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Description
The current sustainability crisis is born from a specious notion that humans are separate from and in a position of control over nature. In response, this dissertation reconceptualizes education beyond its current anthropocentric model to imagine education as learning through relationality with all that is ‘beyond’ the human. The study leaves behind hegemonic binary distinctions (human
ature, teacher/student, formal
on-formal education) to reimagine education as a multidirectional process of learning as worlding and becoming-with Earth (Haraway, 2016a). It explores what matters in education and how it comes to matter.
This dissertation introduces the concept of storyworlding to describe what occurs when multispecies, multi-mattered assemblages (re)write Earth’s narratives through their relationships with one another. Taking its inspiration from the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers, storyworlding acknowledges that the relationships between and among all biotic and abiotic forces on Earth make stories through their interactions, and these stories make a pluriverse of worlds.
The study is structured as a natureculture (Haraway, 2003) ethnography. This innovation on ethnography, a traditionally human-centered method, focuses on agential, multispecies/ multi-mattered assemblages rather than the description of human culture. Data is not generated and then labeled as fixed in this study. It is emergent in its assemblages as a co-narrator in sympoietic storyworlding (Haraway, 2016b).
Data generation took place over 6 months in a small, coffee-producing region of Southeastern Brazil. Data generation methods included walking conversations with children and the more-than-human world, participation in a multi-grade, one-room schoolhouse, and the collection of visual and audio data such as drawings, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
Using an intentionally slow, messy, and fluid diffractive analysis, I follow the data where it leads as I think with the concept of storyworlding (Barad, 2007; Mazzei, 2014). Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Iveta Silova, the dissertation concludes with an Epilogue of speculative fabulation (SF) imaginings through which I invite the reader to engage in the thought experiment of reimagining not only what matters in education, but what education, itself, is.
ature, teacher/student, formal
on-formal education) to reimagine education as a multidirectional process of learning as worlding and becoming-with Earth (Haraway, 2016a). It explores what matters in education and how it comes to matter.
This dissertation introduces the concept of storyworlding to describe what occurs when multispecies, multi-mattered assemblages (re)write Earth’s narratives through their relationships with one another. Taking its inspiration from the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers, storyworlding acknowledges that the relationships between and among all biotic and abiotic forces on Earth make stories through their interactions, and these stories make a pluriverse of worlds.
The study is structured as a natureculture (Haraway, 2003) ethnography. This innovation on ethnography, a traditionally human-centered method, focuses on agential, multispecies/ multi-mattered assemblages rather than the description of human culture. Data is not generated and then labeled as fixed in this study. It is emergent in its assemblages as a co-narrator in sympoietic storyworlding (Haraway, 2016b).
Data generation took place over 6 months in a small, coffee-producing region of Southeastern Brazil. Data generation methods included walking conversations with children and the more-than-human world, participation in a multi-grade, one-room schoolhouse, and the collection of visual and audio data such as drawings, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
Using an intentionally slow, messy, and fluid diffractive analysis, I follow the data where it leads as I think with the concept of storyworlding (Barad, 2007; Mazzei, 2014). Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Iveta Silova, the dissertation concludes with an Epilogue of speculative fabulation (SF) imaginings through which I invite the reader to engage in the thought experiment of reimagining not only what matters in education, but what education, itself, is.
ContributorsGoebel, Janna (Author) / Silova, Iveta (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Beth Blue (Committee member) / Koro, Mirka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This dissertation deals with the confluence of neoliberal and dominant Western social pressures in tension with researchers and educators striving toward a more sustainable world in light of the Anthropocene. Although scientists see the Anthropocene as a problem of human activity and environmental degradation, many social scientists and humanities researchers also see it as a problem with entrenched ways of thought. Current ways of thought complicit in the making of the Anthropocene include centering all thought, control, and agency in the radically individual human, centering science as the only legitimate access to knowledge, and presenting that knowledge as apolitical absolute truth. I engage in research creation activated by the minor gestures of human/nature entanglement in the Anthropocene and the promise of place in environmental and sustainability education. As such, I embark on the invention of a new ecology of practices that takes the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as their guiding foundation. As part of this invention circumventing normative neoliberal and Western logics, I take Ajo, Arizona and the surrounding Sonoran Desert as a partner in more-than-human process inquiry. I live in Ajo and explore the Sonoran Desert for four months of data generation employing basic techniques of ethnography divorced from their neopositivist founding theories.
Bodies generated from my entanglement with Ajo and the desert participate in inventing Remixing Data Experiences (RDE), a novel data engagement technique. Through RDE, my more-than-human partners and I create ideas by engaging in arts-based techniques that form multimedia art-workings. The ideas generated include Oasis, Decline, Celebrate, Precarity, and Directions. I respond to each idea through anarchival written texts in a variety of genres including ethnographic memoir, short fiction, essay, ballad, and talk poem. I put these ideas into conversation with current methodological and education literature to illustrate that aesthetic-based inquiry contributes new ways forward in the Anthropocene. These new ways include rhythms of certainty and uncertainty in knowledge creation, participating in reciprocal affective capabilities of bodies in joyful knowing, developing modest abstractions that frequently engage concrete experience, and inclusion of aesthetic experiences in learning and inquiry.
ContributorsBowers, Nicole (Author) / Carlson, David L (Thesis advisor) / Koro, Mirka (Committee member) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Expansive framing is a promising approach to understanding transfer but little is known about how it might work in teacher professional development, an area that research suggests would be improved by the use of situative strategies. The Content, Person, Context framework (CPC) that has been developed in online learning contexts draws on the concept of expansive framing and further develops it through a focus on positioning content, person and context for value creation. However, little is known about how it promotes transfer. I studied how these two situative approaches, individually and together, illuminated near-transfer in the context of an online teacher professional development (PD) course. In this mixed methods study I adapted and created rubrics to analyze educators’ stories about how they intended to implement what they had learned in the course. I concluded that CPC and expansive framing support different understandings of authorship, with the former prioritizing immediate action planned for specific contexts and the latter emphasizing learner creation and ownership over time. These different views have consequences for how transfer is understood but can be used to create a model of how transfer can be fostered that is more robust than either framework taken on its own. Because this study is part of an evaluation phase of an ongoing design-based research project, I make recommendations for how expansive framing and CPC can be further used as tools for designing the next iteration of the PD module.
ContributorsJongewaard, Rebekah (Author) / Zuiker, Steven (Thesis advisor) / Barab, Sasha (Committee member) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Global sustainable development starts with including youth in sustainability experiences with their creative ideas and unwavering determination. With increasing climate concerns and the push for cleaner energy, support from all ages is crucial for long-term, sustainable reform. Educating youth about essential sustainability systems and their impacts supports their valuable environmental stewardship efforts focused on implementing sustainable initiatives in their communities. For this project, I collaborated with a Southwest organization that connects students to sustainable energy technologies and transitions in an educational environment. Through this interaction, students completed real and meaningful work in their communities by becoming citizen scientists and researching sustainable energy systems, like agrivoltaics, that would benefit their local environment. The students gained a holistic understanding of sustainability concepts instilled in them, along with leadership and empowerment. I also co-designed educational materials with a high-achieving high school student and concluded their experiences co-creating alongside a supportive, intergenerational team. When involving students in real-world impact projects, they take an interest and personal responsibility in their work, which enhances its visibility, believability, and meaningfulness. Empowering students through diverse partnerships and advocating for student-led research will encourage the next generation of sustainability leaders to combat the climate crisis.
ContributorsSpreitzer, Katie (Author) / Jordan, Michelle (Thesis director) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2024-05