Abstract
As lifelong learners and outdoor educators, reflecting deeply on our practices in the field is critical. But what if contemplation reveals our own shallow thinking and lack of understanding? What if it rattles the basic conventions upon which the field was built? I share here the re-turning of my wilderness journeys and my personal paradigmatic transformation towards agential realism. As an elder practitioner, I re-envisioned the assumptions that were implicit in my outdoor learning experiences and have discovered endless complexity and entanglement with the more-than-human natural systems. As readers reflect upon my journey, I challenge them to thoughtfully examine their own ways of knowing the field and to consider themselves as an entangled, embodied practice of that ever-changing, more-than-human complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
“Entanglements are not a name for the interconnectedness of all being as one, but rather specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. Entanglements are relations of obligation—being bound to the other—enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other,’ entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other,’ who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’—a diffraction/dispersion of identity. ‘Otherness’ is an entangled relation of difference (différance)” (Barad, 2010, p. 265).
- 2.
“From a human species standpoint, sustainability is the capacity to maintain and continue to enhance the systems that nourish us. However, from a larger perspective, sustainability must presume that human and ecosystem well-being are inexorably interdependent [entangled]; in order to meet current human needs, they must be maintained without compromising ecosystems or future generations. This concept of survival has environmental, social, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. Sustainability , as applied to the larger field of education, alludes to a holistic, eco-judicial, and culturally relevant approach to teaching and learning that is intergenerational, self-renewing, and built on a model of healthy interrelationships amongst the community of all beings” (Caniglia, 2010, pp. 10–11).
- 3.
- 4.
Gaia theory is “a scientific hypothesis regarding the geophysiological self-regulation of planetary systems as evidenced by the planet Earth. Evidencing an emergent level of complexity greater than the sum of its constituent parts, which many theorists describe as having the emergent properties of life (related to complexity modeling), the Gaia Hypothesis has kinship with many ancient cultural and scientific insights regarding planetary ecology” (Gaian Methodologies, 2010).
- 5.
The metaphor of diffraction (Barad, 2007) uses the scientific principles (and physical phenomena) of wave interactions to explain how complex adaptive systems engage. “Diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about history, not about originals. Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form, thereby giving rise to industries of metaphysics” (Haraway, 1997, p. 268).
- 6.
The term ranchers in this research referred to women who ranch. If references to male ranchers were made, the gender is noted. The term was chosen intentionally to avoid otherwise pejorative assumptions that men are ranchers and women can only be termed ranch wives. Such a patriarchal assumption, that a rancher is male, tends to covertly relegate a woman’s role in ranching to a footnote in the description of this way of life.
- 7.
The term land based refers to people who live on and earn their livings in direct engagement to and entanglement with the land. These will include ranchers and farmers born on a ranch or farm, those that have moved there, or those who have married into ranching or farming families.
- 8.
“Phenomena are differential patterns of ‘mattering’—diffraction patterns dispersed across differently entangled spaces and times, or rather spacetimematterings” (Barad, 2012, p. 77).
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Caniglia, N.C. (2018). Outdoor Education Entanglements: A Crone’s Epiphany. In: Gray, T., Mitten, D. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Outdoor Learning. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53550-0_30
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