Attuning to geostories: Learning encounters with urban plants

Abstract

This paper is a call for educators to respond to the problematics that arise from reducing the Earth to a resource for human activities. The concept of ‘Anthropocene’ is a burning invitation to rethink education by putting the human to its place. We therefore argue for a spatial-embodied conceptualization of learning, which involves the more-than-human and nonrepresentational. In this effort, we use Latour’s concept of ‘geostory’ to problematize the prevailing anthropocentrism in education. We discuss the power of experimentation by introducing a learning experiment that took place at a pop-up greenhouse in Helsinki. The idea was to encourage upper secondary geography students to playfully discard their human perspective and study the city from the viewpoint of plants: to probe the presumed human/nature divide through brief but moving encounters with ‘others’. We argue that through affective encounters with nonhuman others, the Earth speaks: it tells stories with us. If humans let themselves be addressed by these encounters, geostories can temporarily re-place human-centred narrative storytelling practices (histories), voiced by the modernist ‘I’, and generate alternative forms of knowledge that emerge from our belonging together. These stories emerging from geographical experimentation entail potential to cultivate both knowing and care that exceed the human.

Keywords:

• Affect
• care
• encounter
• geostory
• learning
• urban space

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Antti Laherto and Heikki Sirviö for their comments during the writing process and Lauri Jäntti for his contribution to the practicalities that made the empirics of this study possible. In addition, we would acknowledge all the students and their teachers for their contribution to the learning experiment.

Tentative versions of this study have been presented in two conferences: LUMAT Research Symposium on 06/13/2022, and Nordic Geographers Meeting, on 06/22/2022. The study has not been published in conference proceedings or elsewhere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Smolander

William Smolander is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Changes at the Department of Geosciences and Geography. His research deals with more-than-human geographies and education beyond the human. He is part the research group, Affective Politics and Geographies of Education, as well as the LUMA Science Helsinki research group. He also develops geography education through Geopiste, a science class for geosciences and geography at the Kumpula Campus. By rethinking geography education, William wants to probe the traditional separation between humans and Earth, upheld by fixation on representation and the autonomous human subject in today’s education. By exploring experimental educational processes, his goal is to find new ways for geography education to attend to our co-dwelling with Earth and face the problems of the Anthropocene.

Noora Pyyry

Dr Noora Pyyry is Assistant Professor of Geography Education. Her work deals with human subjectivity, knowledge creation, learning and educational politics, as well as with issues of young people’s participation and spatial justice in the city. She is interested in what counts as knowledge, and how learning takes place with(in) various geographical and ideological landscapes. Inspired by her participatory research on young people’s practices of hanging out, she approaches learning as an ongoing and non-linear geographical process that does not begin or end with humans. She uses feminist posthuman and non-representational theorisation to study the multiple forces that are at work in the various encounters from which knowing, participation and everyday affective politics emerge. At the core of her research on learning, is the re-organizing power of enchantment, a radical encounter that makes it possible to ontologically re-think the world. She argues that creating ‘pedagogical spaces of enchantment’ in education is critical for transformative encounters and learning in the Anthropocene. https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/persons/noora-pyyry; https://scholar.google.fi/citations?user=VgtyOsIAAAAJ&hl=fi&oi=ao