Opening to Place
This paper presents a learning journey about deepening capacity for teaching with PlaceFootnote 1 through relational learning. We began with a desire to engage with places that feel like family to us, our closest kinship Places, and to write together about our relationships with them. We wanted to do this as a process of experiencing, encountering and learning together with Place, and perhaps transforming our pedagogical practices to support more ethical, regenerative futures. We write in solidarity with the Bawaka Collective who call for the sharing of stories that “explore knowing and being as relational practices” (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Lloyd, Tofa, Sweeney and Maymuru2019, p. 693) as we trouble our way forward through different ways of knowing, being and doing. We are three women, educators working in community, and teacher education, who feel connected to Place and to our more-than-human kin (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2015). We live, work and write on Dja Dja Wurrung Country and Wurrundjeri Country, otherwise known as parts of Victoria, Australia, from the position of people whose ancestry is not Indigenous to the places we were born, nor those where we live now (Williams, Reference Williams2022). While in Australia currently there is no treaty with First Nations people, we recognise this always was and always will be Indigenous land.
Living relationally and respectfully with Place requires us to pay close and careful attention to the worlds we are part of, to kin (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2015) and places, and to respond as part of these worlds (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020). These understandings are part of enacting regenerative place relations, of co-becoming with place (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Lloyd, Tofa, Sweeney and Ganambarr-Stubbs2018; Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022), and can and should be informing our place pedagogies. The rapid acceleration of damage to the planet wrought by colonialism continues now, in modernity, to destroy present/future (Paradies, Reference Paradies2020). We are concerned with the difficult task of learning how to confront this openly, and to better understand our past/present/future co-responsibilities to our more-than-human kin, during these ongoing, increasingly precarious times. This paper is borne of a desire to respectfully contribute to what we view as necessary and ethical in teaching, learning and enacting shifts in education systems.
Our inquiry emerges from an ongoing conversation about what we learn through our everyday relations with the places we live now, and how these relations are influencing our pedagogical practices. We expanded this through an adapted process of cooperative inquiry (Heron, Reference Heron1996; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021) enacted with the intention of understanding how learning with Place could help us deepen our capacity for teaching with Place. It is premised on the core understanding that our ethical commitment to decoloniality involves attuning with and learning relationally with the places we live now; and prioritising Indigenous voices, stories and ways of knowing in Place in our academic scholarship and pedagogical practices.
As a non-Indigenous research team, our practice focused on learning with Indigenous colleagues and research collectives through engaging with their academic scholarship and by foregrounding this in our thinking and in the writing of this paper.Footnote 2 We also learnt with Indigenous knowledge offered in community settings by Indigenous artists and from traditional owners and cultural custodians by reading their reports and viewing websites. We are conscious of the limitations of this approach, take its implications seriously and welcome ongoing dialogue about it. We also take seriously the view, expressed to us by some of our Indigenous colleagues, that decolonial work is the responsibility of everyone and cannot feasibly or ethically be left only to Indigenous people. We stand with our responsibility to practice decoloniality in solidarity with our Indigenous colleagues and take up this work with careful consideration.
We reflect on these points as crucial throughout our inquiry, and in considering how we can enact regenerative place pedagogies in respectful ways that are contextually and culturally relevant (Williams, Reference Williams2019), locally situated (Somerville, Reference Somerville2010) and geographically appropriate (Wooltorton, White, Palmer & Collard Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021). We consider that relating with Place and teaching with Place are essential to and inseparable from the contribution of education toward Makarrata – coming together after a struggle – the process aspired to by the creators of the Uluru Statement From The HeartFootnote 3 in dealing with Unfinished Business for Australia (National Constitutional Convention, 2017).
Troubling Place pedagogies
We situate our paper within scholarship about place pedagogies, where we find writers across place-based education (for example Gruenwald, Reference Gruenwald2003), critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, Reference Tuck and McKenzie2014; Lowan-Trudeau, Reference Lowan-Trudeau2017), transformative sustainability education (Lange, Reference Lange, Corcoran, Weakland and Wals2017; Selby & Kagawa, Reference Selby, Kagawa, Selby and Kagawa2015; Williams, Bunda, Claxton & MacKinnon Reference Williams, Bunda, Claxton and MacKinnon2017) and land education (Corntassel & Hardbarger, Reference Corntassel and Hardbarger2019; McCoy, Tuck & McKenzie Reference McCoy, Tuck and McKenzie2016) similarly grappling with the issues we are engaging with. Pedagogies emerging from these fields are often deliberately non-anthropocentric, and committed to ways of knowing and being involving relations with the more-than-human world. They share relational worldviews and concur that developing stronger relations with local places is necessary (for example, Somerville, Reference Somerville2010) in nurturing the humility required for living responsibly with place, and addressing past, present and future ecological crises.
