather we found that a (re)storying of human/Earth relationships was made possible through moments of rupture; the small fissures within everyday habits of thought that initiate a minor, dissident flow that spreads away from spaces housing dominant systems of signification (Gough & Adsit-Morris, 2020; Roy, 2003). This break in the natural order of things is not unlike the ecological force of waves eroding shorelines to initiate a break in the sandbar—a moment of rupture—which

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then, in turn, initiates an off-shore flow, or rip current, that escapes back out to the sea (water will always seek its own level). Since a break in the sandbar is different from the rest of the shoreline, this difference creates a rip current that flows back through the powerful charge of water rushing towards shorelines. The rip current follows a channel that pulls water through the breakers, dissipating as soon as it reaches deeper water (shown in Fig. 7.1). Just like the break in the sandbar and subsequent rip currents demonstrate different patterns of being within broader ocean ecologies, the break in normalising practices of environmental education, for Lily and me, showed different patterns of being within broader (environmental) education discourses— albeit sparking many moments of discomfort! As Lily and I followed the flows of difference within our environmental education-type teaching and learning practices, we moved with the demands of these times of the Anthropocene while becoming critical practitioners for socioecological change and transformation. While the break in the sandbar originates from the ecological force of waves, the break in normalising practices of environmental education for Lily and me, however, originated from biological, ethical, sociocultural, political, and ecological forces given the discursive (social) embeddedness of environmental education. In the following section, I draw out some of the forces that generated moments of rupture for Lily and me—the significant breaks in normalising practices of environmental education that helped us enact a (re)storying of human/Earth relationships. I need to add a caveat: I appreciate there were many of these breaks along the way, as storied in these chapters, and you might be asking why I have chosen these specific breaks. I can’t really give an answer to this, except to say that through the sensing of events, I followed the data that glowed (MacLure, 2013). Since I am interested in the

Fig. 7.1 Rip currents at Gunnamatta. Source and Photo credit Life Saving Victoria (2018)

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multisensory, thick, materiality of affect within, and between, Researcher/Teacher/ Environmental Education worlds, I focused on affects emerging from the relational networks of intraactions (Hughes & Lury, 2013). I was drawn to the data for what it showed of relationships, not what it showed of action; struck by various intensities of affect that left traces upon my body’s senses-sensing. The data had its own way of making itself known to me as it resonated through seductive, transformative moments that generated new modes of existence (Lather, 2013; MacLure, 2013). This sensesensing was not a spiritual encounter, nor did it reinstate hierarchies between what counts as important/not important. Working with the materiality of affect meant I responded to the data from a place of realism not romanticism, in that through various intraactions (including with people, animals, landscapes, machines, text), my body was ignited with curiosity and inspiration in varying degrees. Thus, the discursive breaks that I explore in this chapter are all imbued with psychological and biological forces that pulled the/my body into action, leading me to highlight them in this chapter. Your breaks, however, might be quite different to mine. But you might also resonate with broader patterns of environmental education that I discuss below from your own positionality and practices. The job here is to pass on the torch for the co-creation of new stories, assemblages, and worldings.

7.2 Break One: Ethical Forces Moving Identity to Nomadic Multiplicities of Subjectivities Threaded throughout the narratives in this book is the pervasive social and ecological injustices that have occurred due to feats of human exceptionalism and supremacism in these times of the Anthropocene. These systems of beliefs, as I have noted, have a long history and are deeply seated in Western metaphysics. At their core, they rest on a hierarchical ordering based on binary classifications: male/female, human/nonhuman, white/racialised, coloniser/colonised, reason/emotion, and so forth. Those entities positioned in the second part of the binary are deemed to be Other, and have been, and continue to be (albeit in different ways over time), marginalised, subjugated, dominated, and/or exploited. Following this, if environmental education teaching and learning practices continues to (even inadvertently) think through binary classifications, then difference will continue to be met through dualistic and oppositional positions, with the real issue here being the hierarchical power structures of a dualistic and oppositional different that reifies marginalised, subjugated, dominated, and/or exploited Other(s). These tensions were at the forefront of Lady-Backpacker storytelling in Chap. 3, in which I grappled with the marginalised positionality of female within androcentric discourses of surfing, and then in Chaps. 4–6, I recognised that my positionality was structured by the power relations of race, class, and colonialism. As a White/Western/ Settler researcher/teacher living, learning, researching, and teaching on Land/land, I am embedded in, and troubled by, histories of settler colonialism and within colonial

