Abstract
This book is a story about my attempts to construct outdoor environmental education (OEE) pedagogies and experiences that are place-responsive; that is, to create educative experiences that are about the natural~cultural history of the Australian places in which they occur. The project has been many years in progress and this book is only one re/presentation of a larger and ongoing project. Curriculum as I conceptualise and understand it is ongoing, lived, enacted, dynamic and responsive to changing circumstances of individuals and environments within which they live and work. Curriculum, for me, is always already becoming.
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Notes
- 1.
I follow both Warren Sellers (2008) and Margaret Sellers (2009) in using the tilde symbol (~) between words that I believe are enmeshed in one another, that are always-already co-existent. In this instance, natural history is a cultural activity that is shaped by a wide range of cultural influences. Cultural history is shaped by and embedded in the natural history that surrounds it.
- 2.
As with Sellers (2009), I adopt Jacques Derrida’s practice of using the strike through to signify that the given word is inadequate yet necessary. Madan Sarup (1993) observes that for Derrida this is a strategically important device for drawing attention to the temporal nature of language and signs: “in each sign there are traces of other words which that sign has excluded in order to be itself. And words contain traces of the ones which have gone before. All words/signs contain traces. They are like reminders of what has gone before” (p. 34).
- 3.
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), a plateau, unlike the chapter of a conventional book, is a place where the pace may quicken without resulting in culmination or termination points. Commenting on A thousand plateaus, Tamsin Lorraine (2005) observes that “the plateaus are meant to be read in any order and each plateau can be related to any other plateau” (p. 208).
- 4.
Noel Gough (1998) observes that the common usage of both reflection and reflexivity in education connote self-referentiality. I follow Gough in taking diffraction “to be a tactical reminder that light can be directed otherwise than back at oneself–especially at one self–that enlightenment can be other than self-referential” (p. 94).
- 5.
My thinking on ontology has shifted over time. Where once I would have framed this question around being, I now follow Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and conceptualize ontology as becoming.
- 6.
For me there are no clear boundaries between personal/public/professional. Creating a pedagogy that responds to the state of the Murray River (fourth to seventh plateaus), or the fate of woodland birds in south-eastern Australia (final plateau), is not just a professional response, but is also a personal passion.
- 7.
Lather (2007, p. 168) draws on Aronowitz to describe scientificity as not the actual processes of science but the seepage of scientific attitudes and expectations of standards into all aspects of the social world, such as the use of statistical data to decide outcomes and excessive faith in ‘hard facts’.
- 8.
Central threads of this book are the enmeshed qualities of nature and culture, and the natural~cultural histories of the places where I live and work. Throughout this document I deliberately employ the terms ‘natural history’ and ‘cultural history’ to emphasise the respective more-than-human and human aspects of a place under pedagogical and curriculum consideration. The terms remain problematic for me, but are nonetheless useful.
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Stewart, A. (2020). Prologue. In: Developing Place-responsive Pedagogy in Outdoor Environmental Education. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40320-1_1
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