Breaking down binaries between formal and nonformal learning for preservice teachers

• In Event: Affective, Ecological, and Technological Entanglements in Education

Abstract

Preservice teachers of science learn to teach with Western, positivist perspectives that reinforce historical binaries, such as nature/culture and formal/nonformal learning. This study of a field trip to a natural history museum and a local park for a class of preservice teachers explores how nonformal, experiential learning can provide relational intra-actions with phenomena. Using a starting-with-the-earth-first framework based in posthumanist, feminist materialist, experiential, nonformal, and Indigenous perspectives, this study offers the concepts of worlding, diffraction, and reciprocal respect for the earth to address hierarchical approaches to science. Through this field trip, students reconnected to the earth, learned to value their entanglements with the nonhuman and more-than-human, and collectively rethought science education for teachers and their future students.

Author

• Leah Master, New York University