Conference Agenda

Sustainability issues has been described as post-normal, “that facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” (Block et al., 2018, p. 1425). As such they cannot strictly be understood as scientific but rather ingrained with questions of meaning, value and justice. These post-normal characteristics are also fundamental to the relationship between democracy and sustainable development, as the time and space for the democratic process seems to shrink as the urgency of sustainability issues increases (ibid.). This poses a problem for democratic education in balancing the tension between the present urgency and the possibilities for critical reflections and imagination. One challenge is therefore how teaching in ESE can make space for political subjects and at the same time face (Todd & Säfström, 2008) this urgency and the emotions entangled with the sustainability issues.

One way of approaching this is through education in which students get to participate in the democratic process in schools. Hence, letting political subjects emerge, not to solve the crisis made by others, but to bring in new ways of knowing and being together in and with the world. Through Rancière's (2010) perspective on politics and dissensus the political subject emerges when students make interventions on the established order thereby altering the possible by making present what was before absent or unimaginable.

One way of making space for dissensus can be related to the possibility to re-imagine the future and Amsler & Facer (2017) proposes that one important function for democratic education is to facilitate the capacity for active-creative engagement with the future. The general aim of this study is therefore to investigate if and how environmental and sustainability education (ESE) can stimulate students to re-imagine the futures possible and to discuss its implications/possibilities for democratic education. In this paper we are testing and investigating one, amongst many possible methods of conducting teaching that have the goal to re-imagine the future, namely to use dystopian texts in teaching. According to Löwe & Nilsson Skåve (2020) dystopian texts are considered a suitable way in which teaching can deal with complex social issues of our time and according to Soares (2020 p. 74) as a way “for students to conceive a brave new world”. This brings forth the question – if and then how dystopia can be used to stimulate students to re-imagine the futures possible and make space for dissensus in ESE?

This study’s point of departure is grounded in a didactic research tradition which departs from socio-cultural theory, drawing on a pragmatic and poststructural approach. We make use of a transactional theory where meaning in a situation is created in a two-way reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment through experiences (Garrison et al., 2022), and where the human-text relationship is seen as transactional (Rosenblatt, 1982).

The transactional perspective in this study enablesd the exploration of the relationship between the reading and the emergence of political subjects. The notion of dissensus focused the attention towards the moments in teaching where yet un-imaginable futures awere made possible. Thereby the study’s design enablesd an exploration of if and how imagination and dissensus are made present through encountering dystopian literature.