Some critiques of place-based education suggest it risks reproducing the same problematic assumptions and imperatives of settler colonialism and does not go far enough in linking place and the genocide of Indigenous peoples with ongoing settler colonialism (McCoy et al., Reference McCoy, Tuck and McKenzie2016). It is suggested that one of the problematic conceptual reinforcements made in place-based education is settler emplacement, “the desire (of settlers) to resolve the experience of dislocation implicit in living on stolen land” (McCoy et al., Reference McCoy, Tuck and McKenzie2016, p. 592). The unstated subjects of the goal of settler emplacement are settlers; Indigenous people do not need to become native and are by implication excluded from the frame of reference for the educational narrative.
McCoy et al. (Reference McCoy, Tuck and McKenzie2016) argue that decolonisation will not result from settlers “becoming native,” and/or adopting “alternative” ways of living and being by occupying stolen Indigenous land and by practising cultural and spiritual appropriation. Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2019), in response, suggests there is range of legitimate ways of understanding relationships and responsibilities with place, including the view that “everyone has the right to an ‘original relation’ to the universe wherever he or she lives, to his or her own cosmological homecoming” (p. 368). Along with Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2019) and others (including Lowan-Trudeau, Reference Lowan-Trudeau2017), Williams (Reference Williams2022) suggests decoloniality involves re-indigenisation, particularly for the “long ago colonised” (p. 16), many of whom have had connections to place erased and some of whom may have lost tacit knowledge of connection to place. Williams (Reference Williams2022) suggests that recovery of this connection involves attuning with relationships to the more-than-human lifeworld in ways that are situated and culturally relevant – that is, grounded in local and everyday contexts and political ecologies. These are processes which many displaced peoples have already learned to enact (Williams et al., Reference Williams, Bunda, Claxton and MacKinnon2017).
Acknowledging the debate as highly complex, Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2019) suggests that, with regard to settlers and their descendents, ethical and responsible work in this space should not mean cultural appropriation or further exclusion and dislocation of Indigenous peoples. He proposes that “(h)ow to exercise this right, this responsibility, this opportunity to live, is the troubled heart of decolonial soul work” (Greenwood, Reference Greenwood2019, p. 368). With respect to strengthening our connection to the places we live now as an act of solidarity in decolonisation (Land & Foley, Reference Land and Foley2022), we are reminded that “re-indigenisation starts with simple questions, humbling questions that ask about how we might move towards living the truth of reciprocity with other beings” (Williams, Reference Williams2022, p. 7). Throughout our inquiry with Place, we have grappled with our positionality in relation to these debates. We are committed to decolonisation because its injustices, violence and damage are extremely unevenly experienced, yet must be reckoned with by all. We wonder whether our aim of developing stronger relations with kin may be in part an effort to resolve something for ourselves. We are in part, motivated by our awareness that settler-colonial thinking and ways of being have had impacts on our own lives and place relations that have not always been good. We are also motivated by a commitment to learning to better understand the things we need to unlearn and to better notice and attend to the forms of privilege which have come to us, and others, through colonial thinking and habits of being. We engage with Indigenous ways of being and knowing Place, some of which are unfamiliar to us, in an effort to think differently about how we might enact more ethical and pedagogical practices towards decoloniality.
Ways of being and knowing Place
Place is alive, animate and agential: an active and exemplary pedagogue. Kimmerer (Reference Kimmerer2013) explains Land as our real teacher. In NoongarFootnote 4 language, Boodja (Country) refers to the deep, complex, kin-based relational ecosystems that include humans, “which are bound by cultural obligations and rules” (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021, p. 2). Boodja’s extension, boodjari, means “nourishing terrain,” a term Deborah Bird Rose (Reference Rose1996) has noticed is present in other Indigenous languages globally (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021). Kurdoboodjar equates to love of place: an ethic of care that underpins the “profoundly empathic human interrelationship with place, trees, animals and each other” (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021, p. 3). Country is “richly nourished and attended” (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, Ganambarr and Sweeney2016, p. 456), and is inclusive of “the seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds and all the beings that exist in and make up a place, including people” (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru and Daley2022, p .436) in embodied, co-responsible relations, which are constantly regenerated (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr, Maymuru and Daley2022). Country contains its own law. YolnguFootnote 5 understand that, through these relations, we are always co-becoming with place (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, Ganambarr and Sweeney2016).
