Educating beyond the cultural and the natural: (Re)framing the limits of the possible in environmental education

Abstract

This chapter maps an assemblage of the reader, the author, undergraduate students of outdoor adventure, sandstone boulders in northern France, fighter jets in North Wales, emerging posthuman/post-nature discourse, and questions of how we might creatively educate for ‘sustainability’. Following new materialist discourse the chapter advocates (re)framing the limits of the possible with undergraduate students, allowing them to push at the boundaries of staid and static conceptions of the human/nature relationship that channel our current ways of becoming. The through line explores shallow, deep, dark and flat conceptions of ecology to posit a form of environmental education that moves beyond the nature/culture dualism - a flat environmental education. Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of the haecceity, a challenge to dominant Western conceptions of material objects, is suggested as a ready concept for this form of environmental education. In this way education might be re-imagined along immanent lines, as a process of world-making, by helping students map and create their haecceitical ‘selves’ beyond the cultural and the natural.