Pedagogies of Place:Materiality Embodiment Contestation, and Story

Author(s):

Peter Renshaw(presenting / submitting)Ron Tooth

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

30 SES 12 B, Materiality and Immateriality Relationships in ESE

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-26

09:00-10:30

Room:

NM-J110

Chair:

Johan Öhman

Contribution

In this paper we report an investigation of specific pedagogies of place enacted at five environmental education centres in Queensland (Australia), and we provide evidence of distinctive student learning arising from the pedagogies. Educators at the environmental education centres participated in a collaborative research project with the authors (Renshaw & Tooth, 2010 - 2012) that focused on articulating and describing in rich detail their specific practices, and more recently (2013-2015) they co-authored papers in an extended cycle of drafting, reflecting on and redrafting accounts of their pedagogies, as well collating evidence of student learning arising from their pedagogies. We draw upon their accounts in this paper to propose a model of place-pedagogy (after Somerville, 2010, 2015) that necessarily involves: materiality; embodiment, contestation and story.

The notion of place has informed research on environmental education for many years (Gruenewald, 2003; Stevenson, 2008; Sobel, 1996). Various approaches to place pedagogy have been proposed such as ecological place-based (Sobel, 1996; Woodhouse & Knapp, 2000), critical place-based (Gruenewald, 2003) and place responsive pedagogy (Mannion Fenwick & Lynch, 2012). In this paper we build on the previous research and take-up Somerville’s suggestion that place pedagogies need to be constituted through stories and other representations, embodied, and located in a contact zone of contestation (Somerville, 2010). Elsewhere, Somerville (2015) also proposes that place is constituted in relationships between people and the materiality of particular localities (Green & Somerville, 2015).

These features of place pedagogy, namely, story, contestation, embodiment and materiality are deployed to investigate the place pedagogies designed at the five different environmental education centres. Considering the materiality of place, the centres are located in different ecological environments that vary from cloud rainforests, eucalypt and sclerophyll forests, aquatic tidal zones as well as riparian creek zones and forest remnants. It is obvious that these environments afford opportunities for the design of distinctive place pedagogies. The materiality of place matters in this general sense for what might be taught and what might be learned in a particular location. But it also matters in a very specific sense as well. The centre educators give attention to a particular tree, or rock, or leaf or shell or pond that offers special affordances for engaging students. The “thingness” of experience in place matters.

Embodiment is also central to learning in place. Similar to the concept of materiality, embodiment foregrounds the physicality of learning in place, for example, the requirement to walk in different rhythms and patterns depending on the landscape and vegetation. Embodiment treats learning as a particular kind of relationship between an environment and a person that foregrounds mutual physical adaptations of action-reaction such as pushing a pathway through undergrowth and experiencing the flexibility and roughness of branches through one’s muscles and skin. Embodiment challenges views of learning restricted to abstraction and cognitive processes.

Contestation foregrounds consideration of the multiplicity of possible representations of place, and the multiple alternative voices and stories that can be told about any particular place. In this paper, contestation is most poignantly implicated when Indigenous and post-colonial ownership of land is considered; it is also implicated when conservation of natural environments is challenged by interests that seek to economically exploit the place for profit.

At each centre story is used to weave together all the features of the pedagogy (materiality; embodiment; contestation), in order to provide students with a template for sense-making and self-making as they look back on their experiences in place (hindsight) and project themselves into possible futures (foreshadowing).

Method

The methodology is based on case-studies at each centre employing the tools of verbal and written description of practices, observation of practices, dialogue about and reflection on practices. Reflective writing by the educators was used as a tool for explicating practice. Each centre was a separate case and each required detailed descriptions of pedagogical practices. Initially the descriptions were written-up by the educators with accompanying photographs and other teaching artefacts as well student-produced artefacts such as written responses and artistic representations of their experiences on the excursion. These descriptions and artefacts were presented at a professional workshop organised so that the different pedagogies of place could be shared among the centres and so that the educators would begin the process of communicating and explicating their practices in richer detail. Observations were also made by the authors at each site as they accompanied different student groups and their teachers on excursions. Following the initial written drafts of practices and the observations, the authors interviewed each of the educators at their centres. This was conducted as a reflective dialogue where attention was directed to identifying significant moments, activities and sites at each centre. These interviews foregrounded certain practices that had remained implicit or had been regarded as incidental. In on-going dialogue between the centre-based educators and the authors (Renshaw & Tooth), written accounts of pedagogical practices and evidence of student learning were drafted and redrafted during 2013-2015 to produce for each centre their elaborated accounts of place pedagogies and evidence of students’ learning. Evidence of students’ learning was collected in a variety of ways: (i) centre educators keep a research journal to notate comments from students and observations they made of students during excursions at their centre; (ii) selected artefacts produced by students on the excursions at each centre were collected; (iii) students completed short questionnaires probing their learning and evaluation of the excursion; (iv)selected students at each centre were interviewed about one week after the excursion by research assistants to gauge their learning on the excursion

Expected Outcomes

Below only a brief illustration of the results can be provided. Considering the materiality of place, each of the educators had discerned how to deploy the affordances of particular sites and objects, for example, it might be the roots of an ancient tree, a transition zone between ecological niches, a mossy log, a fallen leaf, or a dormant rainforest tree that materially matters. The centre educators realised that dwelling with the “thingness” of the experience was important for extending students’ learning. Embodiment was implicated in different ways at each centre, for example, at one centre it required swishing through the mud flats to observe crabs and worms; at another it required walking carefully at low tide not to disturb the hermit crabs; at another centre learning was embodied in varieties of walking required of students to explore changing landscapes (up hills, along creeks, through thick undergrowth). Likewise, contestation was enacted differently at each centre. In one centre, for example, students considered whether their apparently harmless everyday practice of collecting sea shells was consistent with the interests of hermit crabs. In another centre, students reflected on the presence of Aboriginal artefacts in the forest and wondered where the Indigenous people live today. Story emerged from place, for example, when a teacher imagines with the students what and who an ancient tree may have seen over the centuries as it grew; or story can be laid over place to create new insights, for example, when students are given a blanket role as “advocates for the forest” or as “champions of the bay” and asked to envisage rationales they could devise and actions they could take on behalf of the forest or bay. Overall, the results provide rich instantiations of the model of place pedagogy that we proposed following Somerville (2010, 2015)

References

Green, M. & Somerville, M. (2015) Sustainability education: researching practice in primary schools. Environmental Education Research, 21:6, 832-845, Gruenewald, D. A. (2003a) The Best of Both Worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Research, 32(4), 3–12. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003b) Foundations of Place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40:3, 619–654. Mannion, G., Fenwick, A. & Lynch, J (2012): Place-responsive pedagogy: learning from teachers’ experiences of excursions in nature. Environmental Education Research, 18, 1-18. Sobel, D. (1996). Beyond ecophobia: Reclaiming the heart in nature education. Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society and The Myrin Institute. Somerville, M J (2010) A Place Pedagogy for ‘Global Contemporaneity’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42:3, 326-344, Stevenson, R B (2008) A critical pedagogy of place and the critical place(s) of pedagogy, Environmental Education Research, 14:3, 353-360 Woodhouse, J., & Knapp, C. (2000). Place-based curriculum and instruction. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EDO-RC-00-6.)

Author Information

Peter Renshaw (presenting / submitting)

The University of Queensland

St Lucia

Ron Tooth

The University of Queensland, Australia

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