Learning landscapes through technology and movement: blurring boundaries for a more-than-human pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Interest in the role of technology and movement is growing in outdoor environmental education (OEE) research. However, there are many unexamined assumptions involving both non-digital technology and movement for outdoor learners. In this paper, we explore learning landscapes through non-digital technology and movement involving canoe journeys in south-eastern Australia. We examine ways that technology and movement come together to help shape learning orientations through situated examples from OEE fieldwork. Our investigations utilise posthumanist and process-relational theories for exploring onto-epistemological dimensions of outdoor learning. We bring such theory into conversation with photos, videos and student essays to analyse our fieldwork contexts. We highlight that technology and movement cannot be taken for granted; rather, they help constitute the ways we come to know places. We also acknowledge some cultural and conceptual aspects that overlap to influence learning. This paper offers alternative insights for learning landscapes and the mediating influence of technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology
• outdoor education
• movement
• posthumanism
• more-than- human pedagogies

Framing: technology and posthumanism

In humanisms, boundaries are described between human and animal, or human and plant life, or human and inert technology, in order to preserve the special status of humanity. Process ontologies discard these boundaries and emphasise the shared events that make for human—animal and human—technology assemblages.

(Williams, 2018, p. 372)

We are currently living in a time marked by extinction, loss and environmental precarity. We are also living in a time of rapidly accelerating advanced capitalism and climate change. For many, technology and technological intervention is implicated in current ecological predicaments (for example, Bridle, 2022). As Braidotti (2019) states, ‘at the core of our predicament—but not its sole cause—is the unprecedented degree of technological intervention we have reached, and the intimacy we have developed with technological devices’ (p. 3). Technology intervenes and mediates much of our lives. Technological advancement is occurring at such a pace that humans are hyper-consuming technology and resources at unsustainable rates, while simultaneously transforming our ways of being human. Braidotti (2013, 2019), among others, asserts that we are becoming posthumans, referring to our technologically embedded and rapidly transforming lives as the posthuman condition. As Braidotti (2019) notes, ‘the posthuman condition implies that “we”—the human and non-human inhabitants of this particular planet—are concurrently positioned between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction’ (p. 2). However, as alluded to in the epigraph to this paper, conventional western thought (such as humanism) often separates and categorises humans apart from other animals, landscapes and technologies.

As we have argued elsewhere (see Jukes, Stewart & Morse 2022a), bounded individualism and human exceptionalism create problematic boundaries, including conceptual separations between humans and landscapes. This can influence human domination over these landscapes and their more-than-human inhabitants, perpetuating anthropocentric ways of thinking. Haraway (2016) asserts that bounded individualism and human exceptionalism are notions that are problematic in our shared world, and are ideas we should think beyond if we are to stay with the trouble of confronting ecological precarity. For us authors, posthumanism (and related new materialisms) offer possibilities for thinking beyond bounded individualism and human exceptionalism. Hill (2021) supports this stance, stating that:

The pertinent turn towards post-humanism enables critique of humanist or anthropocentric ways of thinking and being. Post-humanism reconsiders human subjectivity, ethics, norms and values, through lenses which account for the more-than-human world, something that is so pressing given the many complex ecological issues facing the world we live in.

(p. 240)

Such movements in thought are building in outdoor environmental education (OEE), with Gough (2016) highlighting some opportunities for research, and others such as Mannion (2020), Riley (2020, 2021) and Hill (2021) engaging with pedagogical implications these theoretical positionings offer.

As an initial framing, this paper aims to confront the problem of sedimented dichotomous boundaries between humans and the rest of the world. Admittedly, we confront this problem in a small way, within and through OEE practice. We do this by engaging with posthumanist theorisation and process ontologies as orientations that enable us to blur some boundaries between humans and the rest of the world (such as the boundaries created by human-nature and human-technology tropes). Technology becomes a key focus, then, with posthumanist theorising allowing us to consider ways in which non-digital technology shapes worlds, enhances biophysical capacities and connects people with/in the world in ways that might not otherwise be possible (Braidotti, 2019). We enact such possibilities through OEE settings, drawing upon a range of (post)qualitative empirical materials, which we will introduce shortly.

Technology and OEE

In OEE, the role of technologies is a topic that is increasingly being discussed (e.g. Cuthbertson et al., 2004; Hills & Thomas, 2020, 2021; Wattchow, 2001). Recent discussions have focused on the role of digital technologies in outdoor settings, however, there has been minimal focus on the technologies used to travel with/by in outdoor journeying practice. Thus a question that prompts our inquiry is: how do (some non-digital) technologies enable ways of engaging with the world? And furthermore, how does technology influence how we move through and learn with/in landscapes? Our main technological focus for this paper is on the canoe/canoeing, however, a few other related technologies also enter our discussions.

In undertaking such an investigation, we are conscious of arguments from the likes of Hill (2021), Stewart (2004, 2020) and Lugg (2004) that critique a focus on activities themselves within outdoor learning. These authors, part of the broader place-responsive and environmental turn in OEE, argue for pedagogies that orientate learners toward places/environments/communities. Contributing to this discourse, our investigation explores the way technology opens particular ways of engaging with landscapes. Such an intention aims to eschew technology/not technology binaries and instead focus on practices of engaging with places through technology and movement.

