Abstract
This chapter maps an assemblage of the reader, the author, undergraduate students of outdoor adventure, sandstone boulders in northern France, fighter jets in North Wales, emerging posthuman/post-nature discourse, and questions of how we might creatively educate for ‘sustainability’. Following new materialist discourse the chapter advocates (re)framing the limits of the possible with undergraduate students, allowing them to push at the boundaries of staid and static conceptions of the human/nature relationship that channel our current ways of becoming. The through line explores shallow, deep, dark and flat conceptions of ecology to posit a form of environmental education that moves beyond the nature/culture dualism – a flat environmental education. Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of the haecceity, a challenge to dominant Western conceptions of material objects, is suggested as a ready concept for this form of environmental education. In this way education might be re-imagined along immanent lines, as a process of world-making, by helping students map and create their haecceitical ‘selves’ beyond the cultural and the natural.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Haptic because, as Karen Barad (2008, p.327) notes: “Can we trust visual delineations to define bodily boundaries? Can we trust our eyes? Connectivity does not require physical contiguity. (Spatially separate particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities, but rather are part of the same phenomena.)”.
- 2.
Nature and culture are of course conceived as objects in the prevailing approach – physically and temporally delineated: boulder and climber; object and subject.
- 3.
And this includes one of the biggest ethical questions for students of outdoor education – ‘why this place?’ Can we justify the carbon emitted as a result of our drive to Fontainebleau, or up here to North Wales? What alternative practices might we create? – This is, of course, a question that all educators should ask themselves. See Tuck and McKenzie (2014) for a discussion of the politics of new materialisms and place in research.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2008). Queer causation and the ethics of mattering. In N. Giffney & M. Hird (Eds.), Queering the non/human (pp. 311–338). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Bird-David, N. (1999). ‘Animism’ revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40(1): S67–S91. Retrieved from http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/ca.html
Cachelin, A., Rose, J., Dustin, D., & Shooter, W. (2011). Sustainability in outdoor education: Rethinking root metaphors. Journal of Sustainability Education, 2. Retrieved from http://www.jsedimensions.org
Cheng, J. C.-H., & Monroe, M. C. (2012). Connection to nature: Children’s affective attitude toward nature. Environment and Behavior, 44(1), 31–49. doi:10.1177/0013916510385082.
Christie, B., & Higgins, P. (2012). The Impact of outdoor learning experiences on attitudes to sustainability: A Review of literature. Retrieved from University of Edinburgh website: http://anaturalcurriculum.org.uk/assets/Literature-review-UofE.pdf
Clarke, D. A., & Mcphie, J. (2014). Becoming animate in education: Immanent materiality and outdoor learning for sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 14(3), 198–216. doi:10.1080/14729679.2014.919866.
Clarke, D. A., & Mcphie, J. (2015). From places to paths: Learning for Sustainability, teacher education and a philosophy of becoming. Environmental Education Research, 1–23. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/13504622.2015.1057554.
Cohen, J. (2015). Stone: Ecology of the inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Crist, E. (2013). On the poverty of our nomenclature. Environmental Humanities, 3, 129–147. Retrieved from http://environmentalhumanities.org
de Vega, E. P. (2014). Thinking the ecological present. Retrieved from http://www.eistudio.net/ACADEMIC/epdvs_ThinkingTheEcologicalPresent.pdf
Deleuze, G. (2001). Pure immanence. New York: Urzone.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Frantz, C. M., & Mayer, F. S. (2014). The importance of connection to nature in assessing environmental education programs. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 41, 85–89. doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2013.10.001.
Gough, N. (2004). RhizomANTically becoming‐cyborg: Performing posthuman pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 253–265. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00066.x.
Haigh, M. (2006). Deep ecology education: Learning from its Vaisnava roots. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 11(1), 43–56. Retrieved from http://cjee.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/cjee/index
Halsey, M. (2006). Deleuze and environmental damage: Violence of the text. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Hamilton, C. (2015). The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene,’. Environmental Humanities, 7, 233–238. Retrieved from http://environmentalhumanities.org
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Retrieved from http://environmentalhumanities.org
Ingold, T. (2010a). Footprints through the weather‐world: walking, breathing, knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1), S121–S139. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01613.x
Ingold, T. (2010b). Bringing things back to life: Creative entanglements in a world of materials. Retrieved from http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/morgancentre/research/wps/15-2010-07-realities-bringing-things-to-life.pdf
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Oxford, UK: Routledge.