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structures of Saskatchewan education. To paraphrase the words of the sociologist Allan G. Johnson (2011) (who was writing about patriarchy), “By participating in [these power relations], we are of [these power relations] and it of us. Both exist through the other and neither can exist without the other” (p. 31). We can, however, forge alternate paths. Thus, as Lily and I met ethical forces that demanded a response-ability to the dominant environmental educational discourses, we leaned into complex affective materiality that pulled our bodies to know ourselves through Other(s) through sensessensing. Such processes did not mean that I transcended my femaleness; nor did it mean that Lily and I transcended our White/Western/Settler-selves. We also did not try to annihilate identarian categories of female or White/Western/Settler and blend them into their opposite. Instead, as discussed in Chap. 4, Lily and I looked for ways to illuminate relationships with an ecological community of kindred beings through agential realism’s ethico-onto-epistemological (re)configuration of the subject/object as entangled/differentiated. Such move sought to avoid appropriating or co-opting Indigenous cultural and spiritual ontologies of Land. As storied in Mindful Walking and Mapping Worlds, Lily and I started from the grounded, lived, embodied, and embedded (micro) politics of location as a Female/ White/Western/Settler to open to a dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative becoming-with each other, the Grades 4 and 5 children, Mojo the âhâsiw/enn kornay/ crow (Corvusbrachyrhynchos), a dead kêhkêhkaen/mwaanoo/house sparrow (Passer domesticus), lopsided trees and hills, messy clouds, graffiti-clad benches, chipped metal poles, burnt Autumn grass, pencil crayons, and crumpled, dirt-smeared paper. In this way, the identarian categories of female/White/Western/Settler are not static, stable, rigid, or fixed, but our female/White/Wester/Settler-ness is nomadic. We dwell within multiplicities of subjectivities that are always in flux and flow within emplaced and situated contexts. Crucially, without fixed, solidified essences, worldmaking is always relational, and therefore, realities are made but not made up (Hayles, 2006). That is, realities are not only discursively constructed as people bring their beliefs, values, attitudes, and worldviews to any given situated context, but realities are coconstituted and co-implicated through a chiasmic dance of discursive and material forces entangled/differentiated together. While I am not in any kind of position to account for anyone/anything else’s story but my own, it is crucial that I set my story within affirmations of an interdependent and interconnected togetherness relationships. We are inhabitants of a globally interconnected network of other biological species and machines with which we share the planet (Hayles, 2006). Once, we accept, however, that humans are part of a complex global system, living with other agents and entities within that system, then the human subject becomes decentred. No longer do we need to see as ourselves as individual subjects. Rather a posthumanist viewpoint invites us to examine relationship between beings and the things that make up the world (Snaza & Weaver, 2015). Posthumanism is both liberating and challenging. I find it scary, humbling, and exhilarating living in this posthumanist world. As a theory and a practice, it has offered me a new way of thinking, being, and participating in the world. But, as

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Haraway (1988) has observed, one cannot be posthuman rather one is always in a state of becoming posthuman through a dynamic, ongoing, continual, and reiterative unfolding of events. Since knowing is contingent within the present-moment intraactions of any given emplaced context, worldmaking, therefore, can only ever be temporary and partial. Knowledges, as Haraway has observed, are always situated (Haraway, 1988). In becoming (partially) posthumanist I actively remain grounded and open to a worldly (re)enchantment in these messy, confusing, and often terrifying times of the Anthropocene. I also understand the paradox in remaining grounded in a world that is unstable through constant and dynamic flux and change. Just like my first encounters with the vast prairies of Saskatchewan, in which the lack of handrails caused a disorienting dislocation of my sense of self in the world, remaining grounded is not relying on any external world for a sense of stability. Rather, it means turning attention to the relationships between the categories, boundaries, and borders and understanding that the thread of the relationships that hold us all together. Being grounded enables the development of sustainable thoughts, actions, and modes of behaviour and requires an ethic of care that is set within relationality.

