Treat me as a place: On the (onto)ethics of place-responsive pedagogy

Abstract

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil’s body. Thinking with place-responsive pedagogy, I aim to extend a conversation toward exploring a child’s body as a place. Place-responsive pedagogy, while it challenges a commonly endorsed child/brain/self/anthropocentrism by paying more attention to a place, its history, and human-nonhuman entanglements, still positions children as intellectual observers (of places) and multisensorial body-mind thinkers. I propose to attend to pupils/their movements as to ontogenetic phenomena. These phenomena necessarily emerge from the surplus of child-place relations. They are intelligent, complex, transmogrifying, attuning with the emerging ecologies, and growing with/from a place. Such conceptualisation disrupts an often-empty rhetoric that ‘humans are part of nature’, offering an account of an (onto)ethics.

Keywords:

• Outdoors
• place-responsive pedagogy
• body
• place
• ontoethics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and my supervisors Pauliina Rautio and Tuure Tammi, who contributed by reading and commenting on the earlier version of this article to enhance it to the current form. I am also grateful to the copyeditor of this article (and my previous work), Leslie Prpich, who was extremely delicate while attending to the grammar and readability of my manuscripts. Furthermore, I thank the participants of this study: always already emerging together children, teachers, and forests. I acknowledge the Naming the World Collective, whose ideas have shaped my work.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Place in this paper is used interchangeably with land, environment and nature, acknowledging an ambiguity of these terms altogether. For example, I understand ‘nature’ in line with Mcphie and Clarke (2020) as scary, scenic, utopian, scarier, artificial, affective, conceptual, and abstract, and recognise the inconclusiveness of such categorisation a priori.

2 Even though place-responsive pedagogy is not yet popular in Finland, it is relevant for the development of educational practices outdoors, which are currently formed predominantly as part of an experiential/adventure education framework.

3 This term is not often utilised in educational research, but it makes sense in relation to a plurality of material bodies a place is becoming of/with. Multimatter ethics, therefore, may signify a system of knowledge and practices that is attentive to ‘multimatter stories’, using the term of Iris Duhn (2018, p. 1596). For example, attention to a fence and its material-discursive production may inform the practices of place-responsive pedagogy.

4 I do not extensively cite in this article, but acknowledge, the vast body of Indigenous scholarship, which is of vital significance for conceptualisations of body-place interrelations.

5 Even though I built this article around the context of early childhood education, the teaching experience of Stewart (2020) and his work with undergraduate students could prove specifically valuable for young children given the fundamentality of principles that can be adapted in a variety of contexts. Accordingly, I acknowledge the importance of age-appropriate narratives used in environmental education.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of the project Citizens with Rats/Kansalaisia rottien kanssa (CitiRats), funded by the Academy of Finland (2020-2024), project number 333438.

Notes on contributors

Anna Vladimirova

Anna Vladimirova is a PhD Candidate in Education at the University of Oulu, Finland. Drawing on different poststructural theories, she explores the relationality of children and forests from the affective/material/spatial perspective, its implications for the outdoor education research, teaching and learning. Her main areas of interests include body-place relations, place-responsive pedagogy, ethics in multispecies encounters, the role of embodied movement in environmental sustainability. Her work also aims to contribute to rethinking an increasingly anthropocentric notion of forest from the educational and cultural standpoints.