https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7720-1589
To go for a walk as an everyday practice can mean many things. Walking in nature occurs in diverse landscapes and cultural settings. This study is located in Australia within the context of walking practices in Outdoor Environmental Education. Yet walking’s ecopedagogical qualities and characteristics remain under-researched. Specifically, there is an absence of critical ecological praxis that takes account of the nature of emergent interactions and relations of walking with/in nature’s environments.
This thesis interprets and understands the nature of walking as an embodied practice in various scapes of nature, the research problem of the study. Using an autophenomenographic approach, the study explores how the subjectivity of the researcher/walker can be decentred in ‘less’ anthropocentric thinking about and, representing of, the ‘nature’ of walking in various environments, natures/scapes. The framing of the study is guided both methodologically and conceptually by two ‘eco’ lenses which are ‘ecophenomenology’ and ‘ecosomaesthetics’. To understand embodied experiences in nature, ecophenomenology not only questions the nature of experience but relations with/in/of the experience of nature. Interpreting walking as embodied movement and meaning-making with/in nature, the conceptual thread of ‘ecosomaesthetics’ is used whereby the nature of inter/intra-actions between eco(ecology), soma(body) and aesthetic(time-space) inform the research.
The data are (re)presented via sensory narratives informed from auto/sensory/ethnographic methodologies. Empirical ‘scoping’ of material, aesthetic and embodied dimensions are inductively identified and abductively (re)assembled as descriptive interpretations of walking with/in scapes of nature. The ‘findings’ reveal the nature of walking as relational, spatial practices (embodied natures) and temporal events (past, present, future) such as ‘wandering’ and ‘wayfaring’ in local places. It was found that these ‘encounters’ occurred over different time-space scapes, with various environmental, aesthetic and affective affordances.
These grounded and embodied findings are (re)assembled as an ecopedagogy of walking by highlighting the findings as possible and probable ecopedagogical processes as/in scapes that are embodied and ecologised practices. This innovative research design presents an inductively sourced and driven ‘practice theory’ of walking with/in nature. It makes a significant contribution to a wider critical ecopedagogical project that situates nature at the centre of embodied encounters with/in/of/between learner(s), teacher(s), culture(s), nature(s).
Supervisors:
Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, Dr. Margaret Robertson (Supervisor), and Adjunct Associate Professor, Monash University, Dr. Phillip G. Payne (Co-supervisor).
Conferring University: La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Year of award: 2020
Notes on contributor
Genevieve Blades has lectured and researched in outdoor environmental education at La Trobe University, Australia, and is currently working as an independent scholar. Genevieve’s areas of research interest are environmental values and ethics, ecopedagogy, and sustainability education.