Reframing youth’s embodied and affective resistance to an outdoor environment as a resource for learning

• In Event: Designing for Affect and Embodiment: Ethical Attunements in the Futuring of Education

Abstract

Objectives
Traditional school settings notoriously constrain and police bodies and emotions in ways that perpetuate inequities, deny learners’ educational dignity, and hinder learning opportunities (Author et al., 2014; Gholson & Wilkes, 2017). In contrast, place-based pedagogies in outdoor settings embrace embodied and affective learning, recognizing affordances of learning on the move for attending to the more-than-human world with awe and wonder, coordinating sensemaking across spatial and timescales, and affirming learners’ agency and dignity (Author, 2020; Sherry-Wagner, 2023; Stapleton & Lynch, 2021). However, researchers have paid less attention to moments where youth resist moving through the outdoors or to the value of negative emotions in learning. This study focuses on middle-school youth’s embodied and affective resistance to participate in an activity at a creek during a place-based science camp, and how educators’ responses, as they attempted to coax the youth into the water, inadvertently missed opportunities for rich learning and dignity-affirmation.

Perspectives & Methods
We draw on sociocultural understandings of sensemaking, emotion, place, and practice as entangled, achieved in interaction, and influenced by broader sociocultural contexts (Lanouette, 2022; Vea, 2020). Our camp’s design sought to foster science identity play (Author, 2023) and nurture embodied/affective/cognitive connections to and understandings of an entangled more-than-human world (Haraway, 2016). Our analysis focuses on an episode that occurred halfway through the two-week camp at a midstream creeksite where the water was murkier, higher, and more polluted than an upstream site campers had visited before. We used interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to critically examine the emplaced, embodied, affective, and discursive sequence of events that unfolded as we (as researcher-educators) attempted to engage youth with the creek outside of their comfort zones.

Findings & Significance
As a group of girls hesitantly entered the creek, they expressed fears about snakes hiding in the murky water. As Author2 stated in a gentle voice that there were snakes but to just leave them alone, one girl shouted, “OH HELL NO!” and abruptly returned to the bank. Author1 and Author2 coaxed her back, noting the relative shallowness near the bank, her protective boots, and their only having seen one snake at the site on previous visits. After reentering the water, she eventually embraced playing in/with the creek and engaging in a trash pick-up. However, in our moves to coax her into the water, we inadvertently (a) missed opportunities for learning with/about the MTH world (e.g. toward understanding snakes’ perspectives and preferences); (b) perpetuated human-centrism (emphasizing youth’s control over interactions with nature rather than asserting multi-directional relationality); and (c) failed to affirm youth’s experiences of the water, which were wrapped up in personal and sociocultural experiences of the outdoors, thereby denying their educational dignity. While we believe it is ultimately important to help youth move outside of their comfort zones to create opportunities for new relations with the MTH world, this analysis highlights the importance of taking youths’ embodied and affective resistance to outdoor settings seriously.

Authors

• Tessaly Jen, Vanderbilt University

• Heidi Carlone, Vanderbilt University