Posthumanist and Postcolonial Possibilities for Outdoor Experiential Education

Abstract

Background: Teaching and learning in outdoor experiential education is often conducted on lands with troubled histories of settler colonialism. This calls for new and creative forms of socioecological responsibility to attend to human supremacism and exceptionalism that marginalizes, exploits, dominates, and objectifies Other(s) in these Anthropocene times. Purpose: Through posthumanist philosophy (re)conceptualizing Western binary logics, this article explores possibilities for postcolonial land ethics in outdoor experiential education to address past, present, and future socioecological injustices and threats. Methodology/Approach: Adopting new materialist methodologies, this article examines affective materiality emerging from a series of multisensory researcher/teacher enactments, as set within pedagogies attuning-with land with a Grade 4/5 class in Canada. Findings/Conclusions: The affective materiality of sense-making in the researcher/teacher enactments provided opportunities to challenge discursively positioned land ethics, suggesting a transforming-with Other(s) through relationally co-constituted existences. Implications: Understanding that no separate and discrete worldviews exist in which individuals act through autonomous agency, but that worlding emerges through relational agency, teaching, and learning in outdoor experiential education can generate an intrinsic sense of responsibility to attend to more equitable relationships with Other(s) for/with/in these Anthropocene times.