Knowing and being cannot be considered in isolation from place and time, because past present and future exist together in a long now that brings the “archetypes, spirits and shadows of the past – including colonisation” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020, p. 8) into a continuing present. In the long now, “stories, patterns and meanings exist in the landscape, as they always have done.” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020, p. 8). Nothing can be left in the past, the present is always already “inclusive of the past in knowledge, memories, repeated actions and habits” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Brueckner and McDuffie2021, p. 4) and perpetually holds all of the possible eventualities of the future. Historical injustices therefore canʼt be forgotten, erased or dismissed as irrelevant as they irreversibly mark and co-create past, present, future and ourselves (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020) even if we do not acknowledge or engage with them.
We adopt the term “Place” rather than Land or Country in our paper for two reasons. Firstly, as a mark of respect to those whose ancestral and cultural relations are deeply and inseparably entangled with land, Country, and Place throughout deep time. While we feel strongly connected to Place, have the capacity to learn to attune with Place, can learn to love and live with our kin and are open to listening to and engaging with what is shared with us, there are cultural aspects of Country that we cannot, and might never be able to know (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Guenther, Poelina, Blaise, Collard and White2022). Secondly, the nuance of language allows us to engage with Land and Country as different conceptualisations were relevant in our inquiry.
Place, for us, is all animate and sentient beings: plants, animals, humans, ancestors, rocks and the earth, along with air, energy, spirit, culture, love and lifeforce – including ourselves – in reciprocal kin (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2015) and family (Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina & Palmer Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020) relations. Relations with Place surface resonances and empathy that can feel unfamiliar, uncertain and uncomfortable, at times testing us and challenging us to think, trouble and understand differently. Reflecting, responding and making sense occurs as we participate with kin and family in deeply relational ways across time. The emphasis on with-ness in learning with Place and deepening capacity for teaching with Place brings our attention to this relationality, emphasising a reciprocal intent where kin and our love and care for them have equivalent agency in shaping the direction of our pedagogical practices and our research. This intent opens us to different ways of learning, knowing, being and doing that we explore through a cooperative inquiry with Place.
Learning with Place through cooperative inquiry
Our methodological stance is that it is important to develop approaches that are informed, but not delineated, by the models of others and that are experimental, experiential, authentic, appropriate and challenging, for us. We use cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2008; Heron, Reference Heron1996) as a framework to guide our approach to learning with Place. We co-designed and enacted multiple spirals of inquiry by intentionally engaging in experiences that are part of our everyday lives (Heron et al., Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2008) and which are grounded in the places we live now. We practiced attuning with (Riley & White, Reference Riley and White2019), a process we have each experimented with in our contexts, including through our education work and in previous research (see for example Sutton, Reference Sutton, White, Tytler, Ferguson and Clark2022; White et al., Reference White, Raphael, Hannigan, Bellingham, White, Tytler, Ferguson and ClarkIn Press), to open us perceptually and empathically (Heron et al., Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2008) to resonances and discomforts that we feel, sense and register as we encounter Place in different ways. Through our spiralling approach, which included multiple cycles of emergent learning with Place (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2020), we developed experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing (Heron, Reference Heron1996) to refine, clarify, extend and deepen our knowledge (Heron et al., Reference Heron, Reason, Reason and Bradbury2008).
Each of three spirals began with attuning with Place (Riley & White, Reference Riley and White2019) through an intentional experiential encounter with Place. In Spiral One we developed experiential knowing of Place as we engage with the shimmer (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017) of our closest kinship Places through our memories. In Spiral Two we engaged in affective learning (Harrison, Bodkin, Bodkin-Andrews & Mackinlay Reference Harrison, Bodkin, Bodkin-Andrews and Mackinlay2017) during a walk together on a particularly damaged part of Dja Dja Wurrung Country. In Spiral Three we attend to learning to live with our new home Places through practices of becoming family with place (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021). Each encounter with Place was co-designed to allow us to relate with Place in different ways, with the intention of opening to what Place could teach us through direct encounters in emergent ways.
We developed presentational knowing by storying our relations and experiences with Place (Phillips & Bunda Reference Phillips and Bunda2018; Somerville, Reference Somerville2010) through independent reflective practice, in conversations together, and creative responses such as found poetry (Faulkner, Reference Faulkner2019) and Place story making. We share aspects of these stories, containing “rich complexities and layered symbolic meaning” (Phillips & Bunda, Reference Phillips and Bunda2018, p. 6) that are relevant to our inquiry, as a relational practice (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Lloyd, Tofa, Sweeney and Maymuru2019) to engage the reader in ways of knowing of Place, which can be more difficult to represent in narrative and academic writing.
