Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Set within the dynamic unfolding of youth climate movements, this paper explores the role of digital media in staging new possibilities for climate change education and activism. We engage theories of affective politics to explore how young people are using digital platforms to both learn about climate change and perform climate activism. We develop this analysis by describing the co-development of a climate education App with young people, a co-design project that brought together elements of climate science, speculative fiction, crowd sourcing, and hacktivism. The paper aims to advance understandings of how digital practices can help young people navigate climate change as a ‘theatre of problems’ through the cultivation of political affects and subjectivities.

This presentation ‘stays’ with the ‘traces’ in posthuman and Aboriginal knowings as an attempt to situate theory in environmental education and its research. Through a conceptualisation of theory as ‘knots’ in the vast fabric of knowledge, and these efforts to ‘stay-with’ as methodology, we sense/work in/through traces whereby theory may engage with embodied patterns of human and non-human relationality across place and time. This grounding of theory illuminates diverse epistemologies and ways of knowing that are indeed knotted together. Our approach challenges the perpetuation of reductionist humanist perspectives, including the nature/culture binary, within environmental education. Through enacting widening arenas of identification and relationality we offer an exploration of an alternative pedagogical approach, one that will provoke environmental educators to ‘stay-with’ expanding possibilities. With a focus on place and arts-based educational research methodologies, staying with the traces necessitates a slow and deep engagement within both theory and practice.

The interactive and sensory nature of this symposium allows participants to explore the innovative potentials of walking for their own research, education and artistic practice- with specific relevance for those involved with sustainability and environmental education, arts education, site-specific and relational art practices, cultural geography and anthropology, eco-cultural studies, environmental writing, location-based media and other fields of inquiry orientated towards movement, place and entanglement.

‘To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves...we have been aided, inspired, multiplied’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3). Collaborative methods have historically been promoted and applied in the field of educational research, often assuming the form of collaborations between multiple researchers, or collaborations between researchers, teachers and students involved with a research project. Collaboration is often heralded as an ethical and empowering practice that contributes to the authenticity of a given study by weaving multiple voices into both the research process and its forms of dissemination. Despite this proliferation of collaborative methods in educational research, very little analysis has so far been applied to the varieties of collaboration, how these methods actually function, or what might constitute an authentic collaboration in education and its research. Each of the three authors of the paper has come to educational research from a different professional background: one as an environmental educator, another as an arts educator, and a third as a contemporary artist. Educational research offers a unique space for us to collaborate, and indeed reflect on our own experiences of collaboration in our professional and personal lives. In moving between our own and each other’s narratives, we attempt to unravel the harmonics of the collaborative voice in educational research, in which the singular voice of the ‘author’ also gives voice to multiple others. We explore the differences between direct and indirect collaborations, what Carter (2004) has also called ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ collaborations, and collaboration as a certain kind of ‘correspondence’ between people, places and things in the world (Ingold, 2013). What then are the particular attributes and flexibilities of educational research which afford such interdisciplinary collaborations, correspondences, and ultimately, transformations? In addressing this question, we posit collaboration in educational research as more than just working with each other towards mutual goals. Rather, we suggest that authentic collaboration involves a mutual transformation of each and the other, a harmonic re-imagining of individual voices to the point that ‘we are no longer ourselves’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3).

As it stands, climate change is absent within the Australian curriculum for children under 1 The Australian curriculum utilises watered-down language such as ‘environmental change’ instead of well-recognised and accepted terminology in climate change science (Whitehouse, 2013). The curriculum in many respects is blindly stuck in the Holocene past. Such revelations support Kagawa and Selby’s (2009, p.242) work contending that ‘climate change is too urgent and important to suffer 'death by formal curriculum'… calling for emergent curriculum approaches that embed climate change learning and action within community contexts’. This paper is drawn from the initial findings of a NSW Environmental Trust grant entitled Climate Change + Me. The first stage of the project is a 1.5 year participatory youth-led research project which deeply considers children and young people’s (9-14 years) beliefs and concerns about climate change. The research methodology is child-framed in nature utilising visual ethnography (Barratt, Cutter-Mackenzie & Barratt, 2013). In this session we represent our co-researchers’ voices drawing upon their narratives and images. We then consider such research in the context of the Holoscence, Anthropocene and broader environmental philosophy, history and education.

This keynote presents arguments associated with young children's play experiences in contemporary environments. The notion of 'nature deficit disorder' and the changing role of nature in young children's lives is examined and problematized within an early childhood education context. The phenomenon of the ecological continuum is considered, alongside the perceived role of environmental education in the early years as a response to children's contemporary play experiences.