7.3 Break Two: Sociocultural Forces Moving Humancentred Agency to Relational Agency Lily and I were well-accustomed to sociocultural forces in (environmental) education that work to constrain and discipline the ways in which teaching and learning is actualised in any given indoor/outdoor classroom. For example, as I explored in the Introduction and in Chaps. 2 and 6, normalising educational processes are embedded within policy-driven discourses of pragmatics that manifest in instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic teaching and learning practices prioritising objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, achievement, and performance within liberal, capitalist notions of community, often without collective responsibility. To practice outside of these norms is seen to be deviant and is often met with suspicion, as Lily and I found out. We were not seen as team players; nor was what we taught not always perceived as real learning, or good pedagogy mostly because our practices did not seek statistical validation. To grapple with these tensions, Lily and I did not seek to rage against the machine, rather we looked for the small openings, the tiniest of cracks and subtle fissures and trickles that could move us to generate change and transformation within the disciplining constraints of the broader systems in which were worked. We were not only surfers using the rip current to get out beyond the breakers, but we were also the rip current! While we were going against the tide, so to speak, as I figured out as a nine-year-old girl, rip currents are not dangerous if you learn how to use them productively. The first move for Lily and I was to reposition agency as something humans have to an understanding of agency that occurs in relationship with others. This shift enabled us to revision our understanding of human relationships with the

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Earth—not just as site of domination, control, and consumption, but as an entity to which we are relationally interconnected through an irreducible and materially bounding in togetherness. With this insight, we changed the ways in which we taught the students by reframing the curriculum from an overemphasis on curriculum-as-plan to approaches imbued with an entangled/differentiated curriculum-as-plan and lived stories. As I indicated in Chap. 5, Lily and I were not focused on behaviour change models within sustainable development discourses of the Saskatchewan Social Studies curriculum; we were not interested to teach the Grades 4 and 5 children about the Earth, or about human relationships with the Earth (whether in Saskatchewan as relevant to Grade 4 curriculum or Canada as relevant to Grade 5 curriculum). Instead, we sought hands-on, experimental, and sensual engagements with the Earth through multisensory and embodied teaching and learning practices that enacted a touching, listening, feeling, and living-with Land. In this approach, there was literally no separation of the children’s bodies from the Earth. Indeed, the children enacted worldmaking practices through senses-sensing with the Earth. For example, in the Eco-art Installation researcher/teacher enactment, the children came to understand the life cycles of trees endemic to Saskatchewan [namely minahikwak /aen nipinet (white and blue) spruce (Picea glauca and Picea pungens), sesipâskwatâhtikwak/lii zaraab/maples (Acer saacharinum), wâpimitosak /Li Traamb/trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), and waskway/ li bolo/white birch (Betula papyrifera)] because the children held their broken, decaying branches in their hands. The tree’s story of conception (seed), birth (sprout), infancy (seedling), juvenile (sapling), adult (mature), to elderly (decline), and death was co-mingled with fingers, minds, and hearts of the Grades 4 and 5 children. Here, Lily and I attended to the lived stories of the Grades 4 and 5 children in seeking to understand their unique and nuanced relationships with the branches and bark, amongst other assorted artefacts that were collected. And in doing so, we were able to produce teaching and learning practices that connected to a myriad of curricular outcomes across a wide range of disciplines, including Arts Education, English Language Arts, Health Education, Science, Social Studies, and Cross-Curricular Competencies. I can appreciate that not all forms of humancentric agency is set in dominating, exploitive, and extractive pursuits of Other(s) and that many people have good intentions towards developing socioecological justice from humanist perspectives. The difficulty with this approach, however, is that it enacts a negative bonding through grief, sadness, guilt, fear, and hopelessness for the losses of past/present/future on Earth or that we should enact a transcendental escape of reality (Braidotti, 2009). A relational understanding of the world, however, is built upon a different rationality: if worldmaking is co-constituted and co-implicated, then we are always accountable, response-able, and obligated to Other(s) through our attachments within infrastructures of inequity (Braidotti, 2011; Liboiron, 2021). In the sharing of a finite planet, a relational understanding of the world has the potential to bring forth creative, collaborative, and cooperative worldmaking practices for living in, and with, the injustices and threats of the Anthropocene.

