Continuing the Narrative Some 20 years Later

Extract

I wrote ‘Narrative and Nature: Unsustainable Fictions in Environmental Education’ in 1991 as a revised version of a paper subtitled ‘Poststructural Inquiries in Environmental Education’ that I presented at the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Association for Environmental Education in September 1990. To the best of my knowledge, these papers were the first instances of advocacy for poststructuralist analyses of dicourses/practices in the Anglophone literature of environmental education. The key influences on my thinking at this time were US and Canadian ‘reconceptualist’ curriculum scholars, including Cleo Cherryholmes, Jacques Daignault, William Doll, Clermont Gauthier, Rebecca Martusewicz, William Pinar and William Reynolds. The significance and impact of my poststructuralist inquiries in environmental education were recognised by the award of the inaugural Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Environmental Education Research in 1997. Since then, my ‘post’ scholarship has expanded to include postcolonialism and posthumanism. Narrative continues to be an important theme in my work, especially through my development of an approach to narrative experimentation that I call ‘rhizosemiotic play’.