River as Relative: The Mutually Constitutive Roles of Physical and Psychological Closeness in Water Education

• In Event: Ancestral Prolepsis: Cultivating Relational Learning with Land and Generations for Indigenous and Planetary Futures

Abstract

Objectives
Water is the basis of all life and cultivating thriving worlds for future generations will depend on humanity’s ability to develop thriving relations with water. This work draws on ancestral prolepsis by demonstrating the role of Indigenous knowledge systems in designing systems of education that supports future generations to learn to live in right relations with water.

Perspectives
Drawing on nature-culture relations (Bang & Marin, 2015) and sociocultural theory (Esmonde & Booker, 2016) we focus on embodied place-based learning as a core feature of Indigenous knowledge systems (Marin, 2020; Simpson, 2014). Specifically, we examine the phenomena of psychological and physical distance/closeness to water as a critical dimension of water education. Building on construal-level theory (Trope & Lieberman, 2010), psychological closeness with the natural world has been shown to be associated with pro-environmental decision-making and more complex socio-ecological reasoning (Medin & Bang, 2014; Kim et al., 2023). We seek to understand the interrelated nature of psychological and physical forms of closeness by building with work demonstrating how movement in relation to lands and waters creates new conditions for learning and making relations with lands and waters (Marin, 2020; Engman & Hermes, 2021).

Methods & Data Sources
This study analyzes the construction of human-water relations in the context of an Indigenous STEAM program that took place in 2019. We focus on an arc of activity that involves learning about an urban river environment through the practice of setting fish traps. Using video ethnography (Derry et al., 2010), our analysis included corporeal and conceptual components. For the corporeal analysis we sliced the 3 hour dataset into 10 second intervals and counted at each interval: the number of people standing on the riverbank, on rocks in the river and in the water. For the conceptual analysis we coded socio-ecological and axiological reasoning at the same 10 second unit of analysis. Combined, the corporeal and conceptual analyses allowed us to create a timelapse that tracked physical closeness to the river in tandem with thinking about the river over time.

Results
We demonstrate joint shifts across the corporeal and conceptual dimensions of activity. Overall, the data shows a cultivation of physical and psychological closeness with the river over time. Closeness contributed to a shift in the axio-onto-epistemic grounds for learning that enabled a deepening of human-water relations through 1) complex socio-ecological systems reasoning 2) the recognition of MTH personhood and 3) a sense of responsibility to water and concomitant attunement to environmental decision making. We understand these three outcomes as mapped onto the what (complexity), how (MTH personhood) and why (responsibility and decision making) of learning (Philip et al., 2018), and ultimately as creating the conditions for building kin relations with water.

Significance
This work demonstrates the coupling of movement and thought in learning processes, highlighting need for greater attunement to the ways that forms of movement at the scale of micro-interactions matter for place-based sensemaking. This work makes methodological contributions towards a method for analyzing microgenetic shifts in thought and movement in group activity.

Author

• Forrest Bruce, Northwestern University