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7.4 Break Three: Political Forces Moving Top-Down Policy Enactments to Globalised Localities Global issues relating to social justice, solidarity with Indigenous Land protection and sovereignty movements, wildlife and biodiversity protection, climate action, energy transitions, and food security will continue to affect local and global ecological and sociocultural sustainability and economic development. These global issues are not in some far-away, distant place; nor are they a threat somewhere out in the future, but they are issues occurring right now within local contexts. As environmental education continues to prioritise sustainable development policies that are imbued with globalising discourses and top-down governance of curriculum, the field misses important opportunities to grapple with socioecological threats and injustices from emplaced and situated contexts. Lily recognised these tensions when she discussed the tensions of We-day in Chap. 6. She was frustrated, disappointed, and sad that poverty and exploitation were very real for many children with whom she worked with in the here and now in her classroom. Lily was concerned with the ways in which universalising (colonial) educational discourses often fail to account for the lived stories of the children for whom she cares and is teaching. Lily recognised the need for locally relevant education1 that attended to multivocal accounts of the children, and it was these efforts that were accounted for in the stories of this book. Lily and I were not only interested in the impact of these globalising discourse on the children’s stories, but we were also captivated by the parts of the stories that illustrated how they related with the world; how they understood themselves through, and with, the beauty, struggle, discord, and grace in their learning practices that were so intimately, and purposefully, emplaced with the Earth where their feet stood. Lily understood, and certainly she reemphasised for me, that to know how we are mutually implicated, complicit, and response-able to all the various relations we inhabit, is the first step to a thoroughly renovated land politics. However, Lily and I also critically understood that the politics of scale are different in every relationship. For example, as a White/Western/Settler researcher/teacher, living, learning, researching, and teaching on Land/land with troubled histories of settler colonialism, Lily and I had every obligation to do better. For Lily and me, a focus on the politics of scale acted as the impetus to change the story in, and for, environmental education. Dwelling at the borders between normalising and alternative stories in environmental education, we were able to enact a break from conventional teaching and learning practices. To some extent, but perhaps only partially, we were able to free ourselves from the constraining and disciplining discourses of the dominant environmental

1

This resembles enactments of a political ecology of education, which seeks to grapple with power dynamics amongst and between political, economic, and social processes for environmental change in education (Henderson & Zarger, 2017; Lloro-Bidart, 2015; Meek, 2015). Just like classical ecology explores the relationships of organisms within ecosystems, a political ecology of education locates teaching and learning within emplaced and situated contexts to close the gap between diverse everyday practices in environmental education and government policy action (McKenzie, 2012).

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education paradigms. We found our way along new lines of flight within transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum and an ecosophy of becoming. As I explored in Chap. 5, Lily and I did not react to a top-down policy model. We worked with and through the instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic norms of environmental education, in which curriculum policy became one of the many lively and vibrant threads that were gathered along our way. Wandering and wondering along new lines of flight brought forth a nuanced focus on performance-causality relationships that were composed by, and comprised of, multiplicities of entangled/differentiated becoming-withs. It is one thing to suggest that the Earth has intrinsic value, irrespective of human attachments, yet it is entirely different to suggest a flourishing Earth is made possible due to relational accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities to Earthly systems and structures by inhabitants within these Earthly systems and structures.

7.5 New and Different Stories in/for Environmental Education Posthumanist research in environmental education departed from linguistic turn of poststructuralism in the 1990s, and therefore, it is still in the process of establishing its credibility and viability amongst interdisciplinary scholars in environmental education research (Gough & Whitehouse, 2018). Critiques have suggested that posthumanism is fraught with contradiction and offers self-absorbed narratives that are hubristic, conceited, and blinded by its anthropocentrism and humancentricism (Calvert-Minor, 2013; Rekret, 2016). I cannot help but feel a bit guilty considering these critiques: I have certainly spun one or two self-indulgent stories throughout this book! But what I have tried to do is act out my humanness from an uncentred human existence. I have worked to move beyond a positionality that places humans at the centre of the universe based on human supremacy and exceptionalism. We are not humans because we claim to be distinct from nonhuman, the inhuman, the subhuman, the more-than-human, and those who do not matter (Barad, 2017). Our humanness is derived from actualising an acting-with Other(s)—through our own accountabilities, obligations, and response-abilities to enact a standing-with good relations for the unfolding of shared and co-constituted futures (Haraway, 2016; Liboiron, 2021; TallBear, 2014). Through a cartographic and diffractive threading of several stories through each other in this book, I’ve sought to illustrate how the affected/affecting relationship moves each one of us into mutual and co-constituted transformation with all Other(s). Rather than focusing on environmental ethics from the perspective of including Other(s), how might we turn to myriad opportunities to (re)make our own selves time and time again within present-moment becoming-withs? From here, merit exists in exploring the affect/emotion relationship in environmental education research. While there is important emotional lifting being done in the realm of climate change

