Thinking through making: junk paddles, distant forests and pedagogical possibilities

Abstract

Remake activities reuse and recycle waste materials, working them into something useful. The experiential activity seems to be prevalent, yet limited literature covers creative ways of thinking about pedagogical approaches. This paper examines some of the emerging waste education literature before exploring further possibilities for remake activities, using the example of paddle making as a pedagogical practice in outdoor, environmental and sustainability education. I perform a new materialist praxis for paddle making, enacting a diffractive investigation into a piece of timber as a way of framing paddle making activities. I present the investigation as a narrative that considers the life of the timber and the broader ecological history of the material. This charts ethical and environmental problems relating to particular forests whilst posing different ways of conceptualising timber. Through this, I offer an example of the pedagogical diffractions that can be made during remake activities. In summary, the paper attends to materiality in divergent ways, through the use of new materialist ideas, to open up educational possibilities.

Keywords:

• Outdoor environmental education
• waste education
• sustainability
• diffraction
• new materialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alistair Stewart and Marcus Morse for their valuable comments on early drafts of this paper. I also appreciate the generous feedback from six reviewers that greatly helped the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Beau’s video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZJ01sNQuw. . . . . . . . .

2 The concept of malconsumption ‘is indicative of a way of life that does not recognise or pay heed to the ecological and social significance of the act of consumption’ (Hillcoat and Rensburg 1998, as cited in Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel 2019, 209).

3 If you take a walk through an industrial estate you will come across a lot of discarded wood, such as pallets, frames and other ‘junk’ left out on the nature strip. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel (2019) state that ‘as a nation, Australia is generating more commercial/industrial waste and construction/demolition waste, which are related to the tide of malconsumption’ (214).

4 St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) explain the descriptor ‘new’: ‘Whether work is “new” is always a matter of debate, and scholars doing new empirical, new material work usually begin by addressing that issue and pointing out that the descriptor “new” does not necessarily announce something new but serves as an alert that we are determined to try to think differently’ (100). New/neo materialisms are a pluralism of various approaches/divergent ways of thinking that may be found alongside relational materialism (for example, Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010), material feminisms (For example, Alaimo and Hekman 2008), posthumanism (for example, Braidotti 2013, 2019) and post-qualitative research (for example, St. Pierre 2011). What they have in common is a desire to challenge or disrupt dominant modes of thinking, especially those generally taken for granted in Western thought.

5 Maybe it is amiss of me to refer to the paddle in past participle. To do so is against new materialist tendencies and the process-oriented ontologies of those such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994) that influence my thinking. The paddle, the piece of timber, is still in the process of fashioning, creating, moulding in various ways. Admittedly, I recently felt a crack in the shaft and am currently adding a strip of river red gum to strengthen it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Scott Jukes

Scott Jukes is a lecturer in outdoor environmental education at La Trobe University, currently undertaking a PhD. His teaching involves alpine and river environments in south eastern Australia. He is interested in how students engage with the more-than-human world, grappling with environmental problems and creating affirmative educational experiences. Scott’s research focusses on outdoor environmental education pedagogies, posthuman methodologies and new materialist thinking.