Storying and storytelling ground presentational knowing in embodied and affective knowledge of learning with Place and assist us in developing propositional knowing in relation to Indigenous philosophies, decoloniality and place pedagogies. Practical knowing of learning with Place unfolds as we practice holding the fears, concerns and tensions that surface together with empathy, love and care we feel for Place and as we think about practice, and enact more ethical place pedagogies in response to what we learn. We trouble our positionality throughout as we reflect on the pedagogical ingredients we believe are necessary for enacting regenerative place pedagogies towards decoloniality.
Spiral one: kinship Places
To be fully part of Place relations is to see and experience, and be part of, the shimmer all around us: the flourishing of life felt and seen in patterns and pulses and art and the glow of one species for another (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017). We are “surrounded by intelligence other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves…but we have forgotten” (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2015, np). Without attention to the liveliness of a place, we tend to see landscapes as flat, one-dimensional backdrops or commodities, stripped of their spirit, bodies and brilliance (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017). In Spiral One we made time to engage with memories of our kinship Places: K’gari, Badjala Country (Queensland Australia), parts of the Kapiti Coast of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Noongar Boodjar (Western Australia) and with their lifeforce and shimmer.
We talked and wrote reflectively about the continued presence of our kinship Places in our lives, intentionally focusing our stories and relations on the pulse of shimmer: the ancestral power of life that calls to us and appeals to our senses in relations with multispecies worlds (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017). The found poem below weaves sentences from our reflective writing to bring attention to the rhythm (Faulkner, Reference Faulkner2019) of lifeforce present in our memories of kinship Places: the way they call us to us to follow, to explore and imagine even when we are no longer physically present in these places.
Place story: shimmer patterns
Cool melaleucas shrouded the creek and ghosted the light
A magical and haunting theatrical production in the hills at night
Walking up the creek, feeling the soft sand under my feet
It felt so much softer at night, and cool.
The toetoe were so soft on your face
They caught the light in the early morning and the evening and glowed.
Wandering the beach at night looking for tracks in the sand
Being with the turtles under moonlight
Watching the waves
A huge dead sunfish on the beach
A silver dart nailed to a white-dead tree with a fishing knife
The blade and silver scales glinting in the sun
Bright dark red blood dripping onto the sand
This Place made us move more quickly
As the blood rushed in my ears
Riding bikes on the narrow track up the creek
Racing along paths, weaving between trees
jumping fallen branches
My pony would notice them and shy
He raced faster than I really wanted him to
Yet our feelings seemed conjoined
Feeling at home, at peace
The slowness, the trees
the air, the vibe, the energy.
The poem shows how our kinship Places have agency that moves us, tests us and enables us to feel a sense of freedom and possibility. It speaks of other embodied sensations too, including softness, slowness, peaceful and loving feelings and reciprocity. It reminds us also that our kin relations with the Places we hold closest to our hearts and our memories are not always romantic or pleasant: they hold aspects of danger, trouble, blood, death and violence, and other unspoken sensations that are important and embodied in our relations with them. We also notice several gaps and problems in our kinship memories, including that we tend to remember Place in terms of what we feel and what it has given us: for example, the imprints we leave and the way our relations with these Places fulfil us and nurture us. These ways of remembering emerge with human-centric and potentially instrumental ways of knowing Place, leading us to reflect on the legacy of our educational backgrounds and cultural knowledge present in memories and our ongoing relations with Place.
We consider that our memories may not, or perhaps cannot, properly respect the lifeforce, vitality and memories held by Place. All knowledge is limited, partial and emergent from particular conditions. Our memories and connections are no less special for our recognition of the limitations of our own conditions and understanding, but they might instead be opened up to further growth by this recognition. Reflecting on the proposition that attuning with the shimmer of Place, and opening ourselves more fully to learning from and with Place without romanticising, is in part an act of relinquishing the need to feel secure in our own sense of identity and self-knowledge. Robin explains:
I have felt the aliveness of Places but am confident that I am still oblivious to many of its dimensions: I know and see gaps, cracks and silences in my own connections. I can point to tangible examples of where, when and how I have felt that Places were like family, with which I was in reciprocal and caring relationships. But memory is selective and these examples (like all family relations) are flawed and incomplete. Though I practice, I don’t believe I can ‘read’ or ‘feel’ Places terrifically well, or that I can see all the marks of damages and violences left on them. This is partly because I didn’t learn early that ‘Place’ matters, and is part of everyone’s reality and responsibility, past, present and future. And, because Places are not so easy to know, but are ‘complex, generous and shy’ (Greenwood, Reference Greenwood2019, p. 359). The consolation of confronting these impoverished understandings is that the wounds, the gaps, are where the light gets in (Rumi, in Banks, Reference Banks1995). Looking into the cracks in our understanding, freeing ourselves a little from thinking of ourselves as knowers, can let us be questioners and wonderers instead. Wonder seems inextricable from feeling the visceral shimmer of Place.
