Beyond the 3 R’s ‘Reduce,Reuse,Recycle’: A matterphorical eco-pedagogy project with a picturebook author,illustrator,teacher educator and a London Primary School

Abstract

This article describes a picturebook arts-based happening that came about spontaneously through an academic meeting the author of the picturebook Ammu’s Bottle Boat and the classteacher eco-lead of a Primary school linked with her university, and finding both to be inspiring champions of eco-pedagogy. Classteacher Andromachi, picturebook author Niveditha, illustrator Aindri and teacher educator Victoria then all met on zoom and planned sessions with the group of children who represent environmental matters for their class as school eco-ambassadors, reading and discussing the book, then making artwork in response to it. Bringing these perspectives together is not only highly unusual but significant in terms of a shared happening where a picturebook enacts this ecocritical nature, or nature-culture. Following Donna Haraway’s inseparability of nature-culture into ‘Natureculture’ (where collective eco-relationships are recognised as both biophysically and socially formed and thus closely associated) the author, illustrator, teacher, teacher-educator and children co-create in response to a picturebook’s ecocritical value. For Haraway, language and matter are also intertwined in ‘matterphorical’ ways, connecting physical, material and language elements together. For Gandorfer and Ayub, matterphorical practice is ‘an aesth-ethics of thought’ which ‘calls for an ethics of both sense-making and sensing in the making’. In this context, the art of the picturebook ‘shapes’ the associated practices of authorship, illustration, environmental education and teaching with ecopedagogies; combining sense-making and sensory learning as they interplay. The article will first set the context for eco-conscious education and various ways in which environmental research and ‘zero carbon’ schools have come together, introduce and explore the picturebook that features here by both its author and illustrator, and conclude with a teacher’s perspective of Green school practice using this picturebook in her primary school.