Abstract
The sustainability crisis is widely known, with the urgency for action acutely felt and debated. The role of education on, for, and about sustainability has international (e.g. the United Nations (UN) Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the Talloires Declaration), national (e.g. Australian Education for Sustainability Alliance) and local (e.g. New South Wales (NSW) Early Childhood Environmental Education Network, Queensland Early Childhood Sustainability Network) attention and action, with a growing body of literature across all sectors of education. And in Australia, our National Curriculum endeavours to establish the imperative of embedding the sustainability agenda through defining sustainability as a cross-curriculum priority. However, with all of the above-mentioned imperatives and resources (and more), unfortunately education for sustainability has not spread with the degree of contagion necessary, given the urgency of the crisis. Since the early 1990s, as an early childhood and tertiary educator, researcher and activist, I have actively advocated for and enacted environmental education and education for sustainability. In my mind, the most significant scholarly contributions in recent times for education for sustainability have been the writings on place-based pedagogy (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003; Massey, 2005) and posthumanism (e.g. Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). In Children, Place and Sustainability, Margaret Somerville and Monica Green, too, argue for the necessity of the conceptual framework of place in sustainability education, with the enticing richness of many chapters of lived encounters of place-based sustainability education in a more-than-human world.
Children, Place and Sustainability is exceptional in honouring children’s voice and connection to place in an interconnected non-hierarchical world of varying complex beings. As the authors rightfully argue, there is little evidence of children’s views being considered in international and national policy and empirical research on sustainability education. To counter this deficit, direct quotes from children participating in posthuman place-based sustainability educational research are consistently foregrounded throughout the book, acknowledging that children, like adults, are embedded in local places and are valuable contributors.
Place, is a readily accessible concept that offers ‘a common language that can link the local and global, indigenous and non-indigenous and different disciplinary orientations’ (p. 17). And so, Somerville and Green draw on a range of understandings of place across different chapters, including ‘thinking through country’, ‘place as region’, a ‘global sense of place’ and ‘place as assemblage of more-than-human-worlds’ (p. 9).
In ‘thinking through country’, children’s place learning is explored from Aboriginal Australian childhood memories of vivid, embodied connection to county, along with children’s visual map making in present time. Both cultivate embodied knowledge building in which nature and culture are entwined, so that connection to nature is deeply rooted in culture.
‘Place as region’ is lucidly described in chapter 3, where children describe their relationships of pride and care for the wetlands, the chicken shed, the indigenous garden and a vegetable garden within their school grounds. In chapter 5, a school-wide project of children designing and creating a school garden, along with chapter 7’s account of kitchen gardens also demonstrate children’s relationships to local place. Providing evidence of what many have argued (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003; Smit, 1997; Sobel, 1998) that the foundation of building sustainability awareness and action is care for a place. As bioregionalist, Orr (1992) explains ‘Good inhabitance is an art requiring detailed knowledge of a place, the capacity for observation, and a sense of care and rootedness’ (p. 130). Many stories in Children, Place and Sustainability vividly portray children’s care of places.
‘Place as assemblage of more-than-human-worlds’ is signalled throughout the book, with particular focus in chapter 6, in which Somerville shares her engagement with Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action in agential realism to the research design and analysis of two young children’s nature play. Five nature-play events are storied inviting the reader to imagine they are there being with nature with the two young girls and Margaret ‘to explore the nature of matter, time and space in ways that breathe life into new possibilities for living justly’ (p. 124).
In chapter 8, a ‘global sense of place’ is explored in terms of social sustainability and children’s rights driven by global events of violence against children. Although environmental sustainability is typically the main focus in sustainability education, the authors contend that the relationship between the social and environmental is of prime concern. Such relationships are explored through discussion of research of children mapping their everyday language practices, and how the maps bring to the fore
a broader understanding of language that might be more connected to the ground beneath our feet, to the words that may have evolved from this land and to forms of language and knowing that resonate with the idea of a sustainable future. (p. 165)
Sustainability education has yet to fully embrace place and posthumanism. Children, Place and Sustainability is a welcome entry into such emergent thinking and practice. Through a posthuman approach to place in sustainability education, all elements of the world and its living creatures are in ‘continual dynamic processes of shaping each other’ (p. 10). As Somerville acknowledges, the posthumanist philosophically thinking that Barad offers is the closest Western philosophical orientation to the Aboriginal notion of ‘thinking through country’. Aboriginal Australians are indeed masters of sustainable living, as the longest living culture with extraordinary nuanced understandings of every plant, animal and land form and their relationship to each other (see Cane, 2013; Pascoe, 2014), and so there is profound wisdom in listening to and following such thinking. Children, Place and Sustainability presents rich content of multiple lived possibilities of place as an essential connector for children and sustainability in a complex ethically and ecologically entangled more-than-human world.