12 Critical Digital Pedagogy for the Anthropocene

Background

Thinking about education relationally encourages us to appreciate our interconnectedness with the Earth. Critical pedagogy has encouraged us to see the importance of relationships with social and cultural systems but has been criticized as a school of thought that privileges the human and human exceptionalism: that is, humans are more important than the more than human (trees, birds, rocks, microbes, etc).1 For example, some feminist-inspired writing in critical pedagogy has critiqued the notion of the teacher as “intellectual” and argued instead for standpoint pedagogies (Noddings, 2012) in which knowledge is seen as situated and embodied. In other words, knowledge is linked to the relations that we find ourselves within and shaped through, not just the actions of an individual educator (Gottesman, 2016).

Although useful responses to climate change need to involve people, imagining solutions from a purely human perspective might not be enough. Theorists across a range of writing in cultural geography (Whatmore, 2006), anthropology (Ingold, 2011, 2013), and feminist materialism (Barad, 2007) are working to address this by contributing to a field of posthumanist thought (Braidotti, 2019; Haraway, 2016). Posthumanism helps us to understand how we might conceptualize and research education in ways that do not privilege the human. In a view of posthumanism inspired by cybernetics, Hayes (1999) challenges Western thinking by rejecting a view of the ontological situation in which we are separated from the world via a subject-object binary. Applying these ideas to educational research, Snaza and Weaver (2015) argue that, as we reconceptualize the human as posthuman, we take a relational view of what were once thought of as discrete entities: human, animal, machine. As a result, within posthumanist thought, agency is not limited to people; it is distributed. Humans are understood, ontologically speaking, not as separate from the environment or the only actants in an educational event (for a more detailed explanation of the distributed agency of posthumanism, see Carranza, 2018).

If we take posthumanist thought into education in outdoor settings, then we find possibilities for reconceptualizing education for the Anthropocene. Understanding the ontological situation as not being separate from nature means that we are always and already “part of nature.” In fact, the term “nature” becomes problematic because it perpetuates dualisms and undoes a relational understanding (Castree, 2000). One approach to this problem is to use the term “more than human,” which denotes a non-hierarchical relationship with all that is not human but includes the human. The term is important to education for the Anthropocene because it encourages educators to consider a relational or systems view of the environment.

Education in Outdoor Settings

“Education in outdoor settings” is a broad phrase that encompasses experiential education, outdoor education, outdoor learning, environmental education, and education for sustainability. In this chapter, I use the phrase to denote formal education undertaken outside the classroom by tertiary educators. Education outside the classroom can have positive impacts on pro-environmental behaviour, such as instilling a sense of political action for the environment (Chawla & Cushing, 2007) and supporting learners’ understanding of global influences on ecological systems (Rickinson et al., 2004). Research has shown that using local places with learners can improve human-environment relations; as a result, there has been much place-based attention to education in outdoor settings (Ardoin, 2006; Mannion & Lynch, 2016; Meichtry & Smith, 2007; Smith & Sobel, 2010).

Although critical digital pedagogy is a nascent field, some of its defined features relate to education in outdoor settings. For example, Morris and Stommel (2018, p. 27) ground their notion of critical digital pedagogy in action; they call on us to focus on the pragmatic in critical digital pedagogy: “So, Critical Digital Pedagogy must also be a method of resistance and humanization. It is not simply work done in the mind, on paper or on screen. It is work that must be done on the ground.” To do such work “on the ground,” I argue, education in outdoor settings with a place-based approach is one good way to do this.

Education in outdoor settings can improve human-environment relations when it is seen as a pedagogy linked to place. Understanding place through posthumanism can help learners to appreciate their interconnectedness with the more than human and focus education on the relations that we form and sustain with the Earth. The implications of these views are that places can never be just “backdrops” pedagogically. The world is full of abundant relations that can link us to the Earth and the co-implication of any human-environment relation. Snaza et al. (2014) write that, to save the planet and address the environmental crisis, we need to work within a political frame that reduces human dominance. They argue for a politics that puts humans back into the web of life, which prevents not only the destruction of animals as a subset of the world but also the destruction of nature for human gain. Next I explain one practical way in which I set out to put humans back into the web of life through an educational activity called digital wayfaring.

