Abstract
This paper explores the tension for educators between the proliferation of mobile, digital technologies, and the widely held belief that environmental learning is best nurtured through place-based approaches that emphasize direct experience. We begin by offering a general critique of technology in culture and education, emphasizing what is at stake in the new era of digital tools and climate crisis. Building an analogy to the problem of climate change, the second part of the paper takes an “adaptation and mitigation” stance toward technology in environmental learning, and offers critical conceptual guidelines for policy and practice. Invoking language that describes the worldwide response to the climate crisis is a reminder of how the everyday devices we rely on are embedded in political, economic, and ecological webs of contention. Ultimately, we hope that describing some promising adaptations of these tools and their limitations will enable learners to better understand the relation between people, place, and planet, as well as the relation of people to their tools.
Counterfoil research must clarify and dramatize the relationship of people to their tools. It ought to hold constantly before the public the resources that are available and the consequences of their use in various ways. It should impress on people the existence of any trend that threatens one of the major balances on which life depends. (Illich, 1973/2000: 83) When I was a boy, my parents were always spoiling my summer vacation by making me go outside. Kids today have it easier: As long as you can sneak your iPad out of the house, you can stay entertained until the battery runs dry. Who needs the wonders of nature when all you need is a few bucks and a connection to the App Store?
Clearly our digital technologies promote an ethos that is aptly captured in Kesten’s phrase “you can stay entertained until the battery runs dry.” How has it come to this, and what can be done about it? What does it mean to envision policy and practice for environmental learning in this context of ever-present techno-tantalization?
This paper explores the tension for educators between the omnipresence and proliferation of mobile, digital technologies, and the widely held belief that environmental learning is best nurtured through direct and “unmediated” sensorial contact with non-human others (including rocks and forests as well as streets and sidewalks), which we identify here as a place-based approach (Gruenewald, 2003a; Gruenewald and Smith, 2008; Smith and Sobel, 2010). This tension relates to other tensions in the field of environmental learning. The production and use of digital technologies are intimately related to neo-liberal globalization, shifting economic development trends within regions, a culture of speed, and the advent of new media studies. Each of these everyday realities complicates assumptions surrounding place-conscious education that privilege “slow” depth experience in local natural environments (Payne and Wattchow, 2009). While we embrace such experiences as primary to environmental learning, we also acknowledge that an embodied place-based approach can easily neglect making connections with global themes of complicated spaces (Massey, 2005), with local cultural conflict including economic development pressures, and with the complications of people’s fast-paced and culturally diverse mobile lives. Rather than reinforcing a false dichotomy between the local and the global, between fast and slow, between experience with nature and the experience of culture and its newer tools, this paper offers a conceptual framework for holding these tensions together in the development of a critical and pragmatic stance toward technology in environmental education. We begin by offering a general critique of technology in culture and education, emphasizing what is at stake in an “amped-up” culture of learning “while the battery runs dry.” Building an analogy to the problem of climate change, the second part of the paper takes an “adaptation and mitigation” stance toward technology in environmental learning, and offers critical conceptual guidelines for policy and practice.
Critical perspectives on technology in environmental education
Stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. (Berry, 2013)
Technology: Environmental friend or foe?
Since the 1990s the field of environmental education has been questioning the use of technology in environmental teaching and learning. The title of Athman and Bates (1998) article, “Technology and Environmental Education: Friend or Foe?”, is emblematic of a significant strand in the literature that constructs the use of technology in opposition to nature and as socially, ecologically, and educationally problematic. While we want to avoid an approach to the issue that is overly technophobic, we also think it is vital to examine assumptions around relationship between technology 2 and environmental learning and to acknowledge possible impacts of that relationship.
