Teaching environmental education online to pre-service teachers through an agential realist lens: what matter matters?

Abstract

In this collaborative autoethnography, we explore and indeed embody the posthuman concept of Karen Barad’s agential realism, through our experience of teaching environmental education to pre-service teachers in an online classroom. We document our planning, teaching and evaluation journey, as we defied the apparent irony of online teaching of environmental education to explore the entanglements that made up each teaching and learning experience. We continually questioned how teaching through agential realism could reposition us as educators who are not in control of or responsible for our students in the traditional sense but are response-able with. We considered how we could enact this relinquishing of control but not our ethical sensibilities as we shared the entangled nature of environmental education with these future teachers. Using a diffractive analysis, we considered the apparatuses of the e-learning platform, our online classroom, and a course assignment through the concepts of intra-action, agency, and response-ability.