Digital Wayfaring

In this section, I explain the design of a teaching and learning activity that enacted critical digital pedagogy through education in outdoor settings. In a digital wayfaring activity (see activity briefing sheet on page 209), I encouraged tertiary-level outdoor education students to engage critically with place and human exceptionalism through a video-making task. The students in question were all familiar with making videos on their smartphones but had little prior experience using mobile phones pedagogically outdoors. Although research on digital technologies in education in outdoor settings for improving human-environment relations is scant, Winter and Cotton (2012) did use video-making tasks with students to deconstruct the hidden curriculum of the campus to enhance sustainability literacy. They found that a video-making task enabled students to critique local practices of sustainability and to be creative about sustainability solutions.

The digital wayfaring task was designed using concepts from anthropologist Tim Ingold. His work represents a way of understanding the relationship between our knowledge creation and our perception of the environment that draws from posthumanist thought. Ingold contrasts modern knowledge passed down through cultural, institutional, and state apparatus with local knowledge, such as that linked to places and practices. Local knowledge is “continually generated and regenerated within the contexts of people’s skilled, practical involvement with significant components of the environment” (Ingold, 2004, p. 307). With Ingold, then, we can understand learners’ knowledge creation as something that develops through a reciprocal relationship with the more than human in places. Learners, then, can be thought of as “wayfarers” (Ingold, 2011, p. 163) who know about the world through their movement through it. This concept of wayfaring is a practical way to understand how we might develop knowledge through practical engagement with the world in ways that do not see us as separate from the Earth.

The design of the video-creation task was influenced by critical pedagogy in the way that it supports authentic problem solving (Kellner & Gooyong, 2010) and encourages learners to enact their agency (Freire, 2013). The use of digital technology was informed by Stommel (2018), who argues that critical digital pedagogy is less about the digital tools and more about creativity with them. Stommel sees digital pedagogy as being about hybridity and working with technology in ways that can extend the role of education in new directions away from notions of standardized tests and siloed curriculums. Informed by these ideas, I designed the task to be transdisciplinary and to encourage students to consider their developing relationships with the more than human through the creation of a video.

A key pedagogical component of the digital wayfaring activity was to challenge learners to think in posthumanist ways and to appreciate their existence as part of the more-than-human world. Ingold’s (2011) concept of knowledge creation through wayfaring, involving a skilled and practical engagement with the environment, was integral to this purpose. The activity took place during a day walk in a wild mountainous environment with tertiary-level outdoor education students. During this trek, we encountered stony riverbanks, a dense forest, and steep grassy hillsides.

The digital wayfaring activity started with an introductory discussion on elements of posthumanist thought and the concept of wayfaring. The activity then consisted of two parts: an attunement to place phase and a digital video-making task. First students were asked to walk through the landscape and pay attention to the more-than-human features of place, such as wind, trees, rocks, et cetera. They were then asked to consider that these entities are not separate from us and that we are always tied to them through our relational co-existence. Students were asked to consider these questions:

• How do you understand place? What constitutes place?
• If we take a posthumanist view of place—that we as humans are always co-implicated with places and all living things—then how might we harness place in our pedagogy as educators?

After the walk, the students were encouraged to share how they responded to the human and more-than-human aspects of place that they noticed as a group. For example, they were asked which more-than-human aspects of place did you notice, and how might you harness them in education? Which relations with the more than human did you notice becoming attuned to? Next the students were given a one-hour challenge to create a video with their mobile smartphones.

Reflections

Two reflections on the digital wayfaring activity have relevance for how we might understand critical digital pedagogy for the Anthropocene in practice. Across the three groups of students, the task was completed very differently. Some groups created videos that tried to portray the sense of awe and wonder of these places, focusing on birdsong or the sound of walking on gravel riverbanks. Other groups chose to talk to the camera in an interview style, offering thoughts, questions, and ideas about how the places might be pedagogical.