In their article examining the theories of technology and education held by Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, critical theorists Kahn and Kellner (2007) discuss the rapid transformation of society in the twenty-first century into cultures of “infotainment” controlled by “technocapital” though an “internet-based economy.” The computer industry has successfully positioned ubiquitous, up-to-date computers and broadband Internet access as necessary to everyone’s education. As a sign of competency and leadership, schools and universities frequently boast of their investments in technology that presumably will give their faculties and students an edge in the global economic competition. Meanwhile, the miniaturization of digital technology means that most students now carry computers in their pockets that dwarf the capabilities of the laptops of just a few years ago. This is a remarkable shift in the landscape of learning. Never before has so much computing power been wielded by so many people in networks that literally cover the planet. This massive explosion and distribution of personal computing power has created new sectors of profitable business in the Internet-economy that continues to produce and upgrade more products to feed huge worldwide demand for “infotainment” and other wired communications and consumer opportunities. Furthermore, the infrastructure of this “wireless” network, though somewhat invisible in everyday use, is fed by a political economy of extraction, production, consumption, and waste that has serious social and ecological consequences for people and places worldwide. In the main, the social and environmental costs of technological production are taken for granted, go largely unexamined, and are hidden behind neo-liberal marketing phrases such as “the knowledge economy.” Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people continue to “upgrade” their digital tools with little knowledge of the relation of such consumption (which is sometimes framed as a human or civil right) to environmental and social conditions of people’s lives. 3
The omnipresence of technology and the global processes involved in its material and political production impact culture and environment in many ways, and also impact the process of teaching and learning. Screen time is now a dominant medium for formal learning in and outside classrooms; many environmental educators thus worry about how computer-mediated experience distracts teachers and students from direct experience with local environments. On a deeper level, a reliance on screens also has epistemological and ontological consequences as it patterns our human relation (mind and body) to the environment. In one significant investigation of the issue, Phillip Payne (2003) writes: technologically mediated forms of experience abstractly intensifies and individuates experience of both self and ‘others’ (people, cultures, and environments). This is the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the technological ‘manufacturing’ of the body and its time/place/space relations. The electronic medium (re)constructs subjects as abstractions whose ‘knowledge’ is ‘exteriorized’. Environments other than the computer one fade away into the background. This intensified and individualized reconstruction of the self is due largely to the immersion of the subject(s) in an assortment of plastics and microchips that merely act to transfer ‘information’ and act as an artificial conduit of the self. (p. 531) Intensification processes entail a heightened penetration of the cultural world into the body via an increasing array of technologies. Intensification includes the concurrent ‘collapse’ of time, place, space with the increased colonisation of the organic body and socially collective bodies by various aspects of cultural capital … Places and spaces are consequently reconceived, re-experienced and reconstructed, invariably in more abstract and denatured ways because of the changing social construction, technological mediation and correction/regulation of mechanical time and its disciplining consequences on the human body and mind in the everyday. (p. 539)
Chet Bowers, an ecological education theorist who has long been critical of how computer-mediated technologies distort human relationships to their environments, sums up contemporary messianic assumptions about technology’s virtues with the ironic title of his 2000 book, Let Them Eat Data. Bowers argues elsewhere that computers are a colonizing form of cultural assimilation that amplifies certain forms of high-status knowledge while reducing others: What computers select for amplification are the cultural patterns that are valued in an industrially based culture: abstract and culturally context-free information and data, a conduit view of language, a sense of temporality that reinforces the idea that the individual decides whether the past or future has any relevance, print and visual images that reinforce the Cartesian myth of the individual as an autonomous thinker. (Bowers, 2006: 69)
The new mobilities paradigm
Juxtaposed against dystopian readings of the material, ontological, and epistemological consequences of technology brought on by Homo progammandus (Falbel, 2002: 133), many educators remain optimistic about the role technology plays in learning. For example, in his widely cited work on video gaming, James Paul Gee (2003) argues that attaining mastery over a video game is directly related to other forms of learning, and that educators can—and should—learn from gaming about how to structure motivational and interactive learning that is both recreational and productive of identifiable skills and outcomes. As digital technologies continue to saturate and reconstitute our lives, however, some observers have argued that we have co-created through their use an entirely new paradigm. Indeed, most of the literature on computers in education that exists (like Gee’s and Bowers’ work) still assumes relatively static platforms of desktops and laptops that may or may not be connected to broadband Internet. Yet the proliferation of miniaturized, mobile, digital technologies has created entirely new networks of instantaneous information exchange and real-time virtual mobility. In their provocative book, Mobile Lives, sociologists Anthony Elliott and John Urry (2010) argue that the new technologies are an essential component of a new “mobilities paradigm” for rethinking social sciences (Urry, 2007).
