Green bodies : training environmental educators

In this paper, we examine the “greening” of Outdoor & Environmental Education (OEE) students at an Australian regional university through three lenses: temporal, spatial & material. We are inspired by Grosz’ claim that “bodies are always understood within a spatial & temporal context, & space & time remain conceivable only insofar as corporeality provides the basis for our perception & representation of them” (1995, p. 84). As suggested by Grosz, these lenses are not discrete and, in the course of the paper, their intersections & reciprocity become apparent. We draw on interview responses & observations from a longitudinal cohort study undertaken by Preston in an attempt to trace the regulation and practice of “green” “outdoor Ed” subjectivities in the context of the materialities, time & spaces of this specific course. Grosz, E.A. (1995) Space, Time & Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge

An outdoor and environmental education community of practice : self stylisation or normalisation?

In this article, I draw on a qualitative longitudinal study to explore the influence of a tertiary Outdoor and Environmental Education (OEE) course on the formation of environmental ethics among students. In this task, I bring together Lave & Wenger (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice and Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics to underscore some of the difficulties of an OEE community of practice as a space for (environmentally) ethical self-stylisation. Bringing these theoretical ideas together is significant because my analysis suggests that the OEE community of practice (re)produces an environmental ethic based on normalised codes of conduct rather than a self-fashioning of an ethical existence as conceived by Foucault. I demonstrate that membership in overlapping communities of practice is influential in participants’ performance of environmental identities and normalising codes of conduct are particularly significant in the physical education/pre-service education communities of practice of which participants are members.