Place-Based Pedagogy: Ecofeminism and “Standing With the Other”

• In Event: Place and Sustainability Education for the Anthropocene: A Transnational Inquiry of Generative Tensions and Innovative Practices

Abstract

Whose place-based meaning and experience can serve as the basis of place-based education? Place-based knowledge is heterogeneous and questionably local. Indeed, it is very likely hybrid, conflicting and variously connected to global social, scientific and technical networks (Nygren, 1999). This paper examines questions of situated knowledge (embodied, privileged, neglected and idealized), ethics and relationality found in ecofeminism (Warren, 2000). In particular, it details the pedagogical possibilities opened up by Val Plumwood’s discussion of solidarity with non-human others such as “trees, mountains, wild rivers, wilderness areas and endangered species” (Plumwood, 2000, p. 196). A focus on pedagogy provides a theoretical and methodological address, which does not rely on the idea that places are of themselves pedagogical. Place-based education draws on deep ecology and the land ethic of Leopold; the experiential approach and notions of active learning in the work of Dewy; and Greenwood’s reading of critical pedagogy (Knapp, 2005). Pedagogical resources, activities, approaches and innovations derive from particular philosophical understanding of the nature of place. Practice comes from somewhere; it is theoretically informed and historically constituted. An understanding of pedagogy as praxis - beyond the assumption that it is simply the atheoretical mechanics of teaching –focuses attention on theories of practice able to drive place-based education’s sustainability change agenda.

The idea of “standing with the other” (Plumwood, 2002, p. 202) is a particularly productive theoretical resource. It is based on solidarity, rather than the construction of identity or the maintenance of unity, both of which risk subsuming difference to sameness. Instead of dissolving problematic binaries, “standing with the other” seeks grounds for solidarity through respect for difference. Because difference cannot be acted on behalf of, “solidarity with” stimulates the formation of epistemic coalitions, non-hierarchical forms of recognition and “traitorous identities” which challenge the epistemic superiority of master narratives. Somerville’s “thinking through country” (see paper 2), which listens for ways to respond and reposition ourselves alongside Indigenous knowledge in concrete and situated places and times is an example of such a pedagogical endeavour. “Standing with the other” redirects Leopold’s line where “thinking like a mountain” allows us to see land as a community rather than a commodity, and provides the love and respect necessary to better use it. It is a stance that requires closer attention to the condition of non-human entities as systems capable of agency and intentionality; self regulating and ends directed (Plumwood, 1993). The experience of standing with powerful, agentic and creative non-human otherness requires an animating sensibility and vocabulary (Plumwood, 2009). Since we cannot “be” the other we can only seek to precipitate “leaps of recognition” that enrich and reanimate ways of “standing with.” When ecofeminist theory is recast as a pedagogical resource—a theory of practice—it allows for reconfiguration of pedagogical innovation beyond the generation of “masterful” knowledge and science in a way that converges with the humanities, poetry, literature and the arts.

Author

• Julie M. Matthews, University of the Sunshine Coast