Elliott and Urry (2010) describe the ability to move about the globe or cause other people or things to move—physically or through the use of technology—as a new kind of cultural capital that they term “network capital.” Living mobile lives requires the continuous coordination of events—through the use of technology. For those in positions of relative power (those with less power are typically less mobile), the frequent use of technology has become essential to keep their affairs moving; digital technologies enhance the mobile capacities of individuals. As with Payne and Bowers, Elliott and Urry describe how the use of technology also plays ever new roles in the construction of the self: The individual self does not just ‘use’, or activate, digital technologies in day-to-day life. On the contrary, the self—in conditions of intense mobilities—becomes deeply ‘layered’ within technological networks, as well as reshaped by their influence … not only are mobile lives lived against the digital backdrop of miniaturized mobilities, but such portable technical systems give specific form to the self’s relations with affect, anxiety, memory and desire. (Elliot and Urry, 2010: 30)
Adaptation and mitigation of technology in environmental education
The saturation of formal and informal learning spaces with a revolving door of technological infrastructure and the latest version of the personal computer, like it or not, has become a fact of life, not unlike the fact of climate change, which is in part an outcome of our hyper-mobile technologized era. Like climate change, a jump to the mobilities paradigm is something that has already happened and is happening at a faster and faster pace. Thus, just as it remains important to mitigate against further catastrophic global warming in the future, it is equally important to develop adaptation strategies and practices in the present moment of change. Sharing language and context with the climate crisis, our approach to analyzing technology as a tool for environmental learning in the remainder of this paper takes an adaptation and mitigation stance. While we think the use of technology should be limited (mitigation) to appropriate uses that legitimately enhance place-conscious environmental learning without jeopardizing direct sensory experience, we also believe that it is simply common sense to adapt—and thereby create new possibilities and opportunities. Just as with climate change, mitigation of, and adaptation to, digital environmental learning exists in a reciprocal relationship; such strategies are best understood as two sides of the same coin.
Mitigation strategies
Men have become the tools of their tools … . The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition. (Thoreau, 1947: 292)
Reducing the use of digital tools
Along with climate change, we are witnessing a technological revolution in which many educators are hooked by the lure of smart phones in our pockets and smart boards in our classrooms—with the assumption that these expensive tools (socially, economically, and ecologically expensive) will make us smarter or otherwise better people. As some tools and technologies, such as the classroom itself, limit the possibilities for environmental learning, mitigation depends on reducing the use of such tools to open opportunities for unmediated (undigitized) experience. Ivan Illich (1973/2000, 2004) used the terms “counterproductivity” and “technofasting” to describe an orientation to tools (and the paradigms in which they are embedded) that can open up opportunities for “the good life” that are eroded by hyper-productive industrial culture. More recently, environmental education theorists such as Philip Payne and Brian Wattchow (2009) have promoted “slow pedagogy” as an orientation to deep learning and as an antidote to the distractions that limit learners’ ability to connect in an embodied (ontologically and epistemologically) way with the natural environment. Technofasting as a pedagogical strategy for environmental learning offers many possibilities for students and teachers hooked to their devices. Like with any addiction, addictions to technology develop a patterned way of experiencing the world. When the object of addiction is removed (e.g. drugs, food, computers) new possibilities for experience, and new patterns, can begin to emerge. Unlike trying to beat a heroin addiction, however, the purpose of technofasting is not to cast the technology away and rid oneself of it once and for all. As a “fast,” its purpose is abstinence for a defined period in order to achieve a benefit. Only by abstaining from technology—and thereby limiting the negative effects of what Payne (2003) describes above as “intensification”—can one experience the benefits of opening up other ways of sensing, being, knowing, and communicating. Like fasting from food, the point of fasting from technology is not never to eat (or use technology) again, but to develop a new relationship to food (or technology) and to one’s body. Similarly, slow pedagogy is an attempt to rescue the educational process from the current pattern of rushing to meet predetermined outcomes often prescribed by a professionalized culture of accountability (Gruenewald, 2005). As mitigation strategies, “technofasting” and “slow pedagogy” are each forms of voluntary restrictions on technology, the purpose of which is to protect and privilege direct, sensory, unmediated experience with the natural environment. Both of these provocative terms need to be considered as core policy and practice recommendations for educators currently overwhelmed with technological innovations and their unexamined consequences.
