Ron Tooth

Story, setting and drama - a new look at environmental education

The aim of this article is to present the Pullenvale Process as an on-going curriculum approach that has been extensively studies and shown to be effective. It offers tangible evidence of success in organising visits to a Field Study Centre.

Perezhivanie Mediated through Narrative Place-Responsive Pedagogy

We explore in this chapter episodes of deep learning and significant changes to self that students report after experiencing a narrative-based and place-responsive pedagogy called Storythread. To theorise this kind of learning we deploy Vygotsky’s notion of perezhivanie because it treats learning as an amalgam of intellectual and emotional insights that leads to reflection on oneself and one’s future.

Using a new body/mind place-based narrative pedagogy to teach values education in the age of sustainability

In this chapter, a number of conclusions are drawn about the kind of ‘ethical imagination’ that can be generated when skilful and committed teachers work inside and outside classrooms to create values dialogue using story and reflection. The chapter expands on current work in the area of ‘learning for sustainability’ and suggests why a blend of environmental narrative and deep reflection seems so effective in developing a personal sense of ‘wellbeing’ in students that produces deep learning and positive improvements in knowledge, values, attitudes and behaviour. It will be based on an extended history of professional engagement with teachers and students through the Pullenvale Environmental Education Centre in Queensland, Australia, as well as scholarly inquiry into the forms of narrative and place-based pedagogy that emerged from this prolonged professional engagement. The power of story as an educational methodology is well documented. Bruner described story as one of the two ways that human beings learn about reality. Kieran Egan has written extensively about the power of narrative in education as a cultural universal that allows us to make sense of our experience in the world and to infuse it with meaning.

Children Becoming Emotionally Attuned to “Nature” Through Diverse Place-Responsive Pedagogies

We theorize children’s emotional relationships with place in terms of love, care, and solidarity, drawing upon Lynch (2007). However, rather than restricting emotional relationships to human-human interactions, we extend the relational and emotional other to the more-than-human world and to place itself. Can children situate themselves as interdependent beings with other living and nonliving entities in place? Can they come to understand that they are not separated from “nature” but are part of “nature,” emotionally interconnected with the living systems of Earth? To investigate children’s emotional relationships with place and the morethan-human world, we analyzed their representations of “nature” and themselves following an excursion to Karawatha Forest in South-East Queensland, Australia. The children were 11–12 year-old (in Year 6 or 7) and attended four different primary schools in the Brisbane area. The excursion was based on a placeresponsive pedagogy that followed the story of Bernice Volz, whose civic action in the 1990s was crucial for establishing Karawatha Forest and lagoons. Ron Tooth and other staff at Pullenvale Environmental Education Centre (PEEC) designed a storythread educational program for Karawatha that situates Bernice’s story as pivotal in mediating children’s experiences. Their connection to place is also mediated throughout the excursion by dadirri, an Aboriginal practice of attentiveness to, and feeling in place. Following the excursion, children shifted toward an understanding of “nature” as agentic, knowledgeable, emotional, and not as separate but as bonded to them. They envisaged relationships of love, care, and solidarity with “nature” in the present and future, and for some the excursion marked a significant change in identity. The implications of this place-responsive pedagogy are considered in the context of neoliberal times and accountability pressures for teachers.