Designing for the Development of Multispecies Relationships in Science Learning Contexts

• In Event: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances
  In Structured Poster Session: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems Through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances

Abstract

Objectives: How can individuals and groups learn to be more present for other species at a time of ecological devastation? In this piece we articulate a theoretical framework for designing science learning experiences to promote socio-ecological thriving centered on community history and interests. We focus on the interdependent relationships between trees, people, and other living and nonliving entities. This framework allows us to study, theorize, and build capacity for responding to specific systemic effects of global climate change.

Theoretical Framework: We have been developing a methodological framework called worlding design research to open up scopes of possibility for collectively mobilizing an ethos of care to support “as good as possible” thriving within disparate socio-ecological contexts (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Worlding is a concept that recognizes and embeds human, more-than-human, and nonliving entities in entangled and interdependent webs of consequentiality as a fundamental theoretical frame for understanding existence and change (Haraway, 2015). It operates through a situated and historical view of decentralized agency and collective becoming. The framework serves to disrupt human exceptionalism while positioning humans in direct and multifaceted relation to various entities within natural systems (Medin & Bang, 2014).

Mode of Inquiry & Evidence: This piece is a conceptual argument detailing a theoretical framework focused on supporting socio-ecological thriving through place-centered transdisciplinary education centered around tree species. Throughout we use conceptual evidence and examples from the literature to clarify the argument (Burbules & Warnick, 2006).

Warrants for Arguments: Given ongoing effects of shifting climate systems, it is crucial to understand how people can develop deep commitments and actionable responsibilities to the human and more-than-human inhabitants of ecosystems, especially those in which they are embedded or connected. Trees play a crucial role within ecosystems and specific cultural communities and exist interdependently with other trees and plants, fungi, microorganisms, and animals—including people. They also figure prominently in proposed mitigation responses to global climate change (Bastin, et al., 2019). We argue that we need to develop educational design knowledge related to cultivating human-tree and other multispecies relationships—through worlding design research—in support of developing material obligations of caring associated with practical ecological thriving and related policy processes. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argues that this involves an active process of listening to entities speaking “from below” (Harding, 2015) in order to enact a politics of care associated with the local (re)making of relations. Such efforts serve to support both multispecies justice as well as social justice in terms of collective continuance within nondominant communities—by tending to the moral relationships and ethico-political actions that exist in the affinities and bonds between diverse members of human and nonhuman worlds (Whyte, 2019).

Scholarly Significance: We need to develop educational design knowledge and associated accounts of learning focused on the transformation of human-nature relationships that support a just and thriving world. Focusing on a situated, feminist framing of ethos of care in a more than human world provides a new foundation for productively shifting the science education enterprise towards this goal.

Authors

• Philip L. Bell, University of Washington

• Rachel Han, University of Washington - Seattle