Critically evaluating and using digital tools in ways that enhance and extend, rather than limit or distort, direct, unmediated experience
The adoption and use of a particular technology in environmental learning, therefore, needs to be preceded or at least accompanied by an evaluation of its potential costs—economic costs, social costs, ecological costs, and the costs to direct experience. Digital tools in particular can be extremely expensive, especially when replacement and upkeep costs are factored in. One unacknowledged cost of financial investment in technology (which is usually deemed “necessary” spending in the culture of schooling), is a concomitant lack of funding for environmental education—which is usually deemed an “extra” at best, or at worse an unnecessary “frill” in schools strapped for cash. Fully understanding the ecological impact (or cost) of technology on educational institutions, therefore, would require a comparative analysis of cost expenditure for technology and environmental education respectively. Moreover, technologies are frequently adopted by schools and universities with no accounting of the social and ecological costs involved in the extraction, production, consumption, and disposal practices of sometimes toxic materials involved in “technological innovation.” In order to account for these costs, students and teachers can attempt to assess the “ecological footprint” of particular devices—and to discuss the merits of these devices with reference to facts such as contributions to the proliferating stream of e-waste contaminating environments worldwide (Widmer et al., 2005). Like with the concepts of technofasting and slow pedagogy, examining the costs behind technologies is not a retreat from using them, but a stepping back to assess how we use them and the impacts of such use on ourselves and our environments.
As described above, using digital technologies impacts learning and experience in ways that potentially detract from the goals of environmental education—often by creating a kind of screen addiction, or what Richard Louv (2005) called “nature deficit disorder.” Another cost to learning involves the frequent “de-skilling” that follows reliance on or overuse of digital tools. The calculator is a prime example; spell check functions in word processing is another. How can we learn to recognize when the use of digital tools simultaneously leads to de-skilling? For example, the use of GPS may help students learn to geo-cache, but the reliance on the digital device may preclude learning how to use a map and compass, which carry a much smaller ecological footprint and, if used properly, lead to greater technical accuracy. In many ways the pervasive use of cameras—digital cameras in particular—can be seen the same way. Cameras have been affixed to nearly every phone, iPod, computer, and tablet and can produce mountains of data, creating a deluge of media that is for the most part poorly composed—near meaningless snippets of daily life that are seldom as potent as the handful of pictures that our grandparents took with “conventional” cameras. The skill of taking a careful photograph, a skill and creative art that was perhaps reinforced through the patience and cost required to have film developed weeks later, is less and less the emphasis of the camera user. 4 Indeed, digital devices are created to be as “user friendly” as possible—meaning the user does not actually need to know how such devices work.
Just as “putting a price on carbon” may ultimately be the only way to mitigate catastrophic levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, authentically evaluating the use of digital tools may involve “putting a price on technology”—that is, fully accounting for its costs on learners and their environments. As Bowers concludes: [W]e cannot totally eliminate our reliance upon technology once it has become part of the society’s infrastructure, just as we cannot totally eliminate our reliance on the industrial approach to production and consumption. The challenge is in reducing our reliance in those areas where the technology undermines the self-sufficiency of individuals and communities, and where it has a destructive impact on the environment (Bowers, 2006: 143).
Increasing place-consciousness and place-responsive behaviors
Only a few years ago when “smart phones” first became widely available, one of us was leading a graduate-level environmental education field trip in rural Washington State. After reading Aldo Leopold and other astute observers of ecological and cultural learning, students were asked to “read the landscape” (Meine, 1999) for the diverse meanings it holds for diverse learners. On the horizon over a hill, we observed a single wind turbine spinning near a small home. Two students began to speculate on the energy output and efficiency of the turbine, and another immediately took out his new cell phone, connected to the Internet, and began announcing approximately how much such a unit would cost to install in a private residence. While cell phones were familiar fixtures among students, this was for many a first contact with smart phones capable of going online practically anywhere. The question can fairly be asked, did this student’s use of technology promote or hinder place-consciousness and place-responsive behavior? From one perspective, linking with the Internet on an experiential education field trip provided another level of engagement with the place and allowed students to consider the real possibility of acquiring alternative energy technology for personal use. It also instantly opened a window into worlds of other places where clean energy technology is produced and marketed. The class was amazed at how easy it would be to buy a wind turbine right there on the Internet, and research its technical specifications, at the same moment when we were standing there considering the story of an actual turbine and admiring its aesthetic. From another perspective, however, the exercise in “reading the landscape” had taken a sudden and unexpected turn into something more like fantasy shopping—perusing a catalogue of neat technological gadgetry. While everyone was impressed with the capacities of the smart phone, some also pointed out that before investing in a wind turbine, it is necessary to conduct a thorough site analysis over the period of many months to ensure wind speed and placement requirements could be met, as well as working through local building codes and regulations. Everyone instantly knew how to buy a turbine; nobody know how to conduct a wind energy site analysis.
