Restorying Environmental Education

This book examines a performative environmental educational inquiry through a place-based eco-art project collaboratively undertaken with a class of grade 4-6 students around the lost streams of Vancouver. The resulting work explores the contradictions gathered in relation to the Western educational system and the encounter with Other (real and imaginary others), including the shifting and growing self, and an attempt to find and foster nourishing alliances for transforming environmental education. Drawing on the work of new materialist theorists Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, Adsit-Morris considers the co-constitutive materiality of human corporeality and nonhuman natures and provides useful tools for finding creative theoretical alternatives to the reductionist, representationalist, and dualistic practices of the Western metaphysics.

Draws upon new materialist theories to address environmental education and ecological thought Attempts to explore the implications for educational theory and provides concrete real-world example of theory in practice Makes complex theories approachable and understandable by exploring autobiographical stories of educational development and understanding, helping to foster a tangible relationship between theory and practice

Autorentext

Chessa Adsit-Morris is a curriculum theorist and member of the Center for Creative Ecologies. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.

Inhalt

1. How to Create Human Humus Instead of Human Hubris.- 2. A Cartographic Mapping Practice: Environmental Education, the Material/Discursive, and New Materialist Praxis.- 3. Bag-lady Storytelling: The Carrier-bag Theory of Fiction as Research Praxis.- 4. Doing: Exploring the Lost Streams of Vancouver Through Eco-Art.- 5. Thinking: A Narrative Inquiry into Possible Figurations and Multiple Modes of Ecological Thought.- 6. How to Keep the Story going for Those Who Come After.