Teaching Towards Deep Ecological Understanding: Sociocultural Influences and Epistemic Navigation in Outdoor Science Education

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018This dissertation begins with a description of the territory that lies between sociocultural theory, education, and the natural world. It consists of three separate studies that all focus on moments of science teaching and learning that are intentionally situated outdoors. The second, third and fourth chapters are written as somewhat independent manuscripts, but they all revolve around the central concept of teaching and learning with and within complex ecological systems as influenced by nature-culture relations. The second chapter focuses on school gardens and is a case study of one garden educator working within a series of systems that influence her teaching. Culture and power are not often discussed in this context and human dominance is often taken as a given, reifying human exceptionalism. An analysis of the ethnographic data shows that normative and power-laden structures actually prevent her from sharing her expertise with students while she is teaching. I outline how those structures manifest in the garden lessons and the teacher’s moves of resistance. The third chapter investigates the role of teachers in science learning in the outdoors, positioning the natural world as an active agent in student learning. The researchers designed and implemented a curriculum that used Indigenous teaching methodologies. By adopting instructional practices that promote a relational standpoint to the natural world, instructors position children to draw upon the strengths of knowledge-in-context rather than asking them to integrate discordant epistemologies. Results suggest that instructional moves that draw attention to relationships and ascribe agency to the natural world facilitate a deeper understanding of complex systems reasoning. In the fourth chapter, the study examines the educational implications for Indigenous youth when stories are used as an epistemological tool to theorize about more-than-human beings. Youth were encouraged to observe and engage in the perspective of different rocks during a field-based Indigenous learning seminar. Using chronotopic analysis, the results showed that youth reasoned across a range of timeframes and ecological scales. This onto-epistemic flexibility may ultimately prove to be a key to encouraging agentic reasoning when teaching and learning about complex ecological systems