Watery configurations of animals, children, pedagogies and politics in a suburban wetland

Abstract

This chapter explores intimate encounters between secondary school students and the creatures of a suburban wetland in south-west Sydney, Australia. Through unexpected encounters with distressed animals, the students began to recognise the interconnectedness of all things, the vulnerability of the animals of the lagoon and their responsibility to intervene with whatever resources were at hand, including their imaginations and creativity. Learning was mobilised by affectively potent encounters with the animals, and students pursued interdisciplinary inquiry-led investigations of the wetland, producing (amongst many other outcomes) a rap song, a children’s picture book and a dance. In terms of the affective force of pedagogy, the relatively open-ended design and the creative responses, the project resonates with work on place-based “pedagogical encounters” (e.g. Davies B, Gannon S, Pedagogical encounters. Peter Lang, New York, 2009; Somerville et al., 2011), “commonworlding pedagogies” (e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw V, Taylor A, Blaise M, Decentring the human in multispecies ethnography. In: Taylor C, Hughes C (eds) Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 149-167, 2016) and “posthuman pedagogies” (e.g. Snaza N, Weaver J, Education and the posthumanist turn. In: Snaza N, Weaver J (eds) Posthumanism and educational research, Routledge, London, pp 1-16, 2015). Further, the analysis in this chapter suggests that these are enriched by insights from animal studies (e.g. Lloro-Bidart T, Can J Environ Educ 20: 93-108, 2015; Oakley J, Watson GPL, Russell CL, Cutter-Mackenzie A, Fawcett L, Kuhl G, Russell J, van der Waal M, Warkentin T, Can J Environm Educ 15: 86-102, 2010; Pedersen H, Discourse: Stud Cult Politics Educ 31(2): 237-250,2010, Pedersen H, Cult Theory Critique 52(1): 65-81, 2011, Pedersen H, Other Educ: J Educ Altern 1(1): 152-165, 2012; Warkentin T, Thinking like a whale: interdisciplinary methods for the study of human-animal interactions. In Smith JA, Mitchell RW (eds) Experiencing animal minds. New York, Columbia University Press, pp 129-141, 2012). While the students’ projects hint at the possibilities of these paradigms for rethinking education for sustainability, they also show the difficulties of thinking beyond an anthropomorphic understanding of what it means to “be alive” with others in the world (Ingold T, Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description, Routledge, London, 2011). Finally, the wider political contexts of the project are considered - including research funding, urban development and activism.