Reef pedagogy: A narrative of vitality, intra-dependence, and haunting

Abstract

This article is a reexamination of the author’s understanding of pedagogy, aimed at developing an increased awareness of the provinciality, limits and blind spots of the pedagogy and knowledge systems of colonial modernity. It engages with particular Indigenous epistemological theorisations of non-human agency, with Haraway’s notion of multispecies entanglement, and with the Australian Great Barrier Reef in an inquiry aimed at noticing absences and hauntings of pedagogies of modernity, including the absence of ways of knowing and being without separability and determinacy and the damage that has come of this. This opens space for contemplating separability and determinacy as ontological difficulties contributing to socio-ecological crises of our time. The article is intended as a move by the author toward developing greater capacity to stay with the trouble of educating and living on a damaged planet that is fast becoming uninhabitable.

Keywords:

• Pedagogy
• decolonising education
• more-than-human
• Indigenous ontology
• multi-species entanglement
• haunting

Acknowledgments

I thank Yin Paradies, Eve Mayes, and the reviewers of earlier drafts for their generosity and expertise in assisting me with this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin A. Bellingham

Dr. Robin A. Bellingham is a Senior Lecturer in Education, Pedagogy and Curriculum at Deakin University in Melbourne. She is interested in how education and methodologies can respond to pressing problems of modernity such as educational and political disempowerment and disengagement, the ongoing effects of colonization, and ecological crisis. Her research has explored these through different enactments and analyses of educational, democratic and ecological agency, and examination of the ethics and values that emerge through these in different contexts.