Session Information
99 ERC SES 05 F, Ethnography
Paper Session
Contribution
We live in a critical ecological moment. We face unstable climates, intensifying environmental disasters, and escalating extinction rates, all of which threaten the survival of a vast array of species, including humans (Tsing et al. 2017). A significant shift in the way in which humans interact with the world is urgently needed (Taylor et al. 2020).
This paper contributes to the body of work that approaches such a shift through Environmental Education (EE), helping us to imagine ways we might learn to live sustainably. I propose that an exploration of how we understand our relationship with the world through embodied creative activities could help us consider ourselves as ‘entangled’ in the world’s interconnected and affective state of becoming - knowing that our actions and futures are constantly engaged in relation with all else. I explore ways we can apply the concepts of ‘entanglement’ and ‘relationality’ to the process of learning, suggesting that an understanding of the world through these concepts could encourage mindset shifts towards sustainability. The goal of this paper is to explore a pedagogy for an onto-epistemology of relationality, with the hope of helping schools nurture mindsets capable of learning to live sustainably in a changing climate.
A global approach is needed to face the international climate crisis and a large proportion of EE research currently stems from Europe and the Global North. Much of current EE in Western Europe is predominantly focussed on scientific knowledge transmission about climate change and conservation. It perpetuates ideas of human exceptionalism by separating human activity from ‘nature’, teaching about the environment rather than acknowledging how we live within it (Dunlop & Rushton 2022). This has resulted in inadequate pedagogic practices to address the challenges of the current environmental crisis (Taylor et al. 2020).
My research grows from the idea that there is a link between ineffective EE practices and the compartmentalised learning necessitated by Western European education systems. Secondary school learning is a very structured operation, it is characterised by the study of different subjects which require different books and often different teachers with little acknowledgment of the relationality of the experience. My suggestion is that the absence of relational learning is complicit in the justification of the exploitation and destruction of multi-species ecologies that have caused the current climate crisis. To address this, we need to diversify the epistemologies with which we engage in order to facilitate research into effective EE (Blaser and Cadena 2018). Combining EE with global ideologies of entanglement and relationality through arts-based approaches will diversify approaches to EE by helping us to explore ways of learning that enable us to understand our relationship with/in it. Understanding ourselves as entangled entities, deconstructing human exceptionalism, and resisting anthropocentric philosophies is the imagining required to live within a changing world (Haraway 2016).
This paper outlines my experience of working with a secondary school in the UK to explore ways of knowing as curricula to approach EE. I collaborate with a small group of students to creatively explore their learning experience through a series of school based workshops. We use drama and storytelling approaches (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019) to consider their whole school experience, exploring how learning itself can be relational.
My research is framed around these lines of inquiry:
What are the relationships of a compartmental pedagogy with the climate crisis?
In what ways might arts-based approaches to storytelling support an understanding of entanglement through relational pedagogy?
What is relational pedagogy and how can school learning engage with it?
In what ways can schools facilitate beyond-anthropocentric ways of being in the world that embody an understanding of relationality?
Method
The focus of this paper is an exploration of relational research methods that can help young people understand concepts of entanglement and relationality. My relational methodological approach is consistent with my onto-epistemic justification for the research and includes ethnographic and arts-based techniques as well as taking inspiration from emergent post-qualitative inquiries. My methods include extended observation, informal interviews, and a participatory creative project that culminates in an collaborative artistic artefact. Informed by Judith Green and David Bloome’s (2005) approach to ethnography, I interrogate relational knowledge encounters by using “ethnographic tools” (p.4). These tools include situating myself in the place of my research and paying attention to the conversations or informal interviews, participant observations, and subsequent personal explorations which emerge from the experience. I am inspired by Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole (2008) who advocate for research in which the art is the research as opposed to an object to be researched. My process draws on new-materialist arts-informed research to consider the art co-created by participants as the materiality of the research conducted, and the ‘data’ as the stories of relational knowledge which emerge. I draw on Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (1997) ideas about post-qualitative data analysis which aims to “produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (p.175). Analysing the stories which emerge through co-creating relational art is a process of generative difference and close attentiveness to the a/effects of difference. Arts-informed research and ethnographic tools as outlined above will enable me to explore ways that difference can be produced from within entanglement in order to “make difference” (Barad 2007, p.91). As a result, the relational pedagogy explored helps me reveal a relational inquiry that facilitates its creation. I create space for both qualitative and post-qualitative approaches in my research because both engage with ways of thinking that are productive to exploring radical encounters of relational pedagogy. My work goes beyond conceptual research into tangible participatory practice, where some qualitative methods (e.g. interviews and ethnographic journaling) provide vital insights. However, weaving through a post-qualitative critique allows me to unpack what the qualitative methods make visible but also what they exclude from view. A post-qualitative approach of acknowledging the students’ learning experience as entanglement enables me to take into consideration all encounters with my research and know that they can all hold insights as part of my scholarly practice.
Expected Outcomes
This paper has proposed an exploration of the experience of school learning through concepts of entanglement and relationality, an interrogation of the ways we learn, not changing what we learn. What could follow is an application of this to how we understand our relationship with/in the world. Considering our affective relationality with the world might help young people understand the need to consider beyond-anthropocentric impacts of the choices they make. My hope is that doing so will allow for imagining sustainable lifestyles of response-able relationships to unfold. The implications of this research could contribute to the development of pedagogic practice in EE. The ongoing climate crisis demonstrates that dominant humanist approaches to EE in Europe and the Global North have failed to teach us how we live with the world. I have outlined how EE which implies a separation between human and nature is complicit in the justification of exploitation and unsustainable consumption of resources. Alternative approaches to EE, such as the one I propose, can facilitate the onto-epistemological shift of an understanding of entanglement, opening beyond-anthropocentric pedagogic possibilities for learning to live sustainably. Rather than encourage schools to add more of EE initiatives and then show students how these things connect together, I want to start with how schools address relational thinking by engaging in holistic and embodied learning techniques, and then apply this to EE in what might then be considered effective learning for the environment. My work addresses the discipline literature gap on how to approach this, exploring relational learning in mainstream secondary education practice. As a result, my research could contribute to international policy debate around designing future EE. My hope is that teaching for relationality will enable schools to support the development of young people capable of critical beyond-anthropocentric thinking within a changing climate.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Blaser, M., & de la Cadena, M. (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Burrows, D. & O’Sullivan, S. (2019). Fictioning: The Myth-functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dunlop, L., and Rushton, E.A.C. (2022). Putting climate change at the heart of education: Is England's strategy a placebo for policy? British Educational Research Journal, 48(6), pp.1083-1101. Green, J. & Bloome, D. (2005) Ethnography and ethnographers of and in education: A situated perspective. In Flood, J., Heath, S. B., & Lapp, D. (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, pp.181-202. New York: Macmillan Publishers. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Knowles, G. J. & Cole, A. L. (2008). Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. California: Sage Publications, Inc. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997) Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), pp.175-189. Taylor, A., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Blaise, M., & Silova, I. (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Common Worlds Research Collective. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report. Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E. & Swanson, H. (Eds) (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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