Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Urban Education

Advisor

Anna Stetsenko

Committee Members

Patricia Ticineto Clough

Beth Ferholt

Subject Categories

Applied Ethics | Art Practice | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Methods | Epistemology | Feminist Philosophy | Higher Education | Holistic Education | Indigenous Education | Liberal Studies | Other Education | Other Philosophy | Performance Studies | Philosophy of Science | Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development

Keywords

eco-literacy, river-as-teacher, environmental justice, climate action, land-based pedagogy, socio-ecological regeneration, indigenizing curricula

Abstract

Cultures' engagements with land and its more-than-human elements reveal their attitudes toward these dimensions, spanning a spectrum from reciprocal to transactional practices. In time, these engagements form a body of knowledges that nurtures the culture and its land, or arrests their vital and diverse qualities. This research project aims to bring to light how the different ways of engaging with and relating to land are embedded in knowledge production, distribution and communication—in short, in general educational endeavors and their philosophies—to promote a better understanding of the principles of eco-literacy. Additionally, a purpose of this project is to provide insights into how reciprocal ways of land relationality can become educational elements for deeper climate steading and environmental justice actions.

The project follows post-qualitative, decolonizing methodologies that respond with first person accounts to a trial educational encounter with the bioregion of the Hudson River Estuary and its more-than-human elements. Eco-literacy principles encountered and discussed in this project include a liminal, ecotonal/estuarian space of learning where contradictions relax their overdetermination to allow regenerative touchings with difference and the emergence of contributive novelty, the expansion of perceptive capacities that occur in these spaces, and the synchronization with different beings and their temporalities encountered in said spaces. Barriers to these processes that are discussed in this project are those stemming from the current educational infrastructure designed with western transactional, utilitarian goals that tend to discipline knowledges and learning experiences through preemptive biopolitical strategies. Other themes include the queering effects of transdisciplining inherited educational concepts such as curriculum, pedagogy, research and methodology.

The project thinks with concepts like itinerary, mycelium and mycelium care-taker in lieu of the former, to reflect on and analyze a multi-day paddling encounter with the river in which aesthetic, performative and ethical considerations became apparent. These reflections indicate the need for regenerative and eco-centric learning spaces with land for a transformational education to be reciprocally answerable to the more-than-human others that co-enact learning experiences with humans. In turn, these regenerative processes can help offset biopolitical designs while creating alternatives to western monoculture, inspiring further studies and educational encounters that promote life-tropic regeneration.

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