Understanding the etymological roots of the word technology provides us with some guidance. The word technology, according to Ingold (2016), ‘was formed on the stem of the classical Greek tekhne, whose original connotation was human skill or craftsmanship’ (p. 130). There was a bodily root in the early understandings of the word that tied technologies to humans and their capacities, which also had similar connotations to the word art. Tekne, or techne, implied the manner or way in which a thing was gained—technology, then, assumes technique. In this sense, technology involves a way of doing something, rather than a thing alone. Henderson (2003) writes that ‘once, a technology was a practice. It was a human affair steeped in traditions and the social fabric of living’ (p. 14). As educators in Australia, the Canadian technology of the canoe is part of a practice of canoeing, a way in which we gain access to and participate with places. A more contemporary image of technology might likely be something fuel powered or digital, such as a smartphone, artificial intelligence, robotics, or nanotechnologies, although it is also important to remember that walking boots, a canoe, a bike, a pair of skis, or even a drink bottle are all forms of technology.

For this paper, we see technology spanning beyond contemporary visions of electronic devices, encompassing all manner of instruments used in practice. As Cuthbertson et al. (2004) suggested, technology may be either traditional or modern, with technology acting as a filter for how we engage with outdoor environments. Furthermore, to add to this, our image of technology involves ways of doing something, as technologies shape how we may go about our practice. By envisioning technology in this way, we embrace a posthumanist ontology, that negates an artificial separateness between humans and the rest of the world—instead there are relations and processes, where the human is irreducibly entangled and co-evolving with technology (Hoel, 2018). Which is to say that technologies influence the way humans engage with/in the world—they change what a body can do—even in ‘low tech’ outdoor education settings.

Movement, process-relational ontology and OEE

Entangled in this investigation is movement. Firstly, in a process-relational ontology, the world is in constant movement/flux (for some alternative discussions on this see Jukes, Clarke & Mcphie, 2022b). So for us, one underlying assumption involving movement is that everything is in a process of change (becoming). Simply put, humans do not dance around on a static stage. Rather, humans are in constant relational negotiation with an animate world—there are always multiple actors in any event, where a mutual affecting occurs (Riley, 2021). However, a second consideration (and the primary focus for this paper) is the movement of bodies in OEE (e.g. a person with canoe). A person paddling a canoe in a river environment is an example of movement and correspondence with/in the world (or drawing upon Haraway (2008, 2016), a way of becoming-with the world). The technology of the canoe mediates the canoers engagement with/in the river environment, just as the river mediates the canoer in a dance of mutual constitution. From a posthumanist position, a subject is not presupposed in this relating. Technology considered as a practice, enables modes of movement, modes of constituting a subject, along with modes of engaging with the world.

We feel technologies (such as the canoe/canoeing and other similar technologies) and the role they play in enabling certain modes of movement are often taken for granted—almost so fundamental as to be overlooked—and investigation of onto-epistemological aspects of practice can offer new insights for outdoor environmental educators. Thus, throughout this paper, we explore ways that technology and movement are relational, and how this dynamic plays a part in orienting participants towards landscapes.

Empirical context of the paper

The empirical aspects of this paper are geographically situated in south-eastern Australia, involving canoeing journeys with tertiary OEE students. This paper is part of Scott’s (lead author) doctoral studies (see Jukes, 2022), with co-authors (Alistair and Marcus) supporting the study as supervisors. As authors/researchers, it is important to note that we were also lecturers overseeing the fieldwork drawn upon in later discussions. As educators and researchers in this paper, we take a situated approach to knowledge production (Haraway, 1988), noting that OEE is always performed in ‘particular geographic, social and cultural contexts’ (Brookes, 2002, p. 405). Thus, we acknowledge our view is always partial as we are situated within specific conditions. Which is to say, our inquiry does not aim to offer any universal viewpoint or finding, as it is impossible to extrapolate such things from our particular (and ever changing) context.

Methodological processes

To guide the rest of this paper, we frame some methodological considerations for the way we have structured this inquiry. We start with St. Pierre (2008), who questions conventional approaches to qualitative inquiry that are steeped with positivist undertones:

In my research I have not studied participants; rather, I have investigated a topic … And I have used comments from everyone I could find, from published researchers and theorists, from participants, from colleagues, from characters in film and fiction, from anyone and everyone to help me think hard about that topic. Thus, I believe all those comments are data—Foucault’s words are data just as much as the ‘voices of participants’—and should be treated as such. I also believe we should seriously rethink the organization of the conventional qualitative research report because it artificially isolates those data in different sections and thus contributes to weak analyses—too many voices, too little analysis.

(St. Pierre, 2008, p. 331)

St. Pierre (2008) informs our decisions to rethink conventional aspects of research. Like St. Pierre, we research a topic—the role of technology and movement in learning landscapes in our OEE practice. Encouraged by St. Pierre, we reconsider some of the conventional notions of data (for other instances, see Jukes, 2020, 2021; Jukes et., 2022a; Jukes & Reeves, 2020). Firstly, we prefer the term empirical materials, rather than data, following the encouragement of Denzin (2013). The empirical materials are not brute facts, data to be coded or generalised, and there is no universal or essential truth in the data. Instead, our empirical materials help our discussions—analysis of these materials offer some different ways to consider OEE contexts and practices. As Denzin (2013) writes, ‘meanings are always in motion, incomplete, partial [and] contradictory’ (p. 354). It is in this sense that our empirical materials help us articulate realities and possibilities specific to the focus of inquiry.

Secondly, we draw upon photos, video, student essays and theory as our empirical materials. These materials, or at least the way we present them, are partly influenced by Lynch and Mannion’s (2016) vignettes of walking interviews with educators. The difference with our vignettes is that they are selections of videos, photographs and student essays that evoke shared events from river journeys with undergraduate OEE students. We explore these vignettes alongside, and with, literature that provides us with theoretical ideas and posthumanist concepts to broaden the scope of our inquiry. In other words, theory, concepts and literature do not sit in separate sections but are blended with our empirical materials. In this sense the results do not just live in a results section, and discussions do not just belong under a heading titled so.

