Dr Tracy Charlotte Young

Plants are having a moment in contemporary research from the intelligence of mycelial networks to the communicative life of ancient forests, ‘mother trees,’ fungi, and lichens. This paper explores this vegetal turn through a collaborative inquiry in which each author brings situated experiences of human–plant relations. As scientists and educators, we found ourselves unlearning the colonial, anthropocentric, and positivist legacies that have long shaped plant studies. Through this slow unlearning, from botany to ethnobotany and now toward what we call post-ethnobotany, we learn to listen differently to plants, to place, to people, to material affects, and to the more-than-human stories that move through them. Our aim is to decolonise ethnobotany through post-qualitative and posthuman approaches that recognise plants as active participants in multispecies ecologies rather than isolated specimens. Building on work mapping relational vegetal ontologies, we extend toward post-ethnobotanical inquiry grounded in symbiotic, entangled, and reciprocal understandings of plant life.

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as applied in the environmental education research project that informs this article, abandons hierarchical comparisons of plants, which are often historically positioned as “lesser species,” mere “objects” and “resources” even. We start our paper with a modest review of key theoretical approaches informing past and recent environmental education studies on child-plant relations. We then return to the discussion started within the introduction to the paper on how we have theorised a vegetal ontology as a mode of a relational ontology focussing particularly on human-plant relations and drawing on posthumanist, new materialist and Indigenous approaches. To conclude the paper, we then put this newly named vegetal ontology to work. We apply it to a recent study on childhood-plant encounters where researchers engaged with young children and their families in a botanical garden setting and a group of environmental education elders reflected on the significance of plant relations in their childhoods.

This article bewilders dominant discourses about child-animal relations by acknowledging and challenging the work of Gail Melson who positions animals as providing emotional, social and pedagogical support for children. Melson's psychological approach rests upon implicit assumptions that shape and support anthropocentrism whilst also critiquing a utilitarian approach to animals in educational learning spaces. The legacy effects of this approach are steeped in neoliberal discourse that entangle with pedagogy and practice. Unless modified these effects pass through generations as sticky webs of knowability that are difficult to contest. Research from Australia and Finland, framed by critical posthuman and relational ontologies, unsettles these effects to reconfigure child-animal relations as fluid and situated. 'Bewildering education' grants insights into historical political legacies that can be traced in education policy, practice and theory preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the productive 'good' human subject. Child-animal relations expose complex and far-reaching effects of early childhood because processes of becoming and being human with other animals provides spaces for knowing 'difference' as a constituting force that disrupts anthropocentric relations with the world. Building a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and ethical relations reconfigures and reconstitutes animal species, not as objects of pedagogical inquiry, but rather as subjects and fellow earth dwellers.

This paper is an exploration of evolving ideas, urgencies, and actions that we have experimented with in our teaching of an environmental sustainability subject with pre-service teachers at an Australian university. It is a work in progress. Through this shared educator-student teaching and learning process we feel the tensions of contradictory forces that disrupt the flow of prior teaching as we all become unsettled by hope and reality, grief, and loss, all mixed in with a sense of urgency and tempered by a set of often unimaginative contemporary pedagogical practices. These tensions often resort educators like us, to perpetuate well-worn and critiqued tropes such as how to 'care for the planet' through 'greening' practices in schools such as recycling and energy conservation. Always inadequate and limited we are experimenting in our pedagogical repertoire with new ways to teach as we could no longer keep up the charade of agitating for change in the same way. In this paper we explore some of the opening and closures that effect environmental sustainability teaching. We consider how through a reimagining of sustainability education with new pedagogical openings of 'making kin' we first attend to these emotional tensions as a means of waking up to who we are in the Anthropocene and then find ways to identify relational ethico-onto-epistemologies in our teaching. By disrupting humanist paradigms and embracing critical posthumanist sensitivities the educators and students nuzzle into new ways of knowing and being in the world.

Posthumanist thinking opens new possibilities for research that informs new imaginaries for teaching and learning in environmental education. Posthumanism attends to decentering the human, by seeking the means to acknowledge and navigate our symbiotic relationship of being in the world with a host of others. A posthumanist perspective therefore takes seriously the need to halt the “anthropological machine,” the constant “production” of absolute dividing lines between humans and the rest of the natural world....... By unpacking posthumanism and how it aligns with environmental education, the authors of this article aim to generate thought-provoking ideas for educators, researchers, and authors who are exploring and writing papers on this topic. The entry is divided into thirteen sections.

This research adopts post-qualitative inquiry to trace the teachings and learnings with an environmental sustainability subject for preservice teachers at an Australian university. Humanist discourses of 'education for sustainability' and 'default environmental practices' often act to heavily stratify educational spaces, becoming obstacles for alternative perspectives. How might novice teachers connect with the personal (what they learn), the professional (what they teach) ecological literacy and what is ethical (ecological justice), whilst confronting the political and social causations of environmental concerns? In response to these questions, the authors illustrate how they disrupted dominant conceptualisations of teaching environmental sustainability in higher education with pedagogical openings that animate us to think differently. Ecological, relational and critical posthuman philosophies help to orientate co-learnings with students. By blending the familiar, whilst also experimenting with speculative practices and playful learning, we have sought to expand the potential for (re)focusing past/present/future entanglements of human and more-than-human lifeworlds.

This chapter places learning in a posthuman experimentation. This posthuman experimentation engages ‘place as event’ extending from ‘nature as event’ as framed by and formerly by Deleuze (1980), Whitehead (1920) and James (1912). This process of working-through or experimenting attunes creatively to affect and the sensorial as a key engagement of socioecological learning through passages of poetry, photographic essay and creative writing. In effect, the posthumanist learner (re)adjusts to being already entangled as nature and not separated or dominated by humanist dispositions. In this process we acknowledge the everpresent and sometimes incomplete traces of the posthuman, socioecological learner.

The “animal turn” in academia has been described by researchers like Weil (J Fem Cult Stud 21(2):1–23, 2010) as an increasing scholarly interest in the status of animals beyond that of the utilitarian or agricultural scientific study of animals and the larger-than-human degraded ecological times we are living in. The human condition has always been defined and studied in relation to the animal, from ancient to contemporary posthuman thinkers, where the study of animal relations forms a large component of this ontological turn, with shifting aspirations to decenter anthropocentric interactions and challenge human assumptions of more-than-human lives. Human-animal studies, while still firmly planted within disciplinary margins, “have been edging towards the mainstream” (Ritvo, Environ Hist 9(2):204–220, 2004, p. 205), becoming increasingly popular, respected topics of inquiry (Ritvo, Daedalus 136(4):118–122, 2007). Creative opportunities for experimentation therefore exist where new terms, becomings, and conceptualizations are underway.