Thinking through environs: Practices for learning with river environments
Details:
11:00 – 11:50 am
6th of December
Room: 2E-201
Marcus Morse, Scott Jukes & Philippa Morse
Rivers have an allure, a gravitational pull that positions us in particular ways, that orients us towards them and can draw us downstream (Morse, 2014). But is this something that is in our heads? Or is this something that emerges from the topography? For us, we aren’t just interested in rivers, we are fascinated, enchanted – there is something outside of us, that grabs hold and pulls us in. What is this draw? Macfarlane (2013) suggests that landscapes provide a habitat for particular modes of thinking. But there is something more here, a thread we need to pull at. This presentation provides a partial unravelling of this thread, as we link some of these emerging educational ideas with our grounded teaching and learning practices in river environments.
This project works with the idea of thinking with things (Jukes, 2023) to explore ways of thinking with places, landscapes, and in our case, riverscapes. ‘Thinking with’ implies skilfully extending our thinking beyond the brain, outside our skulls, and engaging external materials and entities (Paul, 2021). It acknowledges more-than-human relations in our surrounds and follows the flow of those relations. Through this presentation we explore embodied thinking and somatic pattern-recognition in river environments to highlight ways that students might reach beyond themselves and work with their surrounding environs to think differently.
About the Presenters
Marcus Morse is Associate Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His research focuses on place-based and relational outdoor environmental education, community engagement projects, river experience, and wild pedagogies.
Scott Jukes is a lecturer in Outdoor Environmental Education at Federation University, Australia. His research explores pedagogical development and experimentation in outdoor environmental education, inspired by posthumanist and new materialist theories.
Philippa Morse is a Senior Lecturer in Outdoor and Environmental Education, at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Her teaching and research is focused on imagination and posthuman pedagogical approaches in outdoor and environmental education.
