Unsettling the Primacy of Certainty & Individualism in Outdoor Education: Improvisational Assemblages as Alternative Pedagogy for (Re)conceptualized Curriculum

Abstract

Background: Outdoor education curriculum is predominantly algorithmic with predetermined outcomes prioritizing social goals for individual participants. These practices neglect to attend to intra-active performativity of the human, more-than-human, curricular, material, and place elements within the outdoors. This calls for alternative pedagogies that unsettle the primacy of certainty and individualism. Purpose: The research uses curriculum-as-becoming as a theoretical framework to explore possibilities for outdoor improvisational assemblages to (re)conceptualize pedagogy and curriculum. Method: Drawing upon place-responsive and new materialist methodologies, postqualitative ethnographic field research is employed to observe performative intra-actions of outdoor elements at a discovery garden. I have relied on e-ducating my gaze to displace my view and challenge anthropocentric analysis of visual data to reconsider the ontological situation. Findings: A finding suggests one way outdoor improvisational assemblages are enacted is children having agency to engage in emergent curricular practices when affected through intra-active performativity with outdoor elements. Implications: Educators can harness emergent curricular practices of children with an intended curriculum to produce a phenomenon of indwelling and dissolve the method/subject-matter dichotomy. Such practices can strengthen human–environment relations as children and educators see themselves entangled within outdoor curricula and places.

Keywords

assemblage affect place-responsive intra-active performativity curriculum-as-becoming

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