Phillip G. Payne

The Significance of Experience in SLE Research

SUMMARY ’Experience’ is at the root of individual, socio‐environmental existence. Inquiries into its more ‘significant’ moments and episodes have arrived at a potentially important body of knowledge in environmental education. However, in the absence of parallel research efforts that demonstrate how the findings of those inquiries translate into contextually sensitive and socially useful educational practices, this discussion returns conceptually to questions posed by Louise Chawla about ‘inner nature’ and how significance of experience is socially constructed. To that future research agenda, I add the further question of how those constructions of ‘significance’ must be seen in relation to dominant social constructions of the ‘environment/nature’, sensitivity and activism. This begs the further question, exacerbated somewhat by the above lack of a connection with existing educational practices, of how teachers’ and learners’ thoughts and actions might also need to be examined in relation to dominant conc...

Postmodern Challenges and Modern Horizons: education ‘for being for the environment‘

SUMMARY This article argues that a ‘humanly‐constructive’ critical theory of environmental education called ‘a critical ecological ontology for educational inquiry’ provides a necessary complement to the ‘socially‐critical’ perspective. This humanly‐constructive curriculum theory focuses on our individual and collective ‘being‐in‐the‐world’. It invites learners, teachers and researchers to study how their ‘lived experience’ of socio‐environmentally problematic circumstances is shaped and stretched globally by various economic and technological imperatives. In so doing, ‘a critical ecological ontology’ highlights the personal politic required for a socio‐ecological praxis. Of particular relevance to the socio‐ecological politic ‘for being’ are interpretations of postmodern agency that emerge from three practical applications of ‘a critical ecological ontology’. This dialogue of theory and practice is necessary in the critical curriculum project of environmental education

On the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of experience in 'critical' outdoor education.

Experience is at the historical heart of outdoor education, caring for the environment/nature is a new moral imperative for ‘critical’ outdoor education, yet the activity basis of the outdoor/nature experience/imperative and the discourse(s) in which they function are rarely examined. To rectify this oversight, different constructions of critical outdoor education are contrasted to highlight the potency of the ecopolitic and (socio-)environmental ethic embodied in each construction. The essay concludes reconstructively with an elaboration of some critical dimensions of outdoor education. The paper invites ‘reflective’ and ‘critical’ outdoor/experiential educators to scrutinize the meanings they give to ‘experience’, how they construct it pedagogically in and through selected activities in certain environments and how, in turn, there are individual, social and ecological consequences for the ‘experiencer’, (outdoor) education’s role in constituting such subjectivities and, subsequently, how ‘inner’, ‘social’ and ‘outer’ natures are constructed, often in contradiction.

Conceptualizing the phenomenology of movement in physical education: implications for pedagogical inquiry and development.

There is increased phenomenological interest, philosophical and empirical, in the meaning and meaning-making dimensions of the experience of movement in physical education (Kentel & Dobson, 2007; Kretchmar, 2000a; Loland, 2006; Smith, 2007; Whitehead, 1990). This scholarly concern about the qualities and characteristics of movement shifts the focus of pedagogical interest to the embodied meanings of such experience and the subjective values associated with it (Johnson, 2008). Too often the meaning of movement has been invisible in the discourse of physical education. Philosophical framing and empirically informed discussion about the phenomenological basis of movement as well as interpretation of its embodied time-space affordances and constraints has the potential to reconceive curriculum, pedagogical, and policy development. In this paper, for the purposes of framing ongoing inquiry we examine phenomenological contributions to the physical education literature that examined or describe the intrinsic qualities of movement and consider implications of renewed interest in meaning and meaningmaking for pedagogical theory development and practices.

Slow pedagogy and placing education in post-traditional outdoor education

Time, and our experiences of it, warrants attention in ‘place’ pedagogies in outdoor education. Place typically involves the experience of a geographical location, a locale for interacting socially and/or with nature, and the subjective meanings we attach over time to the experience. Place, however, cannot be severed from the concept and practice of time, as seems to be occurring in the discourse of outdoor education. The way outdoor educators carefully conceive of, plan for, manage and pedagogically practice time may, in our view, positively facilitate an introductory ‘sense’ of place. We illustrate the under-theorised relationship of time and place in outdoor and experiential education via a case study of a semester-long undergraduate unit, Experiencing the Australian Landscape. It reflexively describes how two post-traditional outdoor educators working in the higher education sector have assisted pre-service experiential and outdoor educators to sense, explore, conceptualise and examine how ‘slow’ time is important in ‘placing’ education in nature.

Lifeworld and textualism: reassembling the researcher/ed and ‘others’

This response to McKenzie’s ‘post‐post’ concerns about environmental education research draws upon empirical, conceptual, anecdotal, metaphorical, imaged and poetic means to help the researcher ‘reassemble’ the researcher/ed by attending to her/his relational body and embodiment of various, often hegemonic, socially constructed environmental relations. The purpose is to reconcile body/lifeworld experiences and their sources (socio‐ecological ontology) with mind/text meaning‐making and representational strategies (epistemology) in methodologically advancing the capacity and claims of researchers to legitimize and politicize the aims, methods and consequences of their research. The paper concludes with the contours of a ‘post‐critical’ map for environmental education research.