This anecdote again illustrates some of the tensions and trade-offs inherent in the new digital era. Place-conscious and place-responsive behavior (Gruenewald, 2003b; Wattchow and Brown, 2011) is not necessarily at odds with the use of new technologies. But there is always a relationship between the use of technologies and the development of place-conscious environmental literacy. As with many technologies in the “knowledge economy,” there are many costs to people and places involved in the development, extraction, production, consumption, and waste of smart phones. There are also costs—or impacts of the technology—on the character of the environmental learning experience. In order to mitigate against uncritical uses of technology that distract learners from experiencing the immediate bio-cultural-physical environment (or place), it may first be necessary to invest in place-based education that emphasizes what places have to teach learners who are invited to encounter them directly with their minds and bodies. Because of the mobility of miniaturized digital technology, “wireless” learners and the digital learning environments they inhabit may radically diminish learners’ opportunities for such encounters.
Just as with climate change, mitigation of technology in environmental education will require an activist stance—people willing to take action—that will likely be ridiculed and resisted by those who may name it as a form of Ludditism advocated by green party liberals nostalgic for an imagined golden age. Contrary to that likelihood, however, we offer the concepts of mitigation, technofasting, and slow pedagogy as responsive policy and practice strategies to reduce the harmful effects of intensifying uses of digital technology among learners—at the expense of other ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world.
Adaptation strategies
Adaptation—Adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. (IPCC, 2013).
Learner-centered pedagogy
Whether one is a technology friend or foe, as Kahn and Kellner (2007) note, “One of the challenges of contemporary education is to overcome the separation between students’ experiences, subjectivities, and interests rooted in the multimedia technoculture and classroom situations grounded in print culture, traditional learning methods and disciplines” (p. 442). As Dewey knew long before computers, learners need to be met where they are. Today, this means that educators must accept and embrace the fact that young people increasingly live in an online and digitally mediated world. This does not mean that we need to rush to experiment with every new technology and application; it does mean that we need to think deeply about which technologies can authentically serve student and educator goals. It also means being open to the possibility that our previous educational goals could be transformed, positively or negatively, by new technological applications and students’ facility with them. Take for example the question of whether or not students should use cell phones and laptops in the “classroom,” a practice commonly critiqued and even banned by teachers in fear that students might be more off task than on. A learner-centered approach does not mean accepting distracting behavior such as texting and shopping online during class time; it does, however, allow that student learning, and even the purpose of class time, might be radically reconceived (for better or worse) through the use of multiple digital tools. Environmental educators need to begin assessing what students already know what to do with these tools, and integrate such knowledge into curriculum and pedagogy. The following adaptation strategies develop this point further.
