Landshaping: A Concept for Exploring the Construction of Environmental Meanings within Tropical Australia

The creation of meaning is both intrinsic and extrinsic to environmental learning. In this paper I call attention to the process of how language practices and Imagination are important in constituting environmental meanings, as stories of the places in which we live. A concept of landshaping is introduced as a conceptual tool for thinking about the agentic construction of environmental meanings. Research data collected In north Queensland show that individual subjectivities do not necessarily align with the binary thought lines of human identity (‘us’) and nature (‘not us’) commonly reproduced within environmental education. Ideas of the natural can be problematic in environmental learning, particularly in cross-cultural education experiences. Landshaping can be used as a research strategy and as a pedagogical technique for revealing diversities and illuminating complexities in how we as individuals, and together, create environmental understandings for ourselves.