My first reflection is based upon how the technology of videoing produced diversity in the students’ responses to place and pedagogy. Like Winter and Cotton (2012), I found that the affordances of videoing seemed to hold potential for creative and varied knowledge construction. As a result, I see that the situated nature of the activity resonates with critical pedagogy in that the students’ agency was able to be expressed. Unlike the banking model of education that Freire (2014) critiques, the teacher was not the primary source of knowledge. As a result, we can understand knowledge creation as linked to the relations that we find ourselves within and shaped through, not just the actions of an individual educator (Gottesman, 2016).

Deeper reflections on this activity informed by posthumanism and critical digital pedagogy force me to consider the pedagogical work under way. Taking a posthumanist position in which agency is distributed, we can appreciate how it was more than just the students’ agency at play; the more-than-human agencies also played a role in the co-production of knowledge in this wayfaring task. My intention was that the process of the activity itself would encourage the learners to let themselves be attuned to their responses to the more-than-human aspects. Within this attunement and response making through the video creation, the learner works with more-than-human relations in the world. I see that this co-creation of knowledge with the more than human can be understood as critical digital pedagogy for the Anthropocene in action.

I am also left with a concern. The production of digital technologies and the precious metals that they require, as well as the reliance on electricity, do raise questions about the suitability of such tools in education orientated toward care for the environment. That noted, however, using smartphones in education in outdoor settings can help learners to make and sustain relations with the more than human that might not otherwise be possible. For example, videos from this activity could be incorporated into ongoing teaching and learning about the Anthropocene with people who cannot access these places. Additionally, the environmental costs of this technology are starting points for critical education on what relations with the more-than-human world smartphones bring to our awareness. These relations can be destructive through the mining of precious metals or productive in how they help us to see our interconnections with the Earth.

A final word on place. Place is not necessarily just wild land; it can be any location, wild or urban. As a result, I believe that the digital wayfaring activity can be useful in critical digital pedagogy for the Anthropocene in other settings less obviously rich with the more than human. This activity can be enacted in urban environments in which attunement to more-than-human relations or agencies would still have an impact on knowledge co-creation. For example, the digital wayfaring activity might attune learners to plants colonizing a vacant site or unseen microbes in built environments and the relationships between them and the socio-economic and political conditions of living. Posthumanist-inspired theorizations of place-human relationships in cities argue for an appreciation of the distributed agencies of the more than human shaping our lives there. For example, “cities are not simply inhabited but co-inhabited, in ways that are multiple, entangled and disrupt established ethologies and ecologies. Animals, plants, microbes, and the multiple relations within and between these temporary stabilizations, become urban, often in ways that are surprising” (Hinchcliffe & Whatmore, 2006, p. 137).

For learners without access to smartphones, the wayfaring task can still work without digital technology. Learners can capture their responses to the more than human with paper and pen. In summary, regardless of the technology or setting used, the pedagogical vision of seeking to be attuned to more-than-human relations that remind us of our intertwining with all life on the planet is still relevant.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have shown how places are understood as important sites for knowledge creation and construction: knowledge is situated, embodied, and generated through engagement with the more-than-human world. I have also described how a video-making task, beyond the classroom or lecture hall, can foster creative, independent, and diverse thinking about critical topics such as human exceptionalism.

To conclude, in the Anthropocene, we are never separate from nature. As I have noted, the implications of this view are that places can never be just backdrops pedagogically. The world is full of abundant relations that can link us to the Earth and the co-implications of any human-environment relationship. If our task as educators of critical digital pedagogy in the Anthropocene is to employ and better understand technology to help create new relations between humans and the more than human, then video making is one way to do so. In the process, learners can produce new digital artifacts that portray important human-environment relations. As a result, these artifacts might challenge other audiences to think in critical ways that challenge human exceptionalism.

Key Takeaways

• Places are understood as important sites for knowledge creation; knowledge is situated, embodied, and generated through engagement with the world.
• Critical thinking from a posthumanist perspective can help us to challenge human exceptionalism and appreciate the mutual vulnerability and educational potential of human and more-than-human encounters.
• Digital technologies such as video making offer ways to understand and express critically the relations that we form with places and the more than human.

Note

References