By attuning to the shimmer of our kinship Places, we remember our human capacity for empathic connection with Place (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Williams, Reference Williams2019) and are able to understand why, and how, Place matters. We also learn that our approaches to accessing and re-considering this capacity are different for each of us. Reflecting on conversations we hear between our students and colleagues where this sensibility appears missing, we believe that it is necessary to consider how we might support them to develop this knowledge of Place through our pedagogical practices.
Spiral two: unsettling Places
Country is the node of memory, land and the more-than-human, and knowledge. Even when operating beneath a conscious level, Country tells us the way things are (Yunkaporta, Reference Yunkaporta2019), producing and teaching particular ways of thinking about and being in the world. Our second Spiral of learning with Place involved a walk together on Dja Dja Wurrung Country at the Castlemaine Gold Diggings National Park (Victoria, Australia) and a visit to the Castlemaine Art Museum. We went during a very wet winter, on yet another drizzly day. This area is known by DjaaraFootnote 6 as Upside Down Country because the gold mining practices have turned Country upside down (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, 2017).
We went together with the conscious intention of experiencing, being with, attuning with and listening to Place to hear some of the truth of our history through affective learning (Harrison et al., Reference Harrison, Bodkin, Bodkin-Andrews and Mackinlay2017). This was Country that we knew would show plainly the violence of colonialism, and as such we expected to find this encounter disturbing and unsettling. Bronwyn wrote the Place story below to reflect on our experience and respond to, and make sense of, what she had witnessed and felt.
Place story: Upside Down Country
As I walk along the path, I notice relics of ingenuity, including the largest water wheel in the southern hemisphere, built in the late 1800s by miners to extract gold from rock and earth here. There are warning signs everywhere pointing out dangerous deep holes, mine shafts and tunnels. I notice misshapen trees, many shades of green in the landscape, huge rock faces with brown, pink, green and orange stratification. Tree roots push downward through these layers of rock and soil, and we talk about how Country seems to be teaching us something about the layering of time. The ingenuity of gold mining and the regenerative nature of the plant life here are juxtaposed with knowing this Place is called “Upside Down Country” by Djaara because Country was turned upside down by miners in their search for gold.
Manna Gums stand tall, their red ribbon bark shining in the rain, and young Black Wattles not yet covered in vibrant yellow blossom are visible too. We move under a tree with a thick canopy of leaves. One of us knows that Kangaroos use this tree, Cherry Ballart, as shelter. I try to remember its meaning to Djaara, having recently learnt this during a Welcome to Country Ceremony elsewhere on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. I take a step closer and touch the trunk, my science knowledge reminding me it needs connection to another plant to grow. Later I read Aunty Julie McHale’s (Reference McHale2021) words on a sign about “Bush Tucker” at the Castlemaine Art Museum that tells me the names for these three sacred trees and what they represent in Ceremony. Wurrun (Manna Gum) for the Elders, Mootchong (Black Wattle) as produce of Country, and Pulloitch (Cherry Bullart) for community, because children need something to hold onto, some support as they grow.
I felt disconnected on our walk, even though I had tried, or hoped, to feel the peace, calm and presence I usually feel when I’m walking with trees and attuning with the spirit of a Place. Driving home I feel like I’ve missed something. I want to go back and speak to Country and ask for permission to be there, and I want to say thank you. On reflection I realise I have been paying deep, close attention, by reading the landscape with my whole body and all of my senses, feeling the violence, the silence of spirit, and the different lifeforces present. In the same way that I learn about places I love through attuning with, I can hear Country.