This paper addresses the paradox in environmental education between the idea of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), which claims human beings are the center of global environmental change, and the idea of post-humanism, which rejects anthropocentrism. We explore how Eastern humanism, and in particular Tu Weiming's (2010) concept of Anthropocosmism, may help to dissolve this paradox and how it can inspire environmental and sustainability education. While agreeing with arguments against seeing humans as the only or primary bearers of value or concern, we also wonder whether, in an era so strongly characterized by human-made environmental destruction, the way out of this crisis should be sought in post-humanist responses that risk diverting attention away from human accountability.
Modern Western humanism typically assumes that such ideas as human nature and humanity have an eternal and immutable metaphysical essence. Since the Enlightenment, ‘rationality’ has been an especially popular candidate for such an essence, which accounts for the widely held assumption that rationality is the aim of human development and is, therefore, the goal of education. Humanism tends to assert that individuals are entirely autonomous from their environment socially, biologically, and physically. Each individual is an atomistic center of consciousness and intentional action (e.g., free will). Humanists are often stridently anthropocentric and presume human beings are dramatically different from, and superior to, other modalities of being and, therefore, have the right to dominate nature, or even destroy it, if useful to their purposes. We agree all of these aspects. However, we also agree with Lindgren and Öhman (2019: p. 1201) when they say ‘humanism has other values that we may not want to abandon’. First, it emphasizes the inherent dignity of human beings, which enables commitment to such liberal values as democracy, freedom, equality, human rights, and social policies emphasizing human education and welfare. Second, the emphasis on effective agency helped free humankind from the control of the supernatural and from those who claim to have the special powers necessary for propitiating its demands. Third, without a species-typical sense of the human (or at least Homo sapiens), how are humans to be held accountable for their effect on the environment? Finally, why only speak of the post-human or post-Homo sapiens? Might we not speak of the post-Canid, post-Arachnid, or post-Serpentes? What is it that legitimizes the otherwise often criticized ‘human exceptionalism’ in this case?
Post-humanists sometimes overlook humanism’s achievements. For post-humanists, terms such as ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ have been shown to be historically shifting concepts subject to dramatic change. Post-humanists also reject anthropocentrism. Meanwhile, whatever sense one may wish to make of ‘humanity’ and ‘culture,’ they can only be understood as entangled with, and dependent upon, a more inclusive ecosystem. Therefore, the domination and destruction of the physical and biological environment is foolhardy. Meanwhile, if not discarded, issues of human agency are undergoing dramatic decentering. As we strongly endorse these kinds of critiques, we explore a possible way to dissolve this paradox between anthropocentric humanism and post-humanism by integrating one participant in the affairs of nature, human beings, with all other modalities of being in an endless course of cosmic care and creativity. We do so by turning to Eastern humanism. In particular, we focus on Tu Weiming’s (2001, 2010) notion of ‘anthropocosmism’ wherein ‘the human is embedded in the cosmic order, rather than an anthropocentric worldview, in which the human is alienated, either by choice or by default, from the natural world’ (Tu 2001: p. 244).

In this paper, we report on children’s lived experiences of being with trees in a school. The children in the school were re-planting their playground to find out why trees are important in the climate crisis as part of a large interdisciplinary project called ‘Voices of the Future’ (Ref # 416424) funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The project aimed to explore children and young people’s embodied relationship to treescapes (that is, spaces where trees are) in urban and rural settings.

In this talk, we will share reflections from our research encounters with Year 3 /4 children (7 to 8 years old) in a rural primary school in the north of England. The school practices forest school in a small woodland area where children can freely experience direct contact with nature and trees (Malone, 2007). Proximate and regular access to the forest school creates space and possibilities for children’s bodily and sensational engagement with nature, trees, and the more-than-human.

Building on existing practice in the school, we worked with listening as an attending methodology to attend to children’s lived experiences, their multimodal and multisensory stories of being in and moving around trees in the school woodland area. We attend to various ways through which children express their opinions, experiences of being in the area, enabling us to view the school woodland as generating diverse possibilities for children to learn knowledge and skills whilst being in/with trees and woods. To understand the complex interplay between place and experience, we frame our work on “common worlds relations” to position human and more than human as active and affective participants within their encounters (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013). By attending to children’s encounters with the woodland as relational events, we offer new possibilities of looking at the interdependence of human and more than human as complicated, relational and entangled with the material world (Horton and Kraftl, 2006).

Our research began with our visits to the school with the purpose of getting to know the children, class teacher, school as a place (i.e., school and the school woodlands) with its materiality. We were keen to involve children as co-researchers (Pahl and Pool, 2021) respecting their status as active beings (Prout, 2005) having embodied and relational voices (Cooper, 2022). Our research aimed to focus on a diverse conceptual understanding of children’s voices, as we recognised that children need to be involved in decision making about climate change literacy and learning programmes (Rousell and Cutter-Makenzie, 2020). Our research encounters with children in their school land, helped us to think critically about the role of a cognitive focused model (Trott and Weinberg, 2020) of knowing and learning about environment, critically interrogating “who should decide what children should learn about trees and their role in tackling climate crisis and how?”. Working with Horton and Kraftl (2006)’s conception of research as a way of inquiring into something new differently in experimental way, we do not intend to produce a coherent account on alternative ways of knowing about trees and environment. Our focus here is to consider how this research lens can enable us to learn and explore about trees, humans, and the more-than-human world in diversified ways.