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Abstract
The 1977 Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in Tbilisi, Georgia, solidified the goals of environmental education: to foster awareness of human dependence upon global ecological processes in order to encourage attitudinal and behavioral changes. Over time, recognizing that informational tactics were not always fostering behavioral changes, Western educators made epistemological reforms, prioritizing the affective dimensions of human-environment interactions. However, educators have only recently been revising their stances on the humanistic assumptions underlying Western educational practices. Some scholars believe that rejecting the ontological status of nonhumans as resources for human consumption is a key to stemming environmental destruction, and that posthuman educational practices are one method for challenging human exceptionalism. Educators with the Deep Nature Connection Movement, an affiliation of nonformal environmental education programs spread across North America and Western Europe, work upon a similar premise that nonhumans are knowledgeable agents who desire to contribute to multispecies societies, who can be educators in their own rights. In this dissertation, I explore how one affiliate of the Deep Nature Connection Movement, The Human Nature School in Traverse City, Michigan, seeks to foster collaborative, more-than-human communities within youth and adult educational programs. Using participant
observation, video-cued multivocal ethnography, and semi-structured interviews, I determined that their storytelling practices and embodied methods contributed to an ethos in which humans and nonhumans are mutually permeable and intelligible. I also found that their caretaking-conservation practices reflect emancipatory positions on nonhuman beings, upsetting oppressive assumptions that nonhumans should be subservient to humans. Here, I outline their methods of engaging more-than-human collaboration in northern Michigan landscapes, and the emancipatory pedagogies that emerge from their educational practices.
observation, video-cued multivocal ethnography, and semi-structured interviews, I determined that their storytelling practices and embodied methods contributed to an ethos in which humans and nonhumans are mutually permeable and intelligible. I also found that their caretaking-conservation practices reflect emancipatory positions on nonhuman beings, upsetting oppressive assumptions that nonhumans should be subservient to humans. Here, I outline their methods of engaging more-than-human collaboration in northern Michigan landscapes, and the emancipatory pedagogies that emerge from their educational practices.