Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of worldviews in tertiary outdoor environmental education (OEE) programs. We discuss how worldviews are constructed based on our understandings of the world and our place within it, drawing on the role of social and cultural norms and assumptions influencing the ethical frameworks we might adopt. The chapter offers a critique of commonly employed approaches to the concept of worldviews, such as anthropocentrism, biocentrism and ecocentrism. Although our discussion is reflective of our positions and experiences, located in south eastern Australia, we suggest possibilities for considering broader perspectives and assemblages that might otherwise be overlooked. We suggest the provocations of posthumanist orientations and offer some introductory suggestions for deploying them constructively in OEE.
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Change history
02 March 2022
The original version of this book was published with an error in Chapter 3 wherein the line should read, "We are mindful that the artefacts that comprise our views of reality and nature are socially constructed and do not exist independently of human agency and activity" instead of “… do exist independently of human agency and activity”.
Notes
- 1.
Returning to Haraway (1991), we are ‘somewhere in particular’. Our homes are in south eastern Australia - Noel in Melbourne, the second largest state capital, and Kathleen in Bendigo, close to the geographical centre of Victoria. Our particular positions and experiences are reflected in our writing in this chapter.
- 2.
We adopt the position that our connection to the more-than-human world is artificially severed in modern Western culture by mind/body, nature/culture, subject/object dualisms. Hence, we choose the term ‘more-than-human’ to draw attention to our ethical accountability to the world.
- 3.
Gough (2016) argues that challenging hierarchical anthropocentrism (i.e. challenging the assumption of human superiority) does not prevent us from acknowledging an ‘irreducible anthropocentrism,’ that is, accepting that we necessarily experience the world with species-specific biophysical limitations and possibilities. However, we must also consider how an understanding of irreducible anthropocentrism might be changed by accepting that we increasingly experience the world as posthumans, with perhaps (eventually) fewer species-specific biophysical limitations and with further possibilities provided by biophysical extensions and enhancements.
- 4.
Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of ethico-onto-epistemology points to the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology in knowledge production. See https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/e/ethico-onto-epistem-ology.html for fuller discussion
- 5.
- 6.
Describing worldviews thus, does not rule out the potential worldviews of more-than-human entities
- 7.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues estimates there are more than 370 million Indigenous peoples spread across 70 countries worldwide, each practicing unique traditions, retaining social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live (https://aiatsis.gov.au/)
- 8.
Several tools are available for this exercise. Some employ CO2 measures (eg: https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx), while others calculate how many planets are required to maintain a particular lifestyle (eg: https://www.footprintcalculator.org/)
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Pleasants, K., Gough, N. (2021). Worldviews, Environments and Education. In: Thomas, G., Dyment, J., Prince, H. (eds) Outdoor Environmental Education in Higher Education. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75980-3_3
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