Our goal is to provide insight into the role of technology and movement in OEE while aiming to think beyond the bounded autonomous human subject by blurring perceived boundaries between humans and the rest of the world. Including photos and video offers something beyond words and text—hopefully something affective—and our approaches to the use of video can be read in depth elsewhere (see Jukes et al., 2022a). For us, utilising video enables inquiry to move beyond humans as sole grounds for knowledge production (arguably an anthropocentric practice), instead allowing examination of events and a broader context. This ties in with our engagement with posthumanism and process ontology, as videos follow along with events in process, recording the dynamic movements and entangling of people and place.

As part of our empirical materials we offer excerpts from student essays as well. A key reason for including some excerpts from students essays was to add student insights alongside other empirical materials, to combine what is written by students with theory and viewable contexts in videos and photos. Taking a premise from Barad (2007), we see that matter and meaning are entangled. Including student meanings, theory and contextual matter (through video and photo) together cohere with this onto-epistemological premise. Importantly, we are not intending to prove student learning in any quantitative positivist sense, but instead explore onto-epistemological questions. Another reason for including student essays was to avoid potential problems with presentness. St. Pierre (2008) argues that voice in its presentness (such as in conventional qualitative interviews) vanishes immediately and trying to capture presentness always fails. We took St. Pierre’s provocation and instead experimented by presenting students with an essay prompt¹ to contemplate based on previous critical incidents or transformative experiences in river-environments. The essay prompt was open-ended, allowing for students to explore events of their interest relating to river environments. The premise was to give students time to think, as well as literature and concepts to think with. These essays branched out into different events of importance for each of the students, and we only draw upon a small number of student essays that had relevance to the object of our inquiry in this paper.

The essays, along with photos and videos, are approved by the La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee under the number HEC20092. As they are adults, we gave the tertiary OEE students the option to use their real names or pseudonyms. All students in this study chose to be identifiable. We feel this act acknowledges the students’ work as their own and that we are citing their work as we would any other author’s ideas/work.

Entangling technology, modes of travel and landscape—what worlds are opened?

In Bill Mason’s (1984) Path of the Paddle, the iconic Canadian canoeist offers a parable about canoe travel. The parable, titled ‘The shrinking land,’ is found in the introduction to his guide to the art of canoeing, and provides a simple but poignant message about technology and travel. Mason asks the reader to contemplate hiking along a lake shore amongst a mountainous backdrop. The hike is of considerable distance through rough terrain—it is a difficult but adventurous journey. After a time, Mason explains, you encounter a canoeist. The canoeist offers you a seat in their boat. You accept, as the terrain is difficult and the canoe will offer a different perspective of the shoreline, whilst still being slow enough to absorb it. However, Mason points out that in accepting the ride, the lake has now diminished in size. Canoeing along the lake will be much quicker than hiking the difficult shoreline. As the journey continues, the canoe encounters a motorboat. The motorboat offers a ride and the original canoeist accepts. Upon entering the motorboat, you feel a sense of the lake diminishing further in size. As Mason describes:

When the journey is over and you are dropped off at the point where you first came upon the lake, the mystery is gone. You’ve seen it all; yet, you’ve seen nothing. The motorboat driver meant well, but he has only succeeded in diminishing the size of the lake.

(Mason, 1984, p. 3)

One message in Mason’s parable is that our modes of travelling within landscapes make a difference to how we experience and perceive them. This message (although possibly quite obvious) is significant for OEE in Australia as it often involves a practice of journeying. For us, a key question worth contemplating is how do our modes of movement (always mediated by different technologies) make a difference to educational experiences? What does a pedagogy that involves continual movement and engagement with/in the more-than-human world do? In Mason’s case, he promotes a simple and slow mode of travel, as he believes it maintains the scale of landscapes, rather than shrinking them—simply, he wants to keep the world big. Through this, Mason suggests, we might engage with these landscapes in a way that does not diminish them (spatio-temporally), allowing us to attend more closely to specific details and worlds. However, we must note that other worlds get closed off (e.g. if we never experience the speedboat, we also never understand the world of speedboats in the same way). The point we take from Mason is that the technologies (as practices) and modes of movement we enact open certain worlds whilst closing off others. For us, a key question for educators to ask is what worlds we aim to open for our students? How do the technologies and modes of travel we choose mediate educational experiences? Do they focus on notions of adventure or open us to different aspects of the more-than-human world, such as ecological precarity?

Let us explore an example from our practice, involving a canoeing experience. We set the scene with an excerpt from one of our student’s essays:

Vignette 1

The dawn paddle involved the Barmah lake, which is connected to the Murray by adjoining creeks. It involved pelicans, ducks, woodland birds, insects and fish. There was Giant Rush, Moira grass and River Red Gums. Water, sediments, mist, clouds and sun. Finally as a special addition there were canoes, paddles, pfd’s [personal flotation devices], porridge and people [Figure 1]. The sun rising and glowing across the clouds is what drew us, the people, to this place at this time. The mist made it cold which made us appreciate the sun. The insects were there enjoying the rush and the fish were feeding in the sediments. The pelicans were coming and going, often likely influenced by how close we were. Our paddles made splashes in the water…

Figure 1. A dawn paddle on Barmah Lake. Photo byMaggie Williams.