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education (see: Bright & Eames, 2022; Verlie, 2022), more work is needed in environmental education to activate the settler state of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The field needs to effectively and affectively grapple with Indigenous Land/ Country/Place-based controversies to enact committed response-ability for social and ecological justice. When we activate these response-abilities, we connect our heads, hearts, and hands with the places in which we live. Our emotions bind us to how we inhabit the world with Other(s). In relationship, we learn that we are all in this world together, but not one and then same through our distinctions and differences. For me, this work does not conclude here. As the marks on these pages come to their end, however, my hope is that the stories presented here provide a launching pad for others to engage and entangle with through our differences, as well as our commonalities and shared characteristics (Liboiron, 2021). While the work of this book is contextualised, emplaced, and situated within the (micro) politics of location as a Female/White/Western/Settler/Outdoor Recreator/Environmental Activist (amongst other subjectivities), I do not suggest the ideas in this book can be easily transferred to inform another context. But I do hope that this work can prompt new and different stories from your emplaced and situated contexts. Keeping the story alive in finding new and different stories in, and for, environmental education is not only in our human self-interest—justice demands we do better for each other and for the planet. The very well-being of the planet that sustains us, however, depends on new and different stories for more liveable futures. We need to build a fierce pack full of wildly spirited communities that come together because they know that not only is there safety in numbers, but allyship can provoke fresh and diverse conversations in opening to new possibilities for the here and now.

References Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56–86. Braidotti, R. (2009). On putting the active back into activism. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/ Theory/Politics, 68, 42–57. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. Colombia University Press. Bright, M. L., & Eames, C. (2022). From apathy through anxiety to action: Emotions as motivators for youth climate strike leaders. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2021.22 Calvert-Minor, C. (2013). Epistemological misgivings of Karen Barad’s ‘posthumanism’. Journal of Human Studies—Springer Journals, 37(1), 123–137. Gough, A., & Whitehouse, H. (2018). New vintages and new bottles: The “nature” of environmental education from new material feminist and ecofeminist viewpoints. Journal of Environmental Education, 49(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2017.1409186 Gough, N., & Adsit-Morris, C. (2020). Words (are) matter: Generating material-semiotic lines of flight in environmental education research assemblages (with a little help from SF). Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), 1491–1508. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.166 3793 Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hayles, N. K. (2006). Unfinished work: From cyborg to cognisphere. Theory, Culture, & Society, 23(7–8), 159–166. Henderson, J. A., & Zarger, R. K. (2017). Toward political ecologies of environmental education. Journal of Environmental Education, 48(4), 285–289. Hughes, C., & Lury, C. (2013). Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a social to an ecological epistemology. Gender and Education, 25(6), 786–799. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013. 829910 Johnson, A. G. (2011). Patriarchy, the system: An it, not a he, a them or us. In C. L. Biggs, S. Gingell, & P. J. Downe (Eds.), Gendered intersections: An introduction to women’s and gender studies (pp. 112–115). Fernwood Press. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013. 788753 Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press. Life Saving Victoria. (2018). Coastal trend for summer drowning statistics. https://blog.lsv.com. au/2018/02/14/coastal-trend-summer-drowning-statistics/ Lloro-Bidart, T. (2015). A political ecology of education in/for the Anthropocene. Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 6, 128–148. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2015.060108 MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in postqualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755 McKenzie, M. (2012). Education for Y’all: Global neoliberalism and the case for a politics of scale in sustainability education policy. Policy Futures in Education, 10(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/ 10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.165 Meek, D. (2015). Towards a political ecology of education: The educational politics of scale in southern Pará, Brazil. Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 447–459. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13504622.2014.993932 Rekret, P. (2016). A critique of new materialism: Ethics and ontology. Subjectivity, 9(3), 225–245. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0001-y Roy, K. (2003). Teachers in Nomadic Spaces: Deleuze and curriculum. Peter Lang. Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (2015). Posthumanism and educational research. Routledge. TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2). http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371 Verlie, B. (2022). Learning to live with climate change: From anxiety to transformation. Routledge.