Digital trails
To the young, oncoming naturalist, I would say: Never forget the trail, look ever for the track in the snow; it is the priceless, unimpeachable record of the creature’s life and thought; the oldest writing known on the earth. (Seton as cited in Quinney, 2001: 118)
GIS
Learning with GIS technology ranges from the intentional use of ESRI products
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to indirectly accessing systems deeply embedded behind the scenes of learners’ digital tools. A student does not have to know about and consciously use GIS to be connected to the web of information that it organizes—it is the backbone of so many services and digital interactions (e.g. location-embedded search results, weather forecasting, or even online shopping). While developing more creative uses of GIS tools remains accessible for those classrooms privileged enough to have the powerful hardware, connectivity, and, most importantly, the expertise of a trained instructor, the use of programs and apps based on these resources is quite numerous. A good example of GIS-powered software that invites inquiry and investigation of place is the Field Scope program hosted by National Geographic (FieldScope, 2013); another can be found on the Eye on Earth project (Eye on Earth, 2013). In both of these projects, watershed data—key indicators of a region’s environmental health—can be collected, mapped, and analyzed by students. In addition, learners can benefit from comparing their investigations to similar high-quality maps created by distant students in other places and regions. What these projects demonstrate is the power of visual and spatial representation of environmental data—built on sophisticated GIS and monitoring platforms that operate mainly behind the scenes. Daniel Edelson, Vice President for Education at National Geographic, summarizes this potential of tools such as Eye on Earth for environmental learning: Capitalising on this opportunity would require that we make a few specific commitments to environmental education in particular, but they represent a relatively small marginal cost with an enormous potential payoff. These commitments are: 1) make a public commitment to the importance of supporting environmental learning from experience to abstract reasoning; (2) create a customised set of tools to support citizen science for learners, tools that leverage the core Eye on Earth functionality. (Edelson, 2012)
Environmental monitoring
Collecting and sharing digital artifacts can bridge gaps between experiences outdoors and indoors, between direct experience and reflection on experience. Examples are numerous and range from studying plants, animals, people, politics, weather, and climate. Phenology networks such Project Budburst invite students to track lifecycles of plants as they green-up, bloom, and become dormant (Project BudBurst, 2013). Students can upload information about plants in their region, and also access information in the network about other places and plants that interest them. With the combined effects of miniaturization of technology, the pervasiveness of wireless connectivity and developer communities that are producing apps that can have greater and greater customizations—a window might be opening to a democratization of data collection and analysis that can take place at a micro-local level. Existing examples that demonstrate this potential include programs like Project FeederWatch hosted by Cornell University (Project FeederWatch, 2013) and the many programs offered through NatureWatch (NatureWatch, 2013). Situating these tools in place-specific contexts can open doors for problem-based learning and student-driven inquiry about issues important to local communities. The existence of large data sets and networks of sites across large regions demonstrates to learners the relationship between local observations and wider global trends.
Weather and climate monitoring (as well as modeling) sites are widely spread and include work federally sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (NASA Climate Time Machine, 2013; NOAA PMEL Carbon Program, 2013). For years, governmental and private interests have been monitoring the natural world of climate, hydrology, snow pack, etc., and time series photographs have captured sprawl, fires, floods, and tides. These have been important forecasting tools for agriculture, transportation, and industry. Today, local municipalities are using monitoring data to engage and educate stakeholders about resource use. For example, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s interactive and real-time displays of precipitation and water quality models close the loop between a consumer’s use of water and knowledge of origin, quality, and re-use in the local water cycle (H20 Info, 2013). Milwaukee’s monitoring and education tool is in part powered by United States Geologic Survey (USGS) data, as many local instances of place-specific monitoring rest on the large cyber infrastructure maintained by federal agencies. Further, private companies such as Google build user- and teacher-friendly applications that are based on data sets generated in the public domain. An example can be found in Google’s Public Data Explorer, where demographic data from the census can be visualized, as well as data pertaining to physical geography coming from USGS, NOAA, and NASA (Google Public Data Explorer, 2013). Environmental monitoring projects can blend remote digital access with user-friendly structure and continuity that classroom-based curricula can support. No doubt such environmental monitoring projects offer students opportunities to access and contribute data in meaningful environmental inquiry; however, making the exercise something deeper than data management will require an ability to link digital information to lived experience and reflection.