There was a beautiful stillness to the place and we were able to slowly drift, taking it all in. What I gained from this experience was an understanding of how the health of a river has a strong flow on effect to many other places. Rivers are not just linear but are made up of floodplains, lakes, creeks and more. I had a strong feeling of being a visitor in someone else’s home… (Maggie, student essay)

And here is a link to a video of paddling at dawn on Barmah Lake: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16689430.v1

Place is a key concept for OEE (Thomas et al., 2019). However, Gough (2008) explains that the concept place is not inherently pedagogical. Instead, places become pedagogical through the ways they are ‘envisioned, named, traversed and transformed’ (p. 72). The important thread that relates to our inquiry and the vignette above is the ways that we traverse landscapes/places. Gough (2008), elaborates explaining that ‘different outdoor activities provide lenses through which to “see” forests [and other outdoor places]’ (p. 82). He offers a few examples of activities and how they prompt particular engagements and ways of seeing (and we add, ways of touching, smelling, hearing, tasting) environments, before stating:

Individuals will learn different things about the forest from the particular activity they have chosen, but the meaning of that knowledge will also be shaped by the activity. A practical problem for outdoor environmental educators is judging whether an activity can be shaped to develop particular knowledges or to create particular meanings.

(Gough, 2008, p. 83)

It is this practical problem—the way our activities develop particular knowledge—that we think crucial for outdoor educators to consider in their own environmental and cultural contexts. Canoeing is one such activity (involving technology that enables certain modes of movement) that opens us to specific possibilities for knowing. For example, Maggie’s words in vignette 1 share a particular world—a specific environmental and cultural context. This is a world of water birds, fish etc., where the health of this environment was considered. But Maggie also includes personal flotation devices, people and paddles into the discussion too. The video and photo (Figure 1 further reveal aspects of that world (e.g. the carp [a destructive invasive species in this place] that thrashes past in otherwise tranquil dawn waters in the video at 1:08). But that world would be another altogether if Maggie was in a speedboat.

To paint another picture for the way technology and modes of movement alters what epistemological engagements might be had, we draw upon Australian novelist, Tim Winton. In Winton’s (2015) landscape memoir, Island Home, he describes travelling the Australian landscape via car:

I’ve seen a hell of a lot of landscape through the car window, most of it viewed at speed in bleary, lazy glimpses … behind the wheel I glance outward, but I’m not sure how much I really see. Thanks to air conditioning most of us no longer smell the peculiar scents of places; we hear no birds, feel no wind. We’re mostly oblivious to fluctuations in temperature. You register little more than the noise of the engine and the soundtrack you’ve brought with you. You travel too fast to notice many creatures. Sometimes you recognize a native mammal only the second before you reduce it to roadkill. Seeing the country by car, you may think you’re in the landscape but really you’re in geographical limbo. Enclosed in your steel cocoon you experience the car first, the place you’re in comes a distant second.

(p. 180)

As Winton’s description shows, our modes of movement mediate our engagement with the world. This video on the way home from a river trip down the Murray, offers a depiction similar to Winton’s text: Driving from the river video— https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16689442.v1. The video from the bus contrasts to the other videos that are based in the river environment throughout this essay. What we seek to convey is that the technologies we move by/with shape our realities and open us to certain possibilities whilst closing off others. The different types of engagements that can be planned in OEE have onto-epistemological consequences for education—in other words, we are always becoming-with the world in different ways (Haraway, 2008). At the centre of both Winton and Mason’s descriptions above is technology, not as a thing but as a way of doing.

Our modes of movement—the technologies we use—at least in part determine the particular speeds and intensities of our journeying, potentially dictating the routes we may choose to take. In OEE, our modes of movement can also be described through activities, such as walking, canoeing, rafting or bike riding. These activities each require particular technologies (hiking boots, canoes, rafts, bikes)—or if we think back to the etymological root of the word technology: canoeing, rafting or riding is the skilled performance of doing something, engaging with an environment, where our technological engagement is a way of being embodied and embedded in that place. We think there is something pivotal about the relationship between landscape, modes of movement and technology, and how these relations influence learning contexts. Of course, landscape, movement, technology and learning contexts are all also conceptually mediated and culturally influenced. But we will address this later in the paper.

We offer below, another situated example to explore this relationship between landscape, movement and technology. Vignette 2 shows a particular context involving paddling a full Barmah Lake and surrounded flooded forests inundated with ‘environmental water’ (water allocated to the environment by water managers, to flush the river and flood the forest, mimicking pre-dam flooding regimes to help the ecosystem’s health).

Vignette 2

Full Lake, Flooded Forest video: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16665898.v1

How does canoeing create orientations within the landscape of vignette 2? How does the activity of canoeing (and its equipment/technology) create patterns of relationality, or mediate becoming-with the landscape (Haraway, 2008)? For us, the canoe allows students to travel into this otherwise difficult to access environment (e.g. see Figure 2—you cannot walk or drive a speedboat in such an environment). Moreover, the canoe allows particular ways of accessing this place. The canoe allows a slow immersion into the place, where students can develop an understanding of the fluxes and flows of this landscape, if educators help to guide attention this way.² We believe travelling by canoe makes certain realities of this landscape intelligible, including some of the precarious ecological position such places are in³. However, educators still have a key role in developing pedagogical strategies for confronting the nuanced complexities of these places.

Figure 2. Paddling through giant rush (Juncusignens) in a flooded tributary to Barmah Lake. Image by ScottJukes.

For us, moving by canoe has us moving with the environmental water as it travels and disperses, engaging materially with the story of water management and river regulation. Moving by canoe also opens particular encounters with animals, like the sleepy koala that was caught out by the environmental water releases and the emus here—(Emus on the lake video https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16689448.v1). Importantly in this example, our pedagogical approach aims to attend to the landscape through the activity, and does not focus on the activity as the end itself. We point out precarity, species threatened with extinction and threats to functional integrity, in aiming to foster affirmative relations with the place. We engage with different stories, follow different relational threads and grapple with the tangle of worldviews wrapped up in the landscape. The canoe gives us physical access and movement allows for encounters to emerge.