Anthropocene realities. Source and Photo credit Kathryn Riley. I returned to the field the next summer, one year on since beginning this writing journey. I wondered if the tree had changed since I last visited. Perhaps it had lost its limbs or had grown taller or wider, taking up a different space against the changing Saskatchewan skies. I felt like I was visiting an old friend; or perhaps (re)membering parts of myself that came to life in this place. The summer breeze was cool and soft against my sweating face as my pace quickened across prairie grasses. But as I grew closer and closer to the tree, I stopped abruptly; my heart sank deep into my chest. I fixed my gaze upon two garbage bins neatly positioned beside the tree’s knobbly, grey trunk. In the fading light, I could see that black plastic bags were folded perfectly over the bin’s rims so as not to be seen as too garbagy within the natural qualities of this landscape. No longer could I romanticise this tree, nor my connections to it. And without the romantic juxtapositions of humans and nature, my heart was broken. Dwelling in the fissures, cracks, and breaks, I was called to examine the shaded, dark sides of ecological awareness and co-existence. In going underground into the messy, non-linear, interconnected, and unstructured rhizome in all its unglamourous realism, perhaps these stories are not about how my body breathed me into life but how I’m learning to live in the tensions between life and death. If the Anthropocene does present a crucial opportunity to do things differently, how might we prepare ourselves for more wilder times…

Appendix

Meeting Provocations

Meeting 1 Provocations Historical Accounts 1. How would you describe the Place/Land in which you grew up? (urban, rural, coastal, mountainous). Perhaps you could draw/map this? 2. How would you recall some of your earliest memories engaging with the Place/ Land (as a child, adolescent, adult)? 3. How did such engagement with Place/Land make you feel? 4. Who were the main influencers promoting your engagement with Place/Land (parents, teachers, peers)? 5. How would you describe Place/Land in which you grew up, and/or your engagement with Place/Land as previously described, as influencing your conceptions of environmental education teaching practices?

Meeting 2 Provocations Part 1: Mapping Conceptions and Practices of Environmental Education 1. How do you engage with the Place/Land in your classroom practice? 2. How is Saskatchewan curriculum policy integrated into these conceptions and practices? 3. How is this teaching practice taken up by students? 4. How would you describe any limitations to this practice?

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2

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Appendix: Meeting Provocations

Part 2: Conceptions of Relational Teaching Practices 1. How might we, as a researcher/teacher, practice relational pedagogies in our co-created environmental education researcher/teacher enactments?

Meeting 3 Provocations The Potential for the Future 1. How do ideas concerning relational pedagogy differ from what you’ve conceived environmental education to be about in the past? 2. How would you describe ideas and concepts of more-than-human worlds? 3. How did your relationship with Land and more-than-human worlds develop as you engaged with relational pedagogies? 4. How do ideas concerning relational pedagogy impact upon how you might further engage in environmental education in classroom practice? Commenting on: a. Student engagement with this approach; b. Significant occurrences; c. Implications for teaching practice. 5. How do ideas concerning relational pedagogies, as explored in the researcher/teacher enactments, address curriculum mandates, as prescribed by Saskatchewan policy? 6. Can this work extend to a whole-school approach?