Digital storytelling
Digital storytelling, a democratized version of oral history, uses easily available digital media to produce audio and video stories of the lived experience of diverse individuals, families, organizations, and communities (Burgess, 2006; Lambert, 2002). High-profile web-driven examples are found in StoryCorps (2013), the self-proclaimed largest oral history project on the planet, and the Smithsonian’s Stories from Mainstreet (2013)—each comprehensive website provides free tools for users to begin publishing digital stories. Digitized narratives remain available online, often for public access, and provide a window into the time, place, and circumstances of interview “narrators.” Like the now ubiquitous digital camera, the availability of tools that can capture and represent voices and images are fast increasing in availability, affordability, as well as capacity. Gail Matthews-DeNatale (2008) writes: Technology—everything from Microsoft Word to blogs to iMovie—makes it easier to swap, critique, and revise stories. Digital tools make it possible for authors (even those who aren’t very tech savvy) to construct multi-dimensional stories that are conveyed through a combination of hyperlinked, multidimensional words, images, motions, and sounds. Digital storytelling assignments are one way to increase student engagement and commitment—particularly students who do not respond to traditional academic writing assignments. (p. 2)
Great potential lies in the structuring of these digital tools to enhance awareness of self, community, places, and cultures near and far from the classroom. Like with the new technologies for mapping and environmental monitoring, digital storytelling can potentially transform students’ awareness of their own environment and the environments of others. As with the development of many new technologies, however, the rapid pace of development, innovation, and “upgrade” far outpaces an environmental educator’s ability to use these tools and effectively infuse them into the curriculum. This presents a double problem for policy development in schools and teacher education programs. Understanding, using, and teaching innovative new technologies, and understanding, practicing and teaching environmental education, are competencies that get only slight attention in school and teacher education cultures beholden to state-mandates from neo-liberal governments worldwide (Gruenewald 2004; Gruenewald and Manteaw, 2007). Viewed as extras to the core curricula, these skills are often seen as beneficial, but not essential; few individuals at any level of education have a deep, working understanding of either of these areas, and fewer still have proficiency with both. Aside from more and better professional development, what may be required to fully realize the potential of digital tools and their applications are learner-centered teachers who encourage students to apply new technologies to old lessons (such as storytelling and drawing maps). But again, with the tightening of curricula, such a student-centered approach is lacking and actively thwarted in many policy environments today (Ravitch, 2011).
Distant places
In a philosophical inquiry into faraway places, philosopher Damon Young (2002) explores the problem of “the tyranny of distance”—or, the impossibility of knowing much about places one will never dwell in long enough to know. Damon is concerned that if we cannot authentically speak of what Heidegger termed the “Being” of place, on what grounds can we claim any knowledge or opinion about them? On what grounds do we claim the need to protect distant places, such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, or the Alberta Tar Sands, for example, from economic development and environmental harm? His philosophical resolution the “speechlessness” of faraway places is a “poetics” that bridges the distance by “stretching” the being of the observer.
One of us has been working to deliver climate science education through place-based approaches to high school science courses that also reach—or stretch through a digital poetics—toward an understanding of distant places. As a curriculum was developed around local phenological, hydrographic, atmospheric, and snowpack monitoring, it became clear that a local focus was somewhat incomplete as a way to understand global climate change. A focus on place and local environmental issues can easily neglect the larger biosphere and other political and ideological themes that impact places (Thomashow, 2001). Understanding climate science depends on understanding changes in distant oceans and polar regions, as well as other places around the planet that students and teachers may never see for themselves. Attempting to address this, embodied expeditions were piloted into these areas and a curriculum was drafted from direct observations and deep experience in Greenland and on the Pacific Ocean. Stories of warming oceans and melting ice were broadcast in near-real-time through web posting, voice, and video communication, linking local science inquiry to global, and offering a more complete picture of global climate science and change. Both expeditions included daily web updates, pre- and post-classroom visits to participating schools, and opportunities to communicate through message, voice, and video to these remote locations.
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Surely these exciting trips caught the attention of students and educators, but it is not clear how effective they were in making students any more connected to their places or any more literate about climate science. Satellite modems, expensive monitoring equipment, and hundreds of hours of web development all combined to generate a lot of content, but the question remains whether this technological prowess had a positive impact on student environmental learning. Again, pedagogy lags behind technological innovation. Pedagogical innovations are needed to bridge the gap between the field, the web, distant places, and the classroom.
This observation applies most aptly to the Internet as a whole, which despite its profound reach into education and culture, remains poorly understood as a pedagogical tool. The Internet can be described as a technology that, through the poetics of social media and real-time digital representation, stretches our being across distances, bringing the faraway to one’s fingertips. Young’s (2002) “tyranny of distance,” however, also describes the Internet’s facility to obfuscate, conceal, and deceive the user with images and information. Bringing distant places closer, and potentially misrepresenting what they are, makes the Internet a powerful tool for environmental education and mis-education. The Internet is an inexhaustible gold mine of critical, “contested place stories” (Gruenewald, 2003a; Somerville, 2007) of places we think we know, and places others must speak for. The recommendation here is not simply that environmental educators encourage learners to use the Internet to explore distant places, as well as the connections between local experience and distant places through material culture (e.g. consumer goods) and cultural politics (e.g. social movements). The potential here is for teachers and students to acknowledge how difficult it is to know any place—any distant environment or environmental issue—and that learning about distant places needs to be approached with humility, and critical efforts to discover who does and does not get to speak (or create a poetics) on their behalf. An environmental education that seeks multiple perspectives and purposefully looks for competing stories of places could also be a powerful way to nurture understanding of the inherent contestation in all places, near and far.
