Reconfiguring urban environmental education with ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop’

Abstract

The worry over urban children having lost their connection to nature is most often addressed with either initiatives of reinserting the ‘child back to nature’ or with evidence aiming to prove that the worry is unfounded to begin with. Neither approach furthers our understanding of child–nature relations as continuing transformation of both ‘child’ (‘human’) and ‘nature’. The objective of this paper is to redirect attention from evaluating connectedness of two separate units to mapping mutual emergence of children and their surroundings in relation to each other. The question asked is: Of what kind is environmental education beyond connectedness of ‘child’ and ‘nature’? The aligned theoretical approach, (critical) posthumanism, will help us to elaborate a premise for environmental education according to which humans and their nonhuman surroundings do not exist as independent of each other. The empirically grounded events discussed in this paper are named ‘shitgulls’ and ‘shops’. These events map mutual emergence of child and nature, evidencing the need for environmental education to understand itself as a relational phenomenon.

Keywords:

• Child–nature relations
• child–animal relations
• interdependence
• posthumanism
• urban environment

Notes

1. A thorough theoretical literature review of feminist and/or posthumanist scholars in various disciplines theorising human–animal (or human–nature) relations can be found in a recent issue of this journal (Lloro-Bidart 2015).

2. MacLure’s method was crafted as part of her project to create research practices that could be labelled ‘baroque’ – resisting clarity, mastery, linearity, and coherence and honouring the details of educational events rather than rising above them. This was her response to the aggressive regulation of intellectual acts disparaged by the ‘evidence-based practice movement’. Baroque methods or practices would resist the closure-seeking tendencies by remaining irritating and interuptive, in order to remain open to new questions.

3. This is not to say that direct contact with diverse environments would be of no value per se, or that no causal relation to a person’s pro-environmental behaviour would exist.