Index

A Affect, 50, 51, 59, 63, 65, 84–86, 99, 112, 116, 117 Agency, 31, 42, 43, 94, 114, 115 humancentred, 114 relational, 12–15, 62, 94, 114 Agential realism, 38, 41, 42, 113 Anthropocene, 4, 5, 13–15, 38, 41, 51, 68, 69, 82, 86, 98, 100, 102, 110–112, 114, 115 Anthropocentric logics, 65 anthropocentrism, 40, 117 Anticolonial, 57, 65 Anticolonial praxis, 11, 61, 65 Apparatus, 37, 38, 42, 58, 73, 74, 93 Assemblage(s) of relations, 16, 17, 68, 86

B Becoming-with, 8, 13, 40, 51, 52, 58, 67, 68, 85, 86, 94, 102, 113, 117 Binary classifications, 8, 9, 24, 41, 64, 87, 93, 98, 103, 112

C Capitalist, 7, 9, 30, 47, 60, 67, 98, 114 capitalism, 7, 9, 24, 31, 56, 101, 110 Cartesian representational knowing, 24, 41, 42, 49, 84 Cartographic knowledge practices, 37 Colonial

colonialism, 49, 60, 61, 68, 110, 112, 116 colonisation, 83 colonising, 24 Contact zone, 49 Curriculum-as-plan, 77, 83, 85, 88, 115 D Decolonial decolonisation, 61 decolonising, 59, 61 Deep ecology, 58, 63, 64, 86, 99, 101 Diffraction, 51 Discursive, 5, 12, 38, 41–43, 50, 51, 58, 64, 68, 83, 85, 88, 99, 100, 104, 111–113 discursivity, 5, 50, 83 Dominant discourse, 15, 93 E Ecofeminism, 64 Ecosophy, 85, 117 Ecotone, 49, 50, 52 Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), 7, 26–29, 77 Entangled/differentiated, 9, 13, 58, 69, 82, 84–88, 94, 113, 115, 117 F Figurations, 43, 44

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Riley, (Re)Storying Human/Earth Relationships in Environmental Education, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2587-2

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124 G Globalisation, 77, 110 globalising, 67, 95, 101, 116 Globalised localities, 109, 116 Great Divide, 24, 31

Index New materialism, 11, 40, 64 Nomadic multiplicities of subjectivities, 12, 112

O Outcomes-focused, 8, 77 H Human/Earth separation, 84 Humancentric logics, 9, 10, 41, 62, 65, 87 humancentrism, 40 Human exceptionalism, 8, 31, 112 Human supremacism, 31, 112

I Instrumentalism, 76–78, 82, 87, 94, 99, 101, 114, 117

P Pedagogical events, 58, 68 Performance-causality relationships, 86–88, 117 Policy-driven discourses of pragmatics, 8, 10, 76, 87, 88, 110, 114 Positionality, 38, 49, 112, 117 Posthumanism posthumanist, 40, 64, 65, 113, 114, 117 posthumanist performativity, 40, 59, 87 Poststructuralism, 12, 117

L Land, 5–11, 14, 28, 31, 47–49, 56, 58–61, 63–69, 72–78, 81–83, 86, 94, 98–101, 103, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118 Lived curriculum, 69, 77, 83, 85, 87, 88

R Relational agency, 62, 94, 114 Relational care ethics, 68 Risk societies, 96

M Material, 24, 25, 38, 41, 43, 50, 51, 58, 60, 64, 75, 77, 83, 85, 88, 99, 100, 103, 113 materiality, 5, 15, 38, 40, 42, 50, 51, 60, 68, 83, 99, 103, 112, 113 Mechanistic, 24, 76, 78, 99, 114, 117 (Micro) politics of location, 44, 52, 64, 68, 81, 85, 86, 113, 118 Moments of rupture, 3, 109–111 Multispecies relations, 62

S Stories, 5, 8–10, 14, 15, 17, 24, 31, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 51, 58, 61–63, 65, 66, 69, 73, 77, 81–83, 85, 86, 102, 103, 110, 112, 113, 115–118 storytelling, 40, 41, 43, 44, 61, 112 Subjectivities, 38, 41, 48, 49, 51–53, 58, 62, 68, 83, 113, 118 Sustainable development, 6–8, 10, 11, 14, 25–31, 42, 44, 68, 76, 110, 115, 116 Sympoietic systems, 102

N Nature, 5, 8, 9, 23–26, 30, 31, 38–40, 42, 43, 51, 58, 60, 63–65, 67, 74, 82, 85, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103 Neoliberalism, 110

T Technicist, 8, 76, 78, 99, 114, 117 Togetherness relationships, 77, 103, 113 Transdisciplinary, 83–85, 117 Trigger-causality relationships, 86