But if we were to flip our focus here, Barmah Lake (and the volume of water within it) allows for canoeing to occur. From this perspective, the landscape shapes what might be possible, and our technologies and modes of travel are a reciprocal correspondence between what a person may do, what a landscape allows and what technological mediations may intervene. This coming together provides different ways of knowing, or different aspects of a landscape to be apprehended (which we will discuss further in the following section). Such moments as depicted in the vignettes are a shared event between students, the landscape and the technology that made it possible to be there, entangled with a desire to listen and learn from the place. Landscape and technology enable us to learn through our movements. What we encounter become something we can attend to and being there makes the knowledge gained more than academic, it becomes felt and carries an affective weight (as depicted by Maggie in the first vignette above). However, as one of our students, Kayla points out, ‘highly impactful learning experiences are not isolated in the moment themselves, but are made up of many overlapping facets that combine to create learnings that are meaningful and transformative’ (Kayla, student essay), such as the worldviews we carry and conceptions we make. As argued previously by Stewart et al. (2021), pedagogical frameworks and different worldviews contribute to the way students engage with places in OEE.

A pause: more-than-human approaches to education

As we have been demonstrating, the ways people move among places partly shapes their engagement with them. This opens pedagogical possibilities, without guaranteeing what might be learned by a student. As we suggest above and have explored elsewhere (see Jukes et al., 2022a), we may use encounters with different features as pedagogical provocations. These may be considered learning events, as they involve more than just a human teacher. One of us has described this as thinking with a landscape (Jukes, 2021), where students minds and bodies extend to think with features and stories of landscapes in material-discursive ways. This partly draws upon Mcphie’s (2019) extended body hypothesis (which builds upon Clark and Chalmers (1998) extended mind theory). Thinking with a landscape also involves a pedagogical orientation that attends to landscapes, problematic environmental issues and complex and contested histories. Haraway (2016) asserts that ‘to think-with is to stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth’ (p. 40). For us in OEE, these are key elements of a more-than-human pedagogy—a pedagogy that stretches beyond an anthropocentric focus (such as teacher or student centered learning), towards a relational approach with less sedimented boundaries between humans and the rest of the world. As Riley (2021) highlights, OEE can move beyond classical humanist ideas of autonomous human agents by embracing relational ways of thinking where learners are ‘in constant negotiation with the world [original emphasis]’ (p. 228). We think these are important considerations for OEE. However, for now, we return to our key focus of learning through technology and movement.

Learning through technology and machinic assemblages

Earlier, as one of our guiding questions, we asked how technology influences ways we move through and learn with/in landscapes? We must admit, we do not intend to offer a definitive answer. However, we do believe this is a useful question for educators to ask in their own specific contexts. We have been examining canoeing in south eastern Australia, but we now diverge to take a look at the work of Spinney (2006), who explores mobility as a way of constituting place. His ‘kinaesthetic ethnography’ explores people on bikes climbing Mont Ventoux in France and how they come to know that place. For Spinney, cyclists are a hybrid subject—object, with cycling becoming fundamental for the ways that those people lived with, felt and created meaningful relations with that place. There are two aspects of Spinney’s research that we tease out below, as we think them particularly pertinent for OEE.

The agency of technology

Firstly, the cultural lure of Mont Ventoux as a site of history for cyclists (such as Tour de France stories, magazine articles and other heroic depictions) is part of what brings cyclists there. Yet Spinney (2006) suggests ‘being there’ also adds to cultural representations. For Spinney (2006), being there and participating in the riding of Mont Ventoux is an embodied event that offers something other than observing cultural depictions alone. In other words, for the cyclist, the place is constituted, or made manifest, through the activity of cycling. The cultural element of ‘cycling Mont Ventoux’ is still there, but it is morphed and changed through further material entanglements of participating in the event. In this way, cycling becomes a cultural performance that materially reshapes what might be felt and learned by a participant (just as it is also a material performance that shapes culture). This provokes us to think about OEE, place-responsive education and what we can learn through journeys (journeys down the Murray River and Barmah Forest in our examples). In particular, there is an onto-epistemological distinction between paddling in an area or learning about the place through another more physically distant method (in a classroom, for example). Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism entangles ontology and epistemology, writing that:

We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. [original italics]

(p. 185)

As such, the ways that people learn involves nonhumans and are shaped by the various entanglements of which we are a part (whether in the classroom or outdoors, but both differently).

The second aspect of Spinney’s (2006) work we want to touch upon is that the technology of the bicycle provides a mode of movement that opens different ways of attending, feeling and relating with environments. Through this act of mobility, different realities of the environment are felt and made visible, while others are rendered absent. Spinney’s (2006) explains that when cycling Mont Ventoux, ‘what came to the fore was a place constituted by the sensations and movements of a prostheticised body’ (p. 712). This prostheticised body involves both bike and person: ‘The human organism modifies itself with technologies that produce, temporarily, a new organism: a hybrid object—subject. Thus objects must be seen as crucial to the ways in which subjects effect agency as an accomplishment’ (Spinney, 2006, p. 715). But the bike—referred to as an object by Spinney—is really a ‘constellation of relations’ (Manning, 2014, p. 174) imbued with agency. Adding further consideration, we must not forget the cyclist’s body is not separate from their thoughts, cultural norms, or gendered and classed influences of the activity of cycling—these all further shape the cycling experience.

Machinic assemblages and messy connections

Despite Spinney’s (2006) work having a phenomenological orientation, these connections of person-bike-mountain encourage us to think of Colebrook’s (2002) contemplations on Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblages:

Think of a bicycle, which obviously has no ‘end’ or intention. It only works when it is connected with another ‘machine’ such as a human body; and the production of these two machines can only be achieved through connection. The human body becomes a cyclist in connecting with the machine; the cycle becomes a vehicle.

