Despite good intentions, participatory research and pedagogy can masquerade as an open process but still impose agendas that support particular versions of what constitutes appropriate thought, behaviour, and action. This chapter draws together two studies with some explication of feminist post-structural notions of the self in order to suggest ways in which feminist post-structural analyses might produce different readings of student responses to participatory pedagogies that have environmental change as their aim. Conceiving of the subject as discursively constituted opens up the self to both an interrogation into its construction and its possible reconstitution. It also opens up new ways of understanding student agency and helps bring to light how the discursive production of the self can limit students’ ability to challenge dominant discourses and take up counter-hegemonic ones. Furthermore, a feminist post-structural analysis of power resists the tendency to ‘blame the victim’ when teachers or students do not ‘get it right’.
Keywords environmental education, post-structuralist feminist analysis, classroom interaction, subject positioning, agency, participation
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Barrett, M.J. (2008). Participatory Pedagogy in Environmental Education: Reproduction or Disruption?. In: Reid, A., Jensen, B.B., Nikel, J., Simovska, V. (eds) Participation and Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6416-6_13
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