Place-responsive Environmental Education and Education for Sustainability: the role of more-than-human agencies and intergenerational contact

Author(s):

Greg Mannion(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

30 SES 05 A, Pre-School and Place Responsive Contacts

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

11:00-12:30

Room:

B119 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Elsa Lee

Contribution

We live in the on-going assembling of people, place, and practice (Schatzki). Various theoretical resources in eco-socio-material and practice-based theories (Schatzki) allow us to consider environmental education processes as enmeshed (Ingold) and co-productive (Durose) within a range of human and more-than-human relational and reciprocal agencies. Two theoretical premises guide the argument that education needs to take greater account of the role of place and generation: (a) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent, (b) people learn through participating in embodied transactions, responding to differences found in places, some of which are generationally inscribed (Mannion and Gilbert). Since we are all enmeshed through being emplaced and in-relation intergenerationally, all education can be considered as a form of place- and generation-responsive practice.

Method

In support of the theoretical contribution,I provide an analysis of selected empirical data from a community-based outdoor storytelling project - entitled Stories in the Land. In that project, story telling, journeying, and other practices inhabiting with and in places required sensitivity to generational and place-based differences and environmental agencies. Participants were invited to understand the life of the drovers who moved cattle across the landscape in the past from the Highlands to the markets in the lowlands. Embodied experiences with/in place gave rise to new reflective accounts of life then and of contemporary ways of life too: Young Person: We had a lot more luxuries than the drovers would have had. So it kind of gives you perspective on how difficult it would have been for them. Data from young people themselves on the impactful socio-material transactions and meanings that arose for them show how response making to the very eco-social settings in which they were placed created possibilities for learning to live in a new way; in this case, we notice how relations among children, adults, community members, as well as other living and non-living entities and processes such as storytelling, horses, ancestors, weather, and the terrain itself became important in considerations of how we used to live, and how we might live differently (Haluza-DeLay et al). Any educational programme that creates possibilities for considering and enacting new ways of living that might be more sustainable are worthy of greater attention. My argument is that theory and empirical evidence in this case are strongly suggestive of the need to attend more sensitively to the eco-social, material, biophysical and other practices as more than a background context for learning. An entangled, transactional view asks us to engage with these eco-social relations all the while in programming for education for sustainability.

Expected Outcomes

Theorised in this way, curriculum making in environmental education and education for sustainability needs to take account of the on-going reconfigurations of people-place found in a given context (Ross and Mannion). Allowing for more-than-human agencies to 'have a say' in curriculum making in EE and ESD will likely bear fruit. Where ever such programmes are deployed, our practice-based relations between the human- and the more-than-human are emergent intergenerational, emplaced assemblages that are on the move. It is into this milieu that our educational interventions need to be sensitively connected. By this view, meaning making in education for sustainability is always actively created through journeying / inhabiting a given place. Hence, environmental and sustainability meanings are productions within assemblages of people place and practice, at once being both evoked by and at the same time influencing a range of embodied practices and socio-material agencies within place. An implication is that it will be important in environmental education to attend to our all-age, emplaced, embodied experience of place, and to encourage response making with/in place (Mannion et al) whilst also seeking out altered forms of place-responsive intergenerational practice amid a the world of socio-material agencies.

References

Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J., and Richardson, L. (2011) Towards Co-Production in Research with Communities Swindon, AHRC Gilbert, J. & Mannion, G. (forthcoming) Stories in the Land. On the tracks of the highland drovers. Scottish Local History. Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Michael DeMoor and Chris Peet (forthcoming) That We May Live Well Together in the Land...: Place Pluralism and Just Sustainability in Canadian and Environmental Studies. Special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies: Beyond the Culture of Nature: Intersecting Canadian Studies & Environmental Studies in the 21st Century. Hopwood N. (forthcoming) Ethnographic fieldwork as embodied material practice: reflections from theory and the field. In N K Denzin (Ed) Studies in symbolic interaction. Bingley: Emerald Press. Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge. Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming 2014) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. Mannion, G., Fenwick, A., Lynch, J. (2013) Place-responsive pedagogy: learning from teachers’ experiences of excursions in nature. Environmental Education Research, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp 792-809. Mannion, G. (2012) Intergenerational Education: the significance of reciprocity and place. In Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp 386-399. Ross, H. & Mannion, G. (2012) Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places. Studies in Philosophy and Education, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp 303-313. Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices. A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social. A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Author Information

Greg Mannion (presenting / submitting)

University of Stirling, United Kingdom

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