A posthumanist approach to environmental education in South Africa: implications for teachers, teacher development, and teacher training programs

Abstract

As we enter the sixth great mass extinction event, an event that points to humanity’s exploitative attitude towards nature, posthumanist ethics offers a different way of engaging with the world, a way which has clear and extensive implications for the way environmental education is taught in South African schools. However, given the official curriculum and assessment practices currently in use in South Africa, can a posthumanist approach to environmental education actually work within the current educational framework of discrete discipline/subject areas and specializations? The paper diffractively engages with the Department of Basic Education National Curriculum Statement: Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement: Foundation Phase Grades R-3: Life Skills for South Africa (the phase where environmental education is most likely to take place), and superpositions this text with a research study on environmental education undertaken in Canada and key posthumanist notions as they relate to environmental education. The paper concludes with a section on the implications for teachers, teacher development, and teacher training programs (not solely in South Africa) of using such an approach in the teaching of environmental studies.

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• posthumanism
• early childhood education
• diffractive methodology
• teacher development

Notes

1. This term was first used by Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1981) to describe the ongoing extinction of species now occurring due primarily to human activity. In the five previous events in Earth’s prehistoric past extinction became so prevalent that it changed the course of evolution (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981).

2. Foundation Phase level refers to grades K-3 (roughly ages 5–9) in the South African educational system.

3. This is a methodology (Haraway 1992) that suggests that diffraction might be a fitting ‘counterpoint’ to the use of reflection as thinking for reflection is about ‘mirroring and sameness’ (Barad 2007, 29) and ‘invites the illusion of essential, fixed position’ (Haraway 1992, 300) while diffraction involves ‘the processing of small but consequential differences’ (Haraway 1992, 318), differences that make a difference, yet which are enacted by the superposition of sameness.

4. We will use CAPS to cite this work in the text for subsequent references.

5. We will use GITL to cite this work in the text for subsequent references.

6. Intra-actions are actions where we have come into such close proximity that our very properties have become forever linked.

7. According to quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad (2007) a phenomenon is an ‘entanglement’ of various apparatuses, apparatuses such as bodies, discourses, and discursive practices such as those of gender, professional status, and power, as well as nature and many other material factors. It is in their entanglement that these apparatuses enact a particular phenomenon, a particular agential distribution within the limits of the phenomenon, that determines the ‘agential cut’ (Barad 2007), to produce object and subject.

8. Guattari combines ecology with philosophy to give us the term ecosophy: an ecological philosophy where neither is privileged.

9. Personal communication from Professor K. Wayne Yang who also writes under the name La Paperson, 8 August 2016.

10. Personal communication from Professor K. Wayne Yang who also writes under the name La Paperson, 8 August 2016.

11. Personal communication from Professor K. Wayne Yang who also writes under the name La Paperson, 8 August 2016.

12. Personal communication from Professor K. Wayne Yang who also writes under the name La Paperson, 8 August 2016.

13. Thanks to Ingrid Martin who came up with this idea for her grade R class.