Moral spaces, the struggle for an intergenerational environmental ethics and the social ecology of families: an ‘other’ form of environmental education

‘Green families’ in Australia were studied so as to shed light on how a more durable, everyday environmental ethic and ecopolitic might slowly be enacted in the intimacy of the home ‘place’ over an extended period of time in rapidly changing socio‐cultural‐ecological conditions. Of particular interest to this study of the green household, or postmodern oikos, was how its proximal ‘moral spaces’ have been nurtured intergenerationally by family members from within the broader global climate of what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as the ‘moral lag’ of postmodernity. Three layers of interpretive findings about the social ecology and family dynamics of this oikos are presented in an effort to provide detailed understandings about families’ eco being, dwelling and becoming. Implications for education for the environment can be gleaned from the ‘best’ ecopedagogical practices found in the home that are ‘other’ than those occurring in the formal education sector. This study adds to the theorizations of ‘social ecology’, ‘experiential education’, ‘ecopedagogy’ and, more generally, the notion of an everyday ‘ecocentrism’, while providing some clues for how environmental education in schools might mirror pedagogical aspects of the postmodern oikos.

The technics of environmental education

An ambivalent, sometimes destructive, relationship between modern humanity, technology and ‘outer’ or external nature has historically attracted the critical attention of scholars and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds. The effects of technology on postmodern ‘inner’ nature warrants similar scrutiny. This article examines how technology structures human experience and is structuring education for sustainable development. Propositions about the ‘technics of experience’ and questions for environmental education are posed so as to invite more earnest discussion about the inroads technologies and ‘vicarious’ learning experiences are making into the equally unproblematic ontological treatment of postmodern learners/subjects. Consideration must be given to the question of what users of the technological medium ‘become’—an ontological issue of crucial relevance to the ongoing aspirations and legitimacy of environmental education.

Remarkable‐tracking, experiential education of the ecological imagination

Imagination might be understood as letting our senses, perceptions and sensibilities run free for no apparent reason. Here, for this special edition what might be ‘remarkable’ is the ‘opening’ of our imagination provided orally through storytelling. This opening involves the ‘placing’ of our own and our listeners’ embodied selves in the spatio‐temporal geographies of those stories and their more‐than‐human natures. The remarkable opening is an important experiential dimension of becoming aware of the ecological otherness of nature’s places. Yet, opportunities for such embodied and storied encounters with nature’s places, in the wildly imagined other, are less available to children in what, increasingly, is a fast, literate, urban, technologically saturated and consumptive postmodern world. Story, storytelling, art, illustration, song and poetry provide animated means that, pedagogically, might re‐place children within an ecocentric sense of self. For over 30 years, the author has told gnome‐tracking stories in mysterious places so as to invite young school children and pre‐service teacher educators to sense, perceive and (re)imagine their (un)tamed ecological otherness and their intimate connections with more‐than‐human natures. This article briefly outlines the author’s ‘significant life experience’ encounter with Robert Ingpen, illustrator and author of gnome stories. It highlights how the embodied dance of visual illustration and oral storytelling experienced in natural settings provides a playful means for listeners to explore, discover and relate to their inner, social and more‐than‐human natures and places. The article concludes with a series of cues about an ‘ecopedagogy of imagination’, whose end‐in‐view is to establish some grounds for artful pedagogues to nurture the still elusive reconciliation of human, social and more‐than‐human natures.

Beyond games and sports: a socio-ecological approach to physical education

Acknowledging the performative sporting discourses which continue to dominate physical education, and the emerging focus on disease prevention within this context, this paper presents a socio-ecological framework for physical education that aims to shift the focus towards more multidimensional understandings of what it means to be ‘physically educated’. In doing so, we hope to prompt physical educators in schools and undergraduate programmes to more confidently employ intra-personal, inter-personal and environmental lenses through which to view and understand physical education, and therefore extend the gaze beyond activity-driven practice and ‘downstream’ exercise for health. The proposed framework draws upon established socio-ecological models and encompasses functional, recreational, health-related and performance-related physical activities. The multi-layered complexity associated with the field of physical education is reflected within the proposed socio-ecological framework. Through embracing complexity, particularly the interactions between layers of influence, the framework encourages exploration of the ‘physical’ beyond its subordinate components like fitness, body mass index, tactical awareness or motor skills. The framework is inclusive of games and sports but questions how these activities can be connected in the everyday lives of the learners. Importantly, the framework provided is not an approach to teaching and learning and, on its own, will do little to address the ongoing critique about the privileging of performative and health discourses within physical education. As they have in other fields, socio-ecological frames can provide a useful reference for the teaching and learning of physical education. To produce physically educated citizens in the broadest sense, teachers need to be supported, across multiple levels, to reposition their field to that of a connected specialism contributing to the whole curriculum and the communities within which they are located. It is our contention that socio-ecological frames can serve as useful tools to facilitate such a repositioning.