Direct action
The adoption and spread of new technologies spawn many unintended uses and consequences; the automobile led to a world of pavement that no one had ever imagined. One of the unintended consequences of the Internet and mobile technologies has been a dramatic change in the landscape of activism and political organizing on local and global levels. It is now possible to connect with political friends or foes instantly at great distances, and it is possible to rapidly organize, through the use of social media tools, campaigns for direct action practically anywhere. This new wave of technological activism and organizing has exploded across the globe, and was perhaps first widely understood following the anti-World Trade Organization campaign in Seattle, Washington in 1999. The “Battle of Seattle” became a huge media spectacle as demonstrators successfully used digital tools to organize a roving, nimble, and growing anti-globalization movement that swelled to over 40,000 people and that could not be effectively contained or silenced by police or other government officials. As Kahn and Kellner (2004) write in their influential study of new media activism: online activist subcultures have materialized as a vital new space of politics and culture in which a wide diversity of individuals and groups have used emergent technologies in order to help to produce new social relations and forms of political possibility. Many of these subcultures may become appropriated into the mainstream, but no doubt ever-new oppositional cultures and novel alternative voices and practices will appear as we navigate the ever-more complex present toward the always-receding future. (p. 94)
Yet the political dimension of environmental education is constantly under threat, especially in policy. Since the publication of Sanera and Shaw’s (1999) Facts Not Fear, a powerful, well-funded campaign against environmental advocacy in schools has successfully muted political content in much environmental education research, discourse, and curriculum (Gruenewald, 2004). Outside of schools and more recently, however, the use of technology to organize direct action for the environment is growing in frequency, with powerful results. One has only to witness the effectiveness of online campaigns organized by Bill McKibben’s 350.org, the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, or coast-to-coast rallies for the Idle No More movement in Canada. These models show how necessary technology has become to mobilizing environmental movement activism, which many environmental educators embrace as a core component of their work (Kahn, 2010). Despite the usefulness of digital tools to serve grassroots democracy, it must also be remembered that the Internet is the chief apparatus of the surveillance, police, and security state, and that political activism can just as soon be used for hegemonic, violent, and unjust purposes as it can for the purpose of justice and ecological wellbeing. Again, despite its power to motivate, entertain, educate, and communicate, digital technology is revealed as a tool that is far from neutral. Al Qaida, the US military, and many other political factions have innovated with digital tools in order to destroy people and places. Such adaptations—from smart phones and Androids to smart bombs and drones—are stark and daily reminders that technological innovation does not equate to other advances in the human condition on a violent and ecologically degraded planet.
Conclusion
Whether or not technology is a friend or foe to environmental learning is a complicated question, especially in the context of a collision course between carbon-emitting techno-industrial production and climate change. Climate change is probably studied and debated today more than any other environmental issue in many social sectors. So far, education systems, through policy and practice, continue to contribute directly to the problem by offering their uncritical support of economic systems that are producing the climate crisis. The glaciers are melting much faster than education is changing.
For this reason, it is essential that the use of high-speed digital technologies in environmental learning be viewed from a critical perspective that includes an analysis of the role of technological production and use of these devices. We have argued that the production and use of miniaturized mobile devices and other commonplace digital tools come with significant costs to people and planet; therefore, an appropriate stance toward such tools is mitigation and adaptation. Invoking language that describes worldwide response to the climate crisis is a reminder of how the everyday devices we rely on are embedded in political, economic, and ecological webs of contention. Ultimately, we hope that some promising adaptations of these tools will enable learners to better understand the relation between people, place, and planet, as well as the relation of people to their tools. We also sincerely promote the practice of mitigation through a commitment to technofasting and slow pedagogy—to open space for the undigitized ways of being and knowing that may be needed to appreciate our environments, and that are under threat from an overly digitized culture.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.