(p. 56)

In this instance, a ‘machine’ is a figuration for a body that connects and works with other bodies, to produce something altogether different—the connection of a body with other bodies changes what they can do (and is a process). Colebrook goes on to explain that the bicycle could also become an art object if placed in a gallery, just as the human body might become an artist when connected with a paintbrush. Colebrook alludes to the idea that things perceived as closed systems, such as a human body or some mechanical entity (e.g. bike, watch, car), are really illusions. All these things are machines that connect to other machines: ‘There is no aspect of life that is not machinic; all life only works and is insofar as it connects with some other machine [original italics]’ (Colebrook, 2002, p. 56)—or, it ‘is what it does’ (ibid).

As a concept, machinic assemblages unravel:

…the modern fantasy of the body as a stable, unified, bounded entity, and gives a language to the multitude of connections that bodies form with other bodies (human and otherwise). A body’s function or potential or ‘meaning’ becomes entirely dependent on which other bodies or machines it forms an assemblage with.

(Malins, 2004, p. 85)

It is in this way that cycling Mont Ventoux creates an assemblage (a person-bike-mountain assemblage, each functioning with the other, transmitting intensities [Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 2]) which opens specific conditions and possibilities. Alaimo’s (2010) concept of transcorporeality also comes to mind here, where ‘imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality’ acknowledges that ‘the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world’ (p. 2), giving human corporeality a more porous nature.

But, to add a place-specific material reality to the Mont Ventoux cycling example, these conditions and possibilities would be different if the person and bicycle connected with the Great Ocean Road, and rode along that coastscape in Victoria (or any other location). There would be different smells, different pollen in the air, salt from sea spray and a range of other transcorporeal agents that infuse and influence the rider. In the case of an activity like cycling, the landscape is also a machinic assemblage that the assemblage of the bicycle rider plugs into and travels with. The road, the corners, the pitch, the view, the cultural elements (language, what side of the road to ride on etc.), the locals, the social group rode with, the altitude, the weather all produce affects that connect to the rider and produce the conditions of possible experience—in this sense, the rider is never an individual and always contextually shaped. We can extend this discussion into any of the vignettes already shared above. The point we wish to make is that different landscapes create different connections due to their physical characteristics (material agencies) and also their cultural compositions (discursive amalgamations). Or as Deleuze & Guattari (1987) write, ‘an assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously’ (p. 24). We believe such considerations are important for educators and outdoor programmers to attend to.

Before looking at a landscape-culture composition from our OEE river environments context, we contemplate what Deleuze & Guattari (1987) write about machinic assemblages:

We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations and amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another … Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. The stirrup entails a new man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails new weapons and instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbiosis or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage.

(pp. 104–105)

For us, thinking with/of assemblages is to consider the dynamic constellation of relations (to use Manning’s (2014) phrase quoted earlier) and what this coming together of relations may do and become. For example, in the context of this paper, the canoe, connected to a river environment, students and the idea of OEE has the capacity to become more than a recreational activity. The intermingling of bodies, the attractions of a specific Nature-Society machinic assemblage is evoked by OEE student Dan in the next vignette.

Vignette 3

I came to acknowledge that I, too, was an agent in the landscape, and that I was not ‘detached’ to it simply for being a human, nor for my limited time on the Murray. I had assembled into the complex tapestry that was the River; I had transformed into a ‘hybrid,’ of sorts, between myself, the campfire, the forest, and the riverbank. At that moment, I was in contact with countless other living and non-living things that, when assembled, meant we had become one greater entity. My story was not the only narrative in that place; just like everything around me, I was an agency to an infinite number of stories that are interwoven to make the universe. Becoming more-than-human—be it as simple as a human-canoe-river assemblage—gives value to technologies or objects that we may previously take for granted…

By listening to the sounds of the river, the crackle of fire, the whisper of leaves rustling, and seeing the blue-grey clouds swelling above the tree canopy, I realized that indeed there is a character to the Murray River; an integral character to an ancient and beautiful story that I had become a part of. Viewing the world through such a lens can be challenging, for it defies many anthropocentric notions of learning where humans are at the centre of everything and the environment is something different. (Dan, student essay)

Dan’s writing above could be described as being nature, in Rautio’s (2013) terms—an interspecies articulation of finding and composing connections to the surrounding nonhuman world. Such a relational view that expresses nonhuman agency could also echo Clarke and Mcphie’s (2014) call for an animate and immanent take in OEE, where humans are of the world. Dan’s words resonate with an aesthetic intensity—a desire which ‘is the productive energy flow that moves between bodies in assemblages and enables them to momentarily alter their modes of composition’ (Malins, 2004, p. 89). It would appear that Dan perceives few boundaries between himself and the surrounding world, and he sees himself as part of and influenced by the assemblage. But then again, there is a romantic tinge in Dan’s words too. The aesthetic he portrays in his writing is of a more romantic conception of nature, shaped by specific cultural views—a conception that Clarke and Mcphie (2020) highlight as a common (and potentially problematic) practice in environmental education research. They argue that such a practice still highlights one side of the nature/culture binary, silencing other possibilities. Still, Dan portrays his consideration beyond a bounded self, with a care for the more-than-human river place in which he finds himself.

If we take Clarke and Mcphie’s (2020) point seriously, and blur the borders of nature/non-nature, other vibrant materialities may come to the fore. For example, Bennett (2010) highlights the affective capacity of rubbish, Affifi (2020) considers appreciating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and elsewhere we have acknowledged the agency of a green barrel on a river journey (see Jukes et al., 2019). Mcphie and Clarke (2020) argue that things such as rubbish/artificial nature (a chip packet is one example they highlight) are not of another nature to green landscapes. They state that ‘somehow human produce has become separated from the existing universe’ (p. 1516), but ‘if humans are nature too then surely everything we produce is of nature (the material, force and energy of the world/universe)’ (p. 1517). Again, this comes down to what worlds different conceptions and perceptions attend to. Previously, the first author of this paper (Jukes, 2020) has explored the complex ecological history of a canoe paddle, tracing the life of the paddle back to a door frame, a tree, a forest and the practices of logging that shape that forest. The same could be done with the aluminium/plastic paddle or petroleum derived materials of the life jacket in Figure 3. As Jukes (2020) argues, there is educational potential in exploring the history of our equipment. However, this is not the world that Dan attended to in his essay in vignette 3. And these were not the worlds his lecturer’s chose to emphasise in their teaching at this time.

