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Developing Place-responsive Pedagogy in Outdoor Environmental Education pp 67–81Cite as

Developing Place-responsive Encounters with the Murray River: Deterritorialising Outdoor Environmental Education

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Abstract

How Australians experience a place such as the Murray River has been extensively shaped by our colonial heritage. Colonisation has left behind an intellectual legacy in the way Australians conceptualise nature. In this plateau I discuss how educational experiences might be conceptualised, and indeed carried out, as small acts of decolonisation. At a practical level, outdoor environmental education experiences of the Murray that do not make reference to the particulars of the place, such as the current declining ecological health of the Murray, might well be read as continuing acts of colonisation. In order to decolonise encounters with places, such as the Murray River, I suggest that outdoor environmental education pedagogy develop experiences that are place specific and responsive. In this critical reflection on practice, I draw on student encounters with the Murray River to highlight ways of placing personal experiential learning into a broader cultural context in order to counter colonialist understandings of nature and foster deeper awareness of our relationships with this river and this land.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A reminder that a central thread of this book is the enmeshed qualities of nature and culture, and the natural~cultural histories of the places where I live and work. Nature is a complex and problematic term (Soper, 1995). I follow Griffiths (2003) in arguing that there is no nature outside culture, and that humans are not separate from the natural world. In this plateau I deliberately employ the terms natural history and cultural history to emphasize 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.

  2. 2.

    The section of river to which I refer is home to the Yorta Yorta and Bangarang people.

  3. 3.

    ‘We’ in this context refers to non-indigenous Australians of European and other heritage.

  4. 4.

    Although these authors may in practice develop place sensitive and responsive experiences, my concern is with the way experience is conceptualised and represented in the literature.

  5. 5.

    Val Plumwood (2000, 2003) argues that colonial names express particular politics and worldviews and thus are an act of dispossession. She advocates renaming much of the country as an act of decolonisation and reconciliation.

  6. 6.

    The continent that we know as Australia has experienced many waves of human settlement over 40,000+ years (Flannery, 1994). Flannery describes the British annexation of the continent in 1788 as the most recent wave of settlement. In this book I employ the terms Aboriginal people, and European settlers, immigrants, or invaders. The binary of indigenous and non-indigenous is problematic because it has the potential to carefully conceal difficult histories. Decolonisation is a slow and complex process; developing respectful alternative language is but one aspect. In circumstances where I have referred to the Indigenous people of a particular region I have utilised their language group, nation or clan name. I have followed the names set out by Clark (1995). In south-eastern Australia, where the impact of European colonisation has been substantial, this is problematic in itself as these names were attributed by the colonisers.

  7. 7.

    That is not to say that places with little European disturbance need to be avoided, but rather the history and stories of previous inhabitants need to be incorporated into to an educational experience.

  8. 8.

    The qualitative data used in this plateau is excerpted from student journals produced in 2002, which I analysed, coded and thematically grouped. All names that appear here are pseudonyms.

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  1. School of Education, La Trobe University, Bendigo, VIC, Australia

    Alistair Stewart

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Stewart, A. (2020). Developing Place-responsive Encounters with the Murray River: Deterritorialising Outdoor Environmental Education. 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_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40320-1_6

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