Informal environmental learning: the sustaining nature of daily child/water/dirt relations

Abstract

This post-inquiry paper looks to the intimate matter of young children and their worlds outside of school. With new materialism, water and art as philosophical muse, a new kind of ‘sustaining nature’ for environmental education emerges, problematizing ‘sustainability’ as an aim. We gathered and exchanged short videos and field notes (iPhone artifacts) during morning and afternoon walks with young children in our everyday lives. In a playful moment, these are engaged with in relation to theoretical material on ‘art and sensation’ from philosophers, Deleuze (2003), Grosz (2008) and ontologies of water that do post-qualitative research playfully (Crinall 2017; Somerville 2017). We mutually emerge with relational pedagogies, conjuring the grace and gift of daily life with the matter of clay, dirt, deadbird, water, and home into an environmental learning that attunes bodies/minds to the significance, grace and gift of sustaining, artful everyday life.

Keywords:

• Informal environmental learning
• young children
• everyday materialities
• artful sustenance

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the ARC collective Naming the World: enhancing early years sustainability learning with whom we share the emergence of new ideas within new materialist approaches; The Space Place Body research group for scholarly and everyday support and feedback; and Dr. Karen Crinall for editing work. Sarah would like to thank her daughters, for without who this work and thinking would not be.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Crinall currently mothers, researches and artfully makes a daily life between Western Port and Bass Strait in the global South. Sarah produces post-inquiry collaborative writings within new methodologies with art, water, ecology, and the mattering spaces of a daily, mothering life in the context of sustainability, place and body.

Margaret Somerville is Professor of Education, Western Sydney University. Drawing on a long history of collaborative research with Australian Aboriginal communities about their relationship to place, she is interested in developing creative and alternative approaches to research towards planetary wellbeing. Her most recent research explores posthuman and new materialist frame- works that honor our ethical responsibility to develop philosophical positions and languages that name new modes of thought and action for the time of the Anthropocene.

Notes

1 ‘the notion of ‘intra-action’ queers the familiar sense of causality (where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect), and more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism (the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities, as well as times and places). According to my agential realist ontology, or rather ethico-onto-epis-temology (an entanglement of what is usually taken to be the separate considerations of ethics, ontology, and epistemology), ‘individuals’ do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intra-action.’ (Barad 2012)

2 Water ontologies used here have been established in our previous research pursuits (Crinall 2016, 2017, 2019; Somerville 2013, 2017; Somerville and Perkins 2010).

3 The blog is Sarah’s private writing/making space and not accessible to the public. Blog posts are interpersonal, sent specifically between Sarah and Margaret, at times.

4 We are taken specifically with the swimming, soaking, cycling nature of water in this paper and intentionally stay with this pleasurable sense water provides us at this time. For those readers keen to engage with water’s complex multifaceted, dangerous, devastating nature see Pacini-Ketchabaw and Clark (2016) and Horton and Kraftl (2017). Both offer insights into early childhood education and water.

5 Consent has been given by the guardians of these young children to be involved in this article. One of the authors is the mother to two of the children. Three of the four children have been involved in conversation directly between authors and child about the coming together of this article, and have willingly included themselves. It is understood that the children may not comprehend, to the level of an adult, what they are consenting to. We feel it important to raise the issue of consent as unsolveable, or at least unresolved at the moment. What are the ehtics of researching with one’s own children? We also wonder, what are the consequences for academia of not speaking with the children in our lives?

6 This blog post above is from a recent research project that sought to understand ‘sustainability’ in relation to the alternative knowledge attained and relationships negotiated between art/ists, children and water in everyday life (Crinall 2017).