The Need to Emphasize Reinhabitation and Decolonization as Tandem Processes Within Environmental Education

• In Event: Researching Ecological Relationality and the Prospect of Cultural Change Within the Public School System

Abstract

One of the central questions guiding the Maple Ridge Environmental School Research Project is: Can education be an agent for cultural change towards an ecological consciousness? The answer based on our research thus far appears to be, "only with active and thoughtful mediation and intervention." In this presentation I plan to discuss that in order to be an effective agent of cultural change, education needs to involve two processes which David Greenwood (2003) labels as ‘decolonization’ and ‘reinhabitation’ and most importantly, these processes need to happen in tandem.
The notion of ‘decolonization’ involves “learning to recognize disruption and injury to place and then subsequently addressing the causes of such an impact” (Greenwood 2003, p.9). Greenwood (2003) continues to add “From an educational perspective, it means unlearning much of what dominant culture and schooling teaches, and learning more socially just and ecologically sustainable ways of being in the world” (p.9). He pairs this with ‘reinhabitation’ which he defines as “learning to live well socially and ecologically in places that have been disrupted and injured” (2003, p.9).
Over the past three years the Simon Fraser Research Team has collected data on the daily life at the Maple Ridge Environmental School in the form of field notes, transcripts, interviews with students, teachers, parents and community members as well as audio and visual recordings. Using this data from our research at the Environmental School, I will stress the importance of attending to both decolonization and reinhabitation as too often within the field of environmental education, we sacrifice one process for the other. Using examples from the school I will first speak to the dangers of attempting to ‘reinhabit’ without also ‘decolonizing’ and secondly, describe the troubles of moving to decolonize without care around what it means to reinhabit.
I will be specifically looking at the fort village that the students have created during school time and how this has been dealt with at a pedagogical level. Without teacher intervention to help examine and question dominant cultural assumptions in the student approach to place-making within the village, the students have ended up replicating some ecologically destructive/ignorant ways of being in the world. Then, when the teachers finally took a critical approach to such behaviour, they neglected to pair this with thoughtful ways to connect with the place. Either shift of the pendulum results in the inability to live well ecologically or socially within place. A purely critical approach ignores the need for relation and an approach void of criticality perpetuates a shallow understanding of place and denies the possibility for deep reinhabitation. Instead, we need to ensure our practices as educators pair these processes, as Greenwood suggests “this means looking for ways that teach us to live well ecological and socially and to change ways that injure or exploit people and places (2003, p. 9)”.

Author

• Laura Piersol, Simon Fraser University