Listening to Country, we felt visceral intensities of struggle, trauma, degradation and violence as a sense of disquiet and unease about what occurred during the 1800s as a result of settler colonial practices of goldmining, and what was ongoing in 2022: devastation, ecological and cultural damage braided with the regenerative capacity of Place and the ongoing-ness of cultural care for Country. We wonder what Country had been like for Djaara before mining turned it upside down, what it is like now, and what marks of destruction, and regeneration, continue to be present. The marks on the land from goldmining were visible everywhere: crazy patterns of geological stratification in the tall cliff faces created in the search for gold; deep fissures in the land; gaping holes; signs warning of danger; shallow soil with underlying blasted rock exposed; and trees that have regrown in strange ways after being cut down to make way for mining. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation express it this way:
In the mid-1800s, large deposits of gold were discovered in our Country, enticing flocks of people looking to make their fortune. The miners cut down trees for firewood and building, diverted creeks and rivers and dug holes in the ground, pulling up large volumes of earth. Since that time, mining has been constant in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. This has left a legacy of soil erosion, salinity and toxicity from contaminants such as arsenic and mercury. The Country around the goldfields is very sick and a significant program of remediation is required. As custodians of all Dja Dja Wurrung land, we feel a deep responsibility to heal this Country so that it can be healthy and functioning once again.
(Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, 2017, p. 22)
The knowledge that the soils continue to contain high concentrations of cyanide (Nicolson & Ayers, Reference Nicolson and Ayers2020), mercury and arsenic (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, 2017) used in the extraction of alluvial gold cause us to think and imagine beyond our own lifespans. This brings home that the marks on the land, and much else, will outlast us – humans are ephemeral in this landscape. We reflect on notions of deep time and the long now: a rich dimension of being, which is always already rippled and textured with the future (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022). In this view pasts, presents and futures are nested and folded together, encircling linear time (Paradies, Reference Paradies2020). We wonder, what does it mean if colonial practices, such as goldmining, do not take place only in linear time, but are also always already present in ripples and textures in Upside Down Country landscape in the long now?
We observe that while extraction practices seem to have removed the shimmer in some parts, taking lifeforce down into vortexes of diminishment and death (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017), the vegetation has adaptive abilities to regenerate and thrive, evident in the ways smaller trees have regrown and in the presence of Wurrun, Mootchong and Pulloitch. Patterns and meaning of Country remain present, including cultural and ancestral knowledge that is significant for Djaara people and might be invisible to us, even if we are open to feeling, learning and engaging with Country, without Djaara voices.
The entangled emotions and feelings that surfaced as we opened to listening to Country and reflected on our experiences remind us, Place is profoundly pedagogical (Gruenwald, Reference Gruenwald2003; Somerville, Reference Somerville2010), but attuning with Place is only part of the story. Without engagement with Djaara knowledge, and making this visible in our inquiry, pieces would be missing from our understanding of Country, just as there are gaps and fractures in our memories of our kinship Places in Spiral Two. This suggests that learning with Place involves remaining conscious of the way our cultures, histories and preferences influence what we notice, the knowledge we engage with and how we choose to present these. Our experience of walking on Upside Down Country leads us to consider our responsibilities in caring for Country, because while we gained a greater sense of the unsettling, violent truth of our history, we also felt respect and love for Country.
Spiral three: present Places
Through becoming family with place (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022; Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, White, Palmer and Collard2021), we can learn with our kin about how to care for places we live now, and how we can live together reciprocally and ethically. Becoming family (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020) is a practice of taking the time to be with and attune with Place, and of opening to what we can learn relationally with Place through listening and responding. In our conversations together, which span years, we have been sharing the ways we are learning to live with and love our home places and talking about how these practices can assist us in designing and enacting regenerative place pedagogies. Each of us has recently moved to live in a new Place. In the Place story below, written by Peta, we model the processes of becoming family with our new home places and consider how these practices might help us create and enact different place pedagogies.
Place story: becoming family
We moved to a new family Place to escape from the suburban hard surfaces and limitations of living in a rented house/space/community in response to the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. The land and our kin family are different from our expectations, so we have been changing our plans for how we live with them. The soil here is clay, imbued with medium sized rocks harking to a disruptive volcanic history, and some is impossible to move. We are learning about gardening under a canopy of tree kin. Our family Place honours tall eucalyptus trees and tree ferns, which herald steep slopes, dark days, much rain, and long cold winters. We have learned these are not cold enough to freeze, just cold enough to slow some of us to the core, often prohibiting growth or germination.
I observe the sun as its shadows track across the ground, learning it is warming and enriching when shining. I observe our family members: sulphur crested cockatoo, kookaburra, eastern spine-bill, spiders (such a rich variety), echidna, brushtail possum, ring tailed possum, trees and other plants, insects, wombat. Each day reveals a new relationship, and walks around our neighbourhood are beautifully illustrative of the variety of species that call these hills home. I observe many species that are not endemic to this part of Australia (like me) and note how these species thrive, intertwine with other species, and seemed to shout loudly as they conquer spaces.
