The provocation of Gaïa: Learning to pay attention in Rotary Park
Abstract
How do we learn with the environments we inhabit to promote mutual flourishing? This paper argues that environmental arts practice is a key component in the pedagogical process of getting to know where we live and, through a more-than-human intersubjective exchange, enriching our response-ability to the environment. To think through and work towards this pedagogy we explore a small patch of Gaïa – the Rotary Park Rainforest Reserve in Lismore, New South Wales – via a photography and video project that contemplates didactic and interpretive signs along a short walking circuit. Crucial to our contemplation of this environmental arts project are concepts for action that we develop by putting into conversation ideas from the environmental humanities and early childhood education: progettazione, time to learn, provocation and attention. Through aesthetic immersion in, and in dialogue with the forest, these concepts help us conceptualise a regenerative curriculum and relational pedagogy that energise, amongst other things, environmental arts in-the-making.
Keywords
Regenerative curriculum, early childhood education (Reggio Emilia), environmental humanities, provocation, attention
Author Biography
Rob Garbutt
Rob Garbutt is Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University, Lismore whose place-based research considers ways of belonging through a cultural studies and environmental humanities lens. He works with words, sound and images. Rob’s first book, The Locals, was published in 2011 and he was coauthor of Inside Australian Culture, published in 2014.
Shauna McIntyre
Shauna McIntyre is an early childhood educator for whom place and the relationships within places are the beginning of provocations for learning.