Figure 3. Flooded Budgee Creek, a tributary to Barmah Lake. Image by Scott Jukes.

All educational contexts involve a milieu of forces, a specific nature-society machinic assemblage that can produce knowledge, through the intensities, desires and affects of that ephemeral spatio-temporal assemblage. It would be anthropocentric hubris to think we, as educators, are fully in control of what goes on. In this section, we have highlighted the role that technology and movement can play. We have also traversed a path that acknowledges that specific landscapes, cultural influences and conceptualisations impact student learning. Educators do, however, have some control over the technologies they choose to use, along with the pedagogical orientations they enact. These choices enable some worlds to be acknowledged, whilst others are closed off. For us, we see an imperative to make manifest the realities of the technologies we use and the landscapes we move through. Such realities include the threat of further extinction,⁴ environmental precarity and the ever-increasing rates of change that have threatening consequences for life within our continent. For us, this is how we may think with a landscape as part of a more-than-human pedagogy—something we demonstrate in the next section.

Discussions on technology, movement and blurred boundaries

In this final section, we discuss the use of technology as an embodied movement into the world—a movement in which we attend to the world but are intimately (always already) a part of that world. Taking the example of a paddle, we might consider it as an extension of the human body, an area of sensitivity in both directions that blurs the experience of feeling the world and being felt. Merleau-Ponty (1968), for example, characterises the intertwining of two such related/divergent possibilities as ‘chiasmic’ (pp. 130–155). The term chiasma is used by Merleau-Ponty ‘as a figure for understanding both the paradoxical contact and separation of the intersubjective relation’ (Toadvine, 2009, p. 111). The perception that we might touch this something other, and yet be part of that something other being touched, places us more directly in the world. Merleau-Ponty writes from a phenomenological perspective that pre-supposes a perceiving human subject, yet his later writing (The Visible and Invisible, 1968, for example), pushes the boundaries of phenomenology by conceiving of something approaching a ‘more than human’ phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty was heavily influenced by Whitehead’s process philosophy, and as Manning’s (2014) suggests, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s turn to Whitehead arguably brings phenomenology to its limit’ (p. 164). Hence why we mention Merleau-Ponty, and those that have been influenced by his later work, in our posthumanist/new materialist process-relational inquiry.

For us, the chiasm has similar relationality and entanglement to new materialist concepts such as mutual constitution and intra-action (Barad, 2007)—however, Barad’s intra-action contends that there are no pre-supposed individuated entities (a key differentiation between posthumanist/new materialist/agential realist ontologies and the pre-supposing subjects of phenomenology). Barad (2007), a key figure in new materialist/posthumanist theory, draws upon another related idea of Merleau-Ponty that is of relevance here. Barad (2007) highlights Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) inquiries into the use of instruments in the performance of everyday tasks. The discussion mentions how instruments are incorporated into the body, whilst the body is extended (or dilated) beyond the skin, blurring any ‘inside/outside’ boundaries. The example of a blind man using a stick to navigate local surroundings is used, highlighting that for the blind man the stick is no longer an object that is perceived in itself. Instead, the end of the stick becomes an ‘area of sensitivity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 143) that the world is perceived with, extending touch to a broader radius and scope.

Our reading of this work prompts us to consider how ‘dilating our being-in-the-world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 143) into the tools and technologies we utilise in OEE, and seeing them as an extension of our touch, helps us perceive (through an extended mind and body) a multitude of vibrant materialities specific to the assemblages of body-technology-landscape/place. In short, technologies both mediate and enhance the capabilities and capacities of bodies. This happens in specific ways, through performances (movements), which we think relevant for outdoor environmental educators and theorists of adventure education alike. The bounded individual human is blurred in such thinking (an agential cut undone [Barad, 2007]), as a human body is always more-than-human and transcorporeal due to the prosthetic extensions that change what it can do (perform), perceive (feel) and conceive (imagine). In other words, we are always the very substance of our environment (Alaimo, 2010). We are not in our bodies, we are our bodies, and our bodies extend into and move with the world. Just as we are also an assemblage of concepts shaped by the culture in which we live. As Barad’s (2007) states, ‘bodies in the making are never separated from their apparatuses of bodily production’ (p. 159).

What we come to through these investigations is the understanding that bodily performance influences what is felt, imagined and, therefore, learned. In other words, learning is partly embodied, materially implicated and culturally amalgamated, where ‘bodily performance and intellectual comprehension are as viscerally linked as eating and digestion’ (Ingold, 2016, p. 15). These understandings have implications for outdoor learning, OEE and adventure education, as the bodily performances we design connect us to the world in particular ways, opening specific learning possibilities. As Deleuze (1988) writes, ‘the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it’ (p. 18). Which is to say that we can’t apprehend every aspect of the events we are part of, however, particular movements can enable opportunities for specific multiplicities to be attended to. Furthermore, the world pushes back (so to speak), with the body’s specific situatedness (Barad, 2007, drawing upon Haraway) being a key connection within a machinic assemblage. And as for us, drawing upon Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010), we perceive an ontology where learners are not autonomous human subjects, but bodies that emerge through relational fields. To think beyond the notion of autonomous human subjects acknowledges the more-than-human agencies that shape the world all humans are part of. In this sense, the places of bodily performance are part of the educational milieu, and a key consideration for place-responsive educators, where learning is not a universally replicable affair.