I spent time listening and respecting my new home Place, seeking the sun where it is fleeting, sitting with new members of my family and listening to the stories they share about their lives and relationships with other members of our family. Learning to walk with kin by prioritising First Nations voices in developing our responsibility for caring for Country. These voices, our family, report their preferences about how to live well and I learn how to navigate our shared and diverse needs. As we plan new ways forward for our family we develop consciousness of the soil family members, rocks, trees and other plants, vertebrates and invertebrates, and our ancestors who also call our home, home.
Learning to love our home Places requires a different sensibility, dedication and commitment from the ways of attuning with Place we have practiced in spirals one and two. We learn that connecting with a new Place, developing new family relations and responding to the needs of our kin is an ongoing, emerging process that requires we make time and space for daily practices of respecting, observing, listening, reflecting and responding. We learn to “wait, watch and participate” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022) with Place by paying attention to what happens here over many months, through different cycles and seasons. We find new ways to participate through trial and error, and acting and responding, as we deepen our connection to our family by tending to our shared needs.
We noticed how the practices of becoming family (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Harben, Collard, Horwitz and Palmer2020) have been implicitly diffused throughout our cooperative inquiry and processes for learning with Place. We are becoming embedded and situated with Place through cooperative inquiry and participating with kin and family; experiencing time as co-becoming and relational; and developing our capacity for feeling, listening to and hearing Country. However, if “injustice is found by tracing relationships” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Blaise, Aniere, Horwitz, White and Muecke2022, p. 5), we have a responsibility to explore the limits of our understandings and our complicities in reinforcing the dangers of modernity and unsettling truths of coloniality (Paradies, Reference Paradies2020). The strong undercurrents of resonance and dissonance we felt during our learning journey remind us that engaging in practices of learning with Place are not enough to suggest we understand fully what it means to enact ethical and regenerative place pedagogies. Re-reading our experiences of learning with Place alongside indigeneity and decoloniality, and with the various critiques of place-based education (McCoy et al., Reference McCoy, Tuck and McKenzie2016), we become wary of the seduction of claiming our own “special Places” where feeling connected to the natural world is trouble free. By being more open to, feeling, sensing and sharing the unsettling dislocation we feel in response to the destruction wrought on Upside Down Country, and throughout this inquiry, we aim to connect with and have a greater sense of the rhythms of violence and destruction that persist and continue to create and destroy past/present/futures in co-becoming time. At the same time, we notice the regenerative possibilities that co-exist within these rhythms, recalling that modernity involves among other things, “global de-localization, including the marginalisation of place” (Escobar, Reference Escobar2018, p. 182), but does not foreclose the possibility of radical alternatives to this way of thinking and being.
Possibilities for ethical place pedagogies
Our intention from the beginning was to develop our capacity to teach with Place in the community and tertiary education contexts we live and work in. We distil just three ingredients, which are incomplete but seem valuable to us, as they give us a sense of something that we can work with for ourselves and our co-learners. These are not at all new ideas but are what have emerged experientially, authentically and compellingly for us through our engagements with Place and place pedagogy scholarship.
A first pedagogical ingredient is creating everyday opportunities for exploring deeper Place kinships: asking, and creating responses to the simple question: “How to be here?” (Greenwood, Reference Greenwood2019, p. 360). This priority responds to the disconnection from Country experienced by many and to the placelessness of education in modernity. It means normalising and experimenting in our lives and work with daily practices, of attuning with Place, that assist affective learning and noticing the shimmer (Rose, Reference Rose, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017) and wonder, and which are experiential, aesthetic, ethical, embodied, sensory and creative. For example, through practices of being present, noticing, touching, drawing, writing, creating, talking, nurturing and care-taking. The practices are premised on the view that many of us need to become more deeply reflective about our own ontological experience (Greenwood, Reference Greenwood2019).
A second ingredient concerns the nature of the scholarship and philosophy that we support encounters with. This is to support the practices of “being here” and drawing us into deeper reflections about our own, and others, ontological experience. It is about displacing the centrality and privilege of colonial-modern positivist enlightenment thinking, its linearity, its reductiveness and its abstractions from relations, including with Place. We consider the value of the conceptualisation of knowledge in terms of “ecologies of knowledge” (Santos, Reference Santos2007, p. 66), or knowledge as multiple and non-hierarchical. This reflects the reality that knowledge and ways of thinking are diverse, and that transforming relations with the planet requires multiple knowledges and generative entanglements between them. In practice, this means making located Indigenous philosophies and located critiques of colonisation a critical foci of reading and conversation, including about “what happened here” and “what is happening now” (Greenwood, Reference Greenwood2019, p. 364). We suggest the necessity for experimenting with pedagogical practices that generatively engage people in ways of knowing and being that are unfamiliar to them, and in more intentional development of the capacity for deep listening, including prioritising Indigenous voices, truths and knowledge of Place. Enacting this would also necessitate creating spaces and practices to grow the capacity to listen to and engage with contested truths and different voices, and to move with discomfort and with feelings more profound than discomfort. We suggest this is a crucial part of enacting our collective responsibility for sharing the cultural load of decoloniality.
