Hipótesis específica 3

In 1921 Boris Kozo-Polyansky conceived of the biological concept, symbiogenesis (sym: bringing together, bio: life, and genesis: to produce or create), later taken up by Margulis (e.g., Margulis & Sagan 1997; Margulis 2010). As a theory of evolution, symbiogenesis proposed that neo-Darwinist conceptions of individual competition and natural selection should be replaced by stories of co-evolution within sympoiesis, which means ‘making-with’ in that nothing makes itself (Adsit-Morris 2017). As Haraway (2016) noted, sympoiesis ‘is a word for worlding-with, in company’ (p. 58). In Dempster’s (2000) understanding, ‘systemhood’ in sympoietic terms, does not:

depend on the production of boundaries, but on the continuing complex and dynamic relations among components and other influences. The concept emphasises linkages, feedback, cooperation, and synergistic behaviour rather than boundaries. (p. 4)

Following this, sympoietic systems differ from Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s (1980) explanations of the phenomena of living organisms, conceived of as autopoiesis (Greek

auto- meaning self, and poieses meaning creation or production) in the 1970s. Autopoietic

systems are organisationally closed in their internal reproduction of the same patterns of

relations, through a continual recursive re-creation of self in determining their own autonomous spatial and temporal boundaries (Haraway 2016; Mingers 1991). Because autopoietic systems are self-organising and contain their own patterns of organisation through boundaries of organisational closure, they restrict adaptation.

Conversely, sympoietic systems are organisationally ajar, in that they do not have self- defined boundaries, but are complex, boundaryless, collectively-producing systems, in their ‘making-with/becoming-with’ (Haraway 2016). As such, sympoietic systems have a degree of uncertainty as to when a system might change and to what it might change into, particularly given that external sources influence the organisation of the system, but as the system acts in a

self-determined manner, external sources do not determine the organisation (Dempster 2000). Following this, ‘sympoieses enfolds autopoiesis, and generatively unfurls and extends it’ (Haraway 2016, p. 58), helping to understand different aspects of system complexity ‘in generative friction, or generative enfolding, rather than opposition’ (Haraway 2016, p. 61). Therefore, thinking/doing-with/through sympoietic systems in the context of environmental education teaching-type practices, in keeping an organisationally ajar approach to intraacting relationships (e.g., between a lived curriculum and curriculum-as-plan), means that there is an openness to evolutionary and transformative change in any given moment.

Evolutionary and transformative change was understood by Massumi (2002) as an ‘involution of subject-object relations’ (p. 57, my emphasis), with the term involution (different from evolution) also brought to the fore by Barad (2012) as she questioned a discreet and separate ‘self’ or ‘unit’. As Barad (2017) argued:

all ‘selves’ are not themselves but rather the iterative intraactivity of all matter of time-beings. The self is

dispersed/diffracted through being and time. In an undoing of the inside/outside distinction, it is

undecidable whether there is an implosion of otherness or a dispersion of self throughout

spacetimemattering. Hence, matter is an enfolding, an involution: it can’t help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes into contact with the infinite alterity that it is. Ontological indeterminacy, an

unending dynamism of the opening up of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. (p. 80, original emphasis) In opening to all possibilities through an involution of subject-object relations, therefore, solid and concrete forms of meaning-making and knowledge acquisition fall away. This is because there is no one fixed and complete ontology or epistemology in sense-making, if sense-making is understood to be derived from discursivities and the affectivity of materiality. Therefore, as teaching practices enact a mutating, lively, vibrant, flowing, and dynamic momentum with various intensities (Springgay 2008) derived of the intraacting relationship between lived

curriculum and curriculum-as-plan, a ‘togetherness’ relationship emerges. As Deborah Bird Rose (2012) suggested, looking for the life-affirming qualities of this ‘togetherness’ relationship,

means holding ‘difference and similarity in dialogical relationship rather than as opposites’ (p. 104).

As difference becomes necessary in this ‘togetherness’ relationship (Rose 2012), we depart from the need to capture a unified whole in environmental education, which fails to acknowledge and actualise situated differences in any given teaching context. As such, through a lived curriculum and curriculum-as-plan ‘togetherness’ relationship, environmental education is presented with a pertinent opportunity (Snaza & Weaver 2015). For example, dominant

discourses in these Anthropocene times that emphasise the importance of cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities (Lloro-Bidart 2015), manifests in a policy-driven discourse of sustainable development. In this way, environmental education curriculum policy is typically ‘done’ to teachers, working to limit the capacity for teachers to attend to the unique learning strengths, needs, limitations, and vulnerabilities of individuals, as situated within any given educational and socio-cultural context.

Moving between the borders of curriculum-as-plan and a lived curriculum through politics of affirmative difference in this ‘togetherness’ relationship, however, presents opportunities for teaching practices to enact an assemblage of heterogenous relations. This means that teachers can more actively cultivate a rich and fluid dialogue between diverse epistemic worlds, simultaneously challenging the homogenising and institutionalising of environmental education. Drawing on Juanita Sundberg’s (2014) concept of ‘pluriversal’, teaching approaches that activate different epistemic, ethical and political approaches to sense- making, transform an ‘either/or’ logic into a ‘both/and’ or ‘and, and’ logic. Crucially, modulating tensions between opposing forces through a ‘both/and’ or ‘and, and’ logic means that a lived curriculum in environmental education type-teaching practices, with its diverging qualities, is not

competing with, nor subdued by, broader policy objectives of curriculum mandates. Rather teaching practices are producing the collective goals of both. What this ‘togetherness’

relationship means for environmental education enmeshed within broader educational discourses will now be explored in Chapter Seven.

Chapter Seven: Agential Worlds Outside the Classroom

What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to

think with.

Donna Haraway (2016, p. 57)

7.1 Chapter Overview

Exploring environmental education as set within wider discourses of education, this chapter is interested in the affects emerging from intraacting Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worlds. I begin with a journal entry written after the third researcher/teacher

enactment, ‘Photographic Encounters’, to explore how affects emerging from intraactions in this pedagogical event ‘marked’ my body with discomfort, illuminating the problematic discursive construction of indoor/outdoor binaries in environmental education. I then digress to map some educational theorists’ critiques of the institutionalisation of schools, namely Dewey, Freire, Fromm, Foucault, and Postman, to provide examples of the assimilative effects of globalisation, neoliberalism and capitalism on education. In this way, I discuss ‘normalising’ practices of education to include the indoor classroom as dualistically set against the outdoor classroom, in which practices of environmental education are deemed ‘deviant’. Troubling this, I explore how imbuing Land with relational agency dismantles social constructions of the outdoors, drawing upon important perspectives of social ecology, as rooted in posthumanist performativity, to discuss the idea of individuals intraacting with broader ecologies of the world. Providing a journal entry to prompt a discussion as to how I understood myself as relationally entangled with the world, I end this chapter discussing conceptions of myself/Lily as a holobiont environmental education researcher/teacher, acknowledging that life on the planet is an entangled, yet

7.2 Moments of Rupture: Recurring Tensions in the Pedagogical Event