Water “of Other Spaces”: Analyzing Designs for Children’s Environmental Learning and Agency

• In Event: Waterways and Pedagogical Entanglements: Teaching, Learning, and Relating to Water and Its Multiple Meanings

Abstract

We submit this abstract as scholars whose childhoods unfolded within major metropolitan cities and alongside the expansive bodies of water of the Nile and Detroit Rivers. Our educational contexts for living and learning, while ever-aware of the proximity to water, largely took for granted the sociopolitical histories and multiplicity of everyday water knowledges (Dean et al., 2016). Questions of our ethical relationships with and access to the water of our homelands were not foregrounded in the school curricula. The tensions in our experiences are resonant with broader tensions in the field of elementary education focused on the study of water and waterways (e.g. Bruce et al, 2023; Nxumalo & Villanueva, 2020; Author & Colleague, 2019; Schutz & Woodard, 2022). While many recognize the need for critical STEM in broad strokes, there has been less emphasis on the nuances of designing for the socioscientific and sociopolitical learning of children with different water relationships, identities and experiences (Author & Colleague, 2019). Coinciding with a growing body of research that seeks to expand, de-settle and nourish pedagogical imagination about what environmental and science education can be (e.g. Bang & Marin, 2015; Sengupta-Irving & McKinney de Royston, 2020), we examine examples of water design with children and consider if/how these models reflect water as a heterotopic space of inquiry.
Heterotopias, as a Foucaldian concept, refers to unconventional, “otherwise” spaces (Nxumalo, 2021) that challenge societal norms (Foucault, 1984). As spaces within spaces, heterotopias are fluid (physical or ideational) sites that offer alternative experiences for learners who are transitional or increasingly vulnerable to environmental injustices. Our analysis is guided by the need to synthesize extant scholarship on critical and creative water learning, and to explore how the lens of heterotopias might offer additional insight into designs that advance justice while providing opportunities for children’s joyful, complex sensemaking. How can city-dwelling children be positioned as bearers, protectors and co-constructors of water knowledge? What pedagogical design principles and tools have been employed, toward what ends and otherwise possibilities?
Our paper is organized as an exploratory, multi-case study of design and children’s water learning. Curriculum materials, child interviews from our own work conducted in Michigan and the secondary analysis of reports describing critical water design projects in other contexts constitute the corpus of data for this project. Employing a framework that foregrounds heterotopic elements such as crisis, deviation, juxtaposition, temporality and ritual (Foucault, 1984), we offer insights on areas of similarity and distinction reflected in each case (and by extension, a reflection of the field). For example, in the case of children learning about clean water access in Michigan, the pedagogical design involved a juxtaposition of children’s neighborhood water circumstances with that of the people of Flint, thus helping learners to consider power systems and histories of water instability as entangled. We conclude this paper with a call for the continual evolution and advancement of multidimensional water learning design models that recognize water historicities, power, culture and relationships in ways that build upon diverse children’s playful/proleptic, environmental, and political sensemaking.

Authors

• Roni Barsoum, University of Michigan

• Natalie Davis