Implications for practice, limitations and possible future directions

As we have traversed these discussions, we start to ask; what might this mean for a practitioner on a canoe trip? The implications for us (which we offer as potential implications for the reader) are that we need to consider both the particularities of the landscape and technologies we use. We believe it is worthwhile considering how the practice attunes us to a place and what worlds it opens. What might the practice make students, see, think and feel? Who and what does the practice include and exclude? What movements and becomings are possible? How do different actors shape the assemblage and what role do non-humans play? The writing of this paper has helped us ask such critical questions in and of our practice. We offer the concepts and critical mode of questioning as potential implications to be brought into others practice, into their own situations.

However, this leads us to several limitations for the research in this paper. First, we have drawn upon only a few examples to contextualise our explorations and discussions. There are innumerable other environmental contexts, technologies, ways of travelling and cultural groups that we could investigate to shed light on specific practices. How these may come together would create another altogether different assemblage that would offer something else. Furthermore, in this paper we thought with particular theories and concepts, with the performance of specific concepts stronger than others. Thus, this inevitably creates a particular discourse, that would otherwise be different if we enacted other theories and concepts in other ways. However, this leads to possible future directions in research.

We see potential in further exploring the role of different technologies in OEE pedagogical research. Mobile and digital technologies are receiving increased attention, yet many discussions still involve either/or debates and humanistic elements. There is also further scope to examine the agency and pedagogical potentialities of other non-digital technologies. Importantly, we believe that our field could greatly benefit from further theoretical rigour and conceptual creativity, as this can enable different ways of thinking and doing, which may help us confront the pressing issues of our times.

Inconclusion—looping back

For this paper, we take our lead from Gough (2008), and provide an inconclusion. As Gough explains (drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari), beginnings, endings, introductions and conclusions all imply a linear movement. Linear movement is hardly what we have tried to undertake in this inquiry, thus we suggest looping back to the initial sections of this paper and judge for yourself if we went where you expected. We hope to have, at least in part, confronted the problem of sedimented dichotomous boundaries between humans and the rest of the world through a consideration of technology and movement. Our explorations have been generative for us, helped us think harder about our practices, assumptions and the multiplicity of influences in our own teaching—both the ones we have some control over and aspects we do not. Our focus has been on learning landscapes through technology and movement, and we hope to have provoked others to consider elements of their own practice in relation to blurring some boundaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship [N/A].

Notes on contributors

Scott Jukes

Scott Jukes is a lecturer in Outdoor Environmental Education at Federation University, Australia. He has a passion for the river, mountain and coastal environments of south-eastern Australia and enjoys journeying and teaching in these places. His research explores pedagogical development and experimentation for outdoor environmental education, inspired by posthuman and new materialist theories. He is particularly interested in ways we may challenge human exceptionalism and rethink ontological assumptions as a response to our ecological predicament.

Alistair Stewart

Alistair Stewart is an independent researcher and consultant in OEE pedagogy and curriculum. Prior to 2021 he worked for more than two decades at La Trobe University serving as Head of Department and Course Coordinator in OEE. Alistair’s educational research interests include the development of curricula and pedagogy, informed by philosophies such as poststructuralism and posthumanism, that are a response to places and culture in which they are performed. When not occupied by research/education you might find Alistair working in the garden or out trail running, walking, canoeing, birdwatching or wondering what next to do about climate change and extinction.

Marcus Morse

Marcus Morse is Associate Professor in Environmental, Outdoor and HPE at University of Tasmania, Australia. Marcus grew up in Tasmania, where he spent time on the island’s rivers, coastlines, and mountains, which inspired a love of being outdoors. His research interests include environmental education, community engagement projects, place-based education, river experience, and wild pedagogies.

Notes

1. The following is a brief adapted summary of the essay prompt given for the student essays.

The aim of this essay is to perform a diffractive^* analysis of a learning experience in a river environment … The essay may utilise recorded field notes, photographic images or other relevant materials produced on previous river experiences to help analyse the experience… Your analysis of this experience is to draw upon teaching content, subject reading materials (e.g. Jukes et al., 2019; Morse et al., 2018; Stewart, 2018) and relevant literature to identify ingredients of the experience. *Diffraction is an alternative to the often discussed optical metaphor of reflection. Rather than mirror sameness, a diffractive analysis maps what made a difference and examines how these differences matter (Barad, 2007).

2. Obviously, we are not attempting to empirically validate that all people would experience slow emersion or learn the fluxes and flows of the landscape. What we are suggesting is that being there in this way opens up possibilities to learn such things. We do not believe the environment speaks for itself here—educators have a key role, as we also discuss further elsewhere (see Jukes et al., 2022a).

3. For example, river red gums and Moira grass thrive on flood water (even need flood water), the Barmah wetland (a RAMSAR site) and its various birdlife relies on water, whilst the invasive giant rush chokes up waterways changing the functional integrity of the floodplain (see Figure 2. In short, many of the native species require floodwater to survive. However, we know that floodwater is heavily regulated, with water perceived as a commodity by many in the Murray Darling Basin (such as farmers, irrigators, politicians and communities. For an in depth exploration of water politics in this region, see Simons, 2020).

4. Woinarski et al. (2015) explain how Australia’s land mammals are suffering extreme rates of extinction, with over 10% of endemic terrestrial species already lost since European settlement. They compare this to continental North America, where only one land mammal has become extinct since European settlement. Their research shows a further 21% of these Australian endemic terrestrial mammals are now being assessed as threatened, noting that losses in Australia are primarily due to predation from introduced species and changed fire regimes.