A Walk in the Park: Considering Practice for Outdoor Environmental Education Through an Immanent Take on the Material Turn

Abstract

This article considers practice for environmental education from the perspective of the material turn by taking the reader along on an outdoor learning session in a park. We present a fictional walk where we encounter plants, trees, wasp-orchids, stones, walking sticks, plastic bags, people, weather, and kites, each of which has a story to tell that demonstrates ontological immanence and the material process of being alive. These stories help suggest some practical ways in which environmental education can be reoriented from an essentialist paradigm to one of becoming, tackling prevailing conceptions of the human mind as disembodied from the world.

Keywords:

• educational practice
• environmental education
• ontological immanence
• outdoor learning
• the material turn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference, Under Western Skies 3: Intersections of Environments, Technologies and Communities at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada (September 9–12, 2014).

Notes

¹We understand a transcendent Westernized spirituality to differ from a more contemporary animistic physicalist spirituality of immanence, which is partly how our session would take shape. The difference that we are advocating is the immanent material aliveness of things as opposed to a transcendent non-material spirit/soul.

²This buildup and generation of ideas acts rather like the notion of a “palimpsest,” a layering of rhizomatic conceptions that overwrite previous philosophies/landscapes/cultures and yet the ancestral remains may still be traced, although only faintly as a shadow or apparition to be historically romanticized.

³System appears under erasure as the common conception of a system is a group of interdependent components or parts. While a philosophy of immanence supports the notion of self⁴-sustaining processes, this process would not be constructed of independently existing “parts.”

Self is under erasure as the notion of a self-contained being is problematized in a philosophy of immanence.