What if schools were lively more-than-human agencements all along? Troubling environmental education with moldschools

Abstract

The recent more-than-human turn has increased interest in writing about relations between humans and other animals. In addition, scholars have called for a need to complement the animal turn with a turn to microbes. Microbes entangle all life in relations and participate in processes of living and dying, but thus far, they have been largely absent in environmental education research. This article attempts to think with microbes in environmental education by zooming into the phenomenon of ‘moldschools’ in Finland. Employing the concept of agencement, the article first explores how school buildings, toxic molds, and humans have effectuated each other and introduces the idea of indoor climate crisis. Then the article explores the complexity of everyday life in one moldschool, asking, how was the school becoming felt and practiced differently by children and teachers in relation to material-discursive mold. Finally, the article asks what moldschools might teach us or ask from us in terms of environmental education and ethics. The notion of schools as always already more-than-human agencements is offered to make space for hesitation and curiosity on various scales of connection.

Keywords:

• School
• more-than-human
• multispecies ethnography
• microbes
• environmental education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tuure Tammi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Education of the University of Oulu. He studies childhood and education with more-than-human theories. His recent interests address child-animal relations, posthuman participation, multispecies storytelling, and non-innocent care.

Acknowledgments

I thank my colleagues at the Animate project, for the ongoing feedback, discussions, and experimentations in the more-than-human world. I also thank the article’s anonymous reviewers and the editors of this Special Issue for their comments and suggestions that were invaluable for the development of this article.

Notes

1 I cannot help thinking about the recent news about the toxic dumping by the oil company Chevron in the Amazon in Ecuador that has had drastic effects on the indigenous people and more-than-humans, for example (see Donziger 2016).

2 The common worlds approach ‘merges Latour’s (2009) notion of common worlds as a collective of human and non-human constituents with Haraway’s (2008) grounded and relational “worldly” ethics’ (Taylor and Pachini-Ketchabaw 2016).

3 ‘Moldschool’ is a vernacular term used to refer to schools (and other educational institutions) where an indoor air problem often caused by toxic molds has been detected or assumed. Whereas ‘sick building’ in the 1980s signaled confusion between buildings and the bodies in them (Murphy 2006), moldschools signal confusion between nature (mold) and culture (school), already teasing out images of the school as a multispecies site.

4 I count xylitol-drops as materials for (dental) health education as pupils are obliged to take them after each meal in order to prevent acid attack.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth foundation, Emil Aaltonen foundation.