Inger BIRKELAND, University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway
Place-conscious education and feminist pedagogy: Watery lessons from the north
How do we educate in a situation of climate change? I work as a teacher educator, where I amongst other things teach local and global challenges of sustainability from the perspective of place-conscious education. Place is a relevant category for transforming both education and climate change in ways which can have direct bearing on the wellbeing of people and the places where they actually live. Most importantly, the challenge is to understand place-conscious education as relational and not as an effect of either people or places, culture or nature, the local or the global, person or world (Birkeland forthcoming).
The paper will discuss place-conscious education and feminist pedagogy from the perspective of hydrofeminism. It aims at discussing some results from community-based research for culturally sustainable development of a post-industrial region of Norway in light of an ecological and relational feminist pedagogy where water plays a particular role. My feminist pedagogy draws partly upon the hydrofeminist thinking of Astrida Neimanis to help create and establish solidarity between human bodies and the body of the earth and the biosphere, between humans and our physical surroundings. Further, my discussions will draw upon bell hooks’ feminist pedagogy of hope (hooks 1994), and in particular my own re-thinking of place and becoming (Birkeland 2005) based on Luce Irigaray (1993), where I engendered sustainability as relational, where meaning and matter co-evolve via the “logics of the umbilical cord” – thinking about matter and meanings in a way where everything is related to everything and where everything affects everything (Birkeland 2005).
Mots clés : Place|Water|Sustainability|Hydrofeminism|Feminist pedagogy
A103045IB