The generative and enriching process of working collaboratively on this learning journey, the premise of epistemological and ontological relationality we work from, and the historical and political questions raised by our place interactions, bring us to a third pedagogical ingredient: collaborative action towards relations with Place and decolonial aims. In Australia, mainstream education still tends to maintain supposedly “apolitical” values. We argue that this idea is inaccurate and has proven itself entirely inappropriate. We believe that appropriate collaborative action involves engagement with the real and serious obstacles and problems of decolonisation and that this means political action and activism, as necessary aspects of education. In practice, this means teaching and learning about the inextricable relations political and economic agendas have with the local and global places we live. It means building capacity and supporting collectives to negotiate and challenge the agendas together. In the current Australian context, the upcoming referendum on whether to alter the Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (Australian Electoral Commission, 2023) as part of enacting the Uluru Statement From the Heart represents a situation that we and our students are ethically required to engage with in debate and conversation.
Deepening capacity for teaching with Place
We remain mindful that deepening our capacity for teaching with Place is an ongoing, always incomplete project that involves resisting the desire to smooth over the internal contradictions, gaps and fractures that this learning manifests. This work can, and should, feel uncomfortable and disruptive, and rewarding and regenerating. We continue to trouble our way forward as a pedagogical practice: learning to see, do, think, feel and practice differently and continuing our conversation about how we might enact more ethical place pedagogies towards decoloniality. By practising differently, we mean enacting place pedagogies that are grounded in the pedagogical ingredients we think are important: developing capacity for attuning with kin, engaging with ecologies of knowledge that prioritise Indigenous voices and critiques of colonisation, and working collaboratively towards decolonising place relations. These are necessary aspects of transforming our relations with place, and our pedagogical practices: we must think differently, and we must remember the future. This is the site of our most provoking and productive learning.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the unceded lands, seas and sky, which are part of the place stories of our inquiry, including Noongar Boodja, the Kapiti Coast Aotearoa, Badjala Country, Wurrundjeri Country, Boon Wurrung Country and Dja Dja Wurrung Country and offer our respects to the ancestors and elders who have cared for and continue to care for Country throughout deep time. We thank our friends who walked with us through Castlemaine Gold Diggings Regional Park and Art Museum on a rainy day in August 2022, and the Djaara women of Dja Dja Wurrung Country who generously shared their cultural knowledge of Country with us. We extend our gratitude to the editorial team and reviewers for their generative feedback on our developing ideas and this resulting paper.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
None.
Ethical standard
We acknowledge compliance with the spirit of the AIATIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-10/aiatsis-code-ethics.pdf).
Bronwyn A. Sutton is an educator, activist and researcher who uses embodied, arts-based and collaborative approaches in her practice. She researches leadership, climate justice activism, public and place pedagogies and transformative learning from Wurrundjeri Country, unceded Indigenous lands also known as the fringes of Melbourne, Australia. She has particular interest in leadership and learning in informal, nonformal and community places and spaces. Bronwyn is exploring professional and practice transformation with educators whose work involves leading communities towards environmental sustainability and action on climate change as a PhD candidate at Deakin University.
Robin Bellingham teaches and researches education, pedagogy and curriculum at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her work explores how education and research methodologies can respond to pressing problems of modernity such as educational and political disempowerment and disengagement, the ongoing effects of colonisation, and ecological crisis. She draws on critical, posthumanist and decolonial perspectives and on literary practice and critique to challenge and reimagine narratives that construct the ways in which we understand and engage with education, place, time, society, ecologies and the more-than-human world.
Peta J. White is an Associate Professor in science and environmental education at Deakin University. She educated in classrooms, coordinated programmes, supported curriculum reform and prepared teachers in jurisdictions across Canada and Australia. Her PhD explored learning to live sustainably as a platform to educate future teachers. Peta continues her commitment to initial teacher education and in-service teacher education through research-informed professional learning programmes. Peta’s current research follows three narratives: science and biology education; sustainability, environmental and climate change education; and collaborative/activist methodologies and embodied research practice. She is committed to share research findings via accessible professional contexts.
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