Mark Fettes - Böcker

What changes in education, when it is not just humans whose teaching is sought and acknowledged? And how can educational research be accountable to the voices and agency of such more-than-human teachers, interlocutors, and kin? These have become pressing questions in an era of soaring interest in forest and nature schools, place- and land-based education. Ecoportraiture offers theoretical and practical guidance into an emerging methodology with deep roots in the anti-racist, emancipatory research tradition of portraiture initiated by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis. Bracketed by the editors’ wide-ranging introductory essay and a closing critical conversation, five inspiring chapters take readers deep into the thinking and action that characterize ecoportraiture research. Ideal for researchers at all levels who want to explore more deeply how human learning is shaped and informed by the more-than-human, this book also invites a wider audience into the artful practice of close listening to the many voices of the natural world. Ecoportraiture seeks to evoke and to guide journeys of knowing that are both profoundly ecological and profoundly personal. This is an open-ended and transformative methodology: one that is less about finding answers than about asking better questions—about learning to participate more deeply, as student, teacher, parent, community member, and/or co-researcher, in the conversations of the Earth.

The current ecological crisis is the consequence of entrenched attitudes, discourses and behaviours in human societies worldwide, fostered and reinforced through modern educational traditions, processes and institutions. This book envisions a radical transformation of education to focus on the mutual flourishing of human societies with the rest of life on Earth. In part, the authors suggest approaching this as a problem of systemic design, incorporating principles that challenge and undermine key premises of the Capitalocene—the socio-economic-political landscape sustaining the current educational regime. Tracing the implications of this transition, they review core assumptions of modern Western culture that need to shift, and identify a wide range of relevant capacities and practices grouped under four complementary educator “stances” for eco-social-cultural change.