Ivakhiv, A. (2010) About. Immanence [Blog]. Retrieved from http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/about/
Ivakhiv, A. (2014). On matters of concern: Ontological politics, ecology, and the Anthropo(s)cene. Retrieved from http://environmentsandsocieties.ucdavis.edu/files/2014/04/On-Matters-of-Concern.pdf
Kopnina, H. (2014). Future scenarios and environmental education. The Journal of Environmental Education, 45(4), 217–231.
Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. doi:10.1080/09518398.2013.788752.
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. doi:10.1086/421123.
Liefländer, A. K., Fröhlich, G., Bogner, F. X., & Schultz, P. W. (2013). Promoting connectedness with nature through environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 19(3), 370–384. doi:10.1080/13504622.2012.697545.
Lorimer, J. (2012). Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene. Progress in Human Geography, 36(5), 593–612. doi:10.1177/0309132511435352.
McBride, B. B., Brewer, C. A., Berkowitz, A. R., & Borrie, W. T. (2013). Environmental literacy, ecological literacy, ecoliteracy: What do we mean and how did we get here? Ecosphere, 4(5), 1–20. doi:10.1890/ES13-00075.1.
Mcphie, J. (2014). Mr. Messy and the ghost in the machine: A Tale of becoming… a working-class academic (researching environ(mental) health). Rhizomes, 27. Retrieved from http://rhizomes.net
Mcphie, J., & Clarke, D. A. G. (2014, September). A Walk in the park: Considering practice for environmental education through an immanent take on the ‘material turn’ (pp. 9–13). Paper presented at Under Western Skies conference, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta, CA.
Mcphie, J., & Clarke, D. A. G. (2015). A walk in the park: Considering practice for environmental education through an immanent take on the material turn. Journal of Environmental Education, 46(4), 230–250. doi:10.1080/00958964.2015.1069250.
Moore, J. (2014). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature & origins of our ecological crisis. Retrieved from http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/ The_ Capitalocene__Part_I__June_2014.pdf
Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Naess, A. (1973). The Shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 16(1–4), 95–199. doi:10.1080/00201747308601682.
Nicol, R. (2003). Outdoor education: Research topic or universal value? Part three. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 3(1), 11–27. doi:10.1080/14729670385200211.
Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. New York: Suny Press.
Payne, P. G. (2016). What next? Post-critical materialisms in environmental education. The Journal of Environmental Education, 47(2), 169–178. doi:10.1080/00958964.2015.1127201.
Pimm, S. L., Jenkins, C., Abell, R., Brooks, T., Gittleman, J., Jopa, L., et al. (2014). The Biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection. Science, 344(6187). doi:10.1126/science.1246752.
Plumwood, V. (2000). Deep ecology, deep pockets, and deep problems: A Feminist ecosocialist analysis. In E. Katz, A. Light, & D. Rothenberh (Eds.), Beneath the surface: Critical essays in the philosophy of deep ecology (pp. 59–84). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On Autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. doi:10.1080/14733285.2013.812278.
Somerville, M., & Williams, C. (2015). Sustainability education in early childhood: An Updated review of research in the field. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 16(2), 102–117. doi:10.1177/1463949115585658.
Spuybroek, L. (2011). Sympathy of things: Ruskin and the ecology of design. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: V2 publishing.
Steffen, W., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? Ambio, 36(8), 614–621. doi:10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[614:TAAHNO]2.0.CO;2.
Stone, M. K., & Barlow, Z. (2005). Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
St. Pierre, E. A. S., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 99–110. doi:10.1177/1532708616638694.
Taylor, C. A. (2016). Close encounters of a critical kind: A diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 201–212.
Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. New York: Routledge.
Vos, A. (2006). The philosophy of John Duns Scotus. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M., Barnosky, A. D., Cearreta, A., Crutzen, P., et al. (2015, June 21). When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International. Advance online publication. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045.
Zelenski, J. M., Dopko, R. L., & Capaldi, C. A. (2015). Cooperation is in our nature: Nature exposure may promote cooperative and environmentally sustainable behavior. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 42, 24–31. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.01.005.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clarke, D.A.G. (2017). Educating Beyond the Cultural and the Natural: (Re)Framing the Limits of the Possible in Environmental Education. In: Malone, K., Truong, S., Gray, T. (eds) Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2548-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2550-1
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)