Introduction
Research indicates that having access to quality educational resources plays a critical role in helping teachers rise to the challenge of facilitating authentic and integrous learning experiences, particularly during periods of educational reform (Glasnović Gracin & Jukić Matić, Reference Grocott2021). For this article, we consider an education resource to be any tool, material or entity that facilitates learning, teaching or educational activities (see Tuomi [Reference Tuomi2013] for a comprehensive discussion of Open Education Resources).
While transitioning towards sustainability-focused education is an international imperative (Beasy, Smith & Watson, Reference Bhattacharya, Carroll Steward and Forbes2023), such transition is impeded by ongoing reforms in education, which contribute to the perpetual reconfiguration of teachers’ roles. For decades already, “educational reform in Australia has been a quagmire of political and educational agendas, with a myriad of known factors (of which change fatigue is a part) that have enhanced or hindered implementation” (Dilkes, Cunningham & Gray, Reference Duke2014, p. 46). When we couple this with humanity having become a geophysical force capable of fundamentally altering planetary ecological systems (Rousell et al., Reference Silver2017; Steffen et al., 2015), we can come to better appreciate how teachers are becoming increasingly enmeshed in wicked problems. In the context of discussion across this article, we consider wicked problems as those that comprise an evolving set of interlocking issues, constraints and possibilities (Conklin, Reference Cook, Oreskes, Doran, Anderegg, Verheggen, Maibach and Rice2003; Rittel & Webber, Reference Rousell1973).
Bleazby, Thornton, Burgh and Graham (Reference Bodkin-Andrews, Denson and Bansel2023) describe that despite the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2016), the issue continues to be socially and politically controversial (Mcpherson et al., Reference Moreton-Robinson2023), particularly with respect to how teachers’ successfully and sensitively cultivate dispositions and skillsets essential for imagining and creating sustainable futures. This situation poses a dilemma for teachers, where they can risk being accused of indoctrination if they teach from the evidence base of climate change in a directive manner or criticised for adopting more impartial approaches that risk undermining key aims of climate education (Bleazby et al., Reference Bodkin-Andrews, Denson and Bansel2023). For teachers, this combination of choice dilemma, reform fatigue and expectations to attend to compliance-driven agendas impact upon the core business of teaching and learning (Gavin, McGrath-Champam, Wilson, Fitzgerald & Stacey, Reference Glasnović Gracin and Jukić Matić2021). This in turn, we posit, inhibits teachers’ ability to meaningfully engage with international global imperatives concerned with planetary survival. As teachers grapple with mounting pressures to demonstrate accountability in their practice to multiple agendas, it comes as no surprise that they are increasingly turning to external education resources to help meet these (Silver, Reference Sobe2022). The rise of education resources unfolds in relation and parallel to this.
Education resources: Production, utility and opportunities
In developing this article, we initially surveyed relevant literature in order to better understand the prevalence and context of existing scholarship regarding education resource creation. Examination of three databases (Scopus, ERIC, Education Source) revealed a paucity of peer-reviewed research explicitly addressing K-12 education resource creation and its underlying professional practices. Narrowing our search, we looked for literature that might offer ancillary insights into the production of education resources, particularly examples that were speaking from or that might be perceived as adjacent to environmental education settings. Noteworthy examples included review of empirical studies on K-16 climate education (Bhattacharya et al., Reference Bishop2021), investigation of the practices of curriculum curation (Dezuanni & Zagami, Reference Dilkes, Cunningham and Gray2017; Mahon, Reference Mainardes2016) and entanglement of pedagogical and learning possibilities (Jukes et al., Reference Lane, Boggs, Chen and Torphy2022). Further to this, we also identified works on curriculum and pedagogical concepts that were congruent with or that could be contextualised to climate change education settings (Brennan, Reference Brooke, MacDonald. and Hunter2022; Jukes & Reeves, Reference Jukes, Stewart and Morse2020). While some examples of literature discuss teachers’ increased use of resources (CooperGibson Research, Reference Country, Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr and Maymuru2018; Glasnović Gracin & Jukić Matić, Reference Grocott2021), we found limited literature specifically addressing the motivations and methods for education resource production.
Engagement with education resources offers a dual purpose; first, in providing tangible materials for everyday classroom practice (Usiskin, Reference Warren, Vossoughi, Rosebery, Bang and Taylor2013), and second, they can inadvertently function as tools that foster and support professional development (Glasnović Gracin & Jukić Matić, Reference Grocott2021). For example, Cool.org, an Australian organisation, offers sustainability-focused, curriculum-integrated resources, with an independent study revealing their positive impact on teachers and students, enhancing confidence and skills in teaching environmental and social issues for 91% of surveyed teachers (Lonergan & Labour, Reference MacDonald2020). More recently, Ngarrngga (2023) is developing resources made by educators for educators in collaboration with Indigenous knowledge experts, with the vision for all Australian students to have the opportunity to connect with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems, histories and cultures (Ngarrngga, 2023). With teachers’ uptake of such resources and subsequent evaluations that will no doubt follow, it is fair to surmise that teachers’ vicarious and direct engagement with corporate entities through resources and professional development will become increasingly commonplace (Andrée & Hansson, Reference Andrée and Hansson2021).
Further to this, GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) are actively contributing education resources and professional learning for teachers and tailored tours for school groups. GLAM settings provide means for cultural collections, natural history displays and contemporary artworks to be curated into complex narratives about the people and places from whom these materials were produced (MacDonald et al., Reference Mahon2024). These initiatives have rich potential to connect communities and provide complex yet accessible opportunities for learning (Baguley et al., Reference Baguley, MacDonald and Jackett2018). In addition to this, GLAM institutions are — albeit slowly and tenuously — becoming more transparent in acknowledging and accounting for the problematic means by which their collections and exhibited materials have been acquired (Rimmer & Taylor, Reference Rittel and Webber2023). Education resources created in and for GLAM settings are becoming more concerned with detailing processes that can help audiences become more aware of “the significance of representation and the power of symbols to carry meaning, to signal identity and to invoke social and cultural alignments” (Ruanglertbutr, Reference Ruanglertbutr2014, p. 5). With research evidence pointing to teachers’ increasing utilisation of GLAM institutions’ websites and social media portals for education purposes (Mahat et al., Reference Mahat, Morrow, Long, Law, Gullickson and Guo2022), it is affirming to see the awareness of the need and efforts being made in these spaces to support teachers.
Teachers’ production, engagement with and uptake of education resources
While we could point to manifold examples of initiatives working to develop quality education resources for teachers, it seems that teachers’ readiness to seek out and uptake education resources can be impeded by factors such as reform fatigue, role recalibration and compliance priorities (Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ & Wilson, Reference Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig2023). Factors of accessibility, adaptability and currency, coupled with standardisation of curriculum, run parallel to the rise in the production of online resources that can reach a mass audience with shared needs (Silver, Reference Sobe2022). Keeping up with curriculum change and rolling reforms can weigh heavily on teachers’ readiness to seek out and embrace change (Dilkes et al., Reference Duke2014), particularly in the context of seeking out and incorporating new education resources into their programmes. This is an important insight, as while it points to the utility of education resources, it is clear that usefulness alone will not resolve the conflating challenges teachers are working with to utilise them effectively.
In looking at the practices that underlie education resource creation and making these transparent, we can better understand how education resource creation engages with — for example — compliance agendas, accurate climate science, pro-environmental values and attitudes and civic actions necessary for addressing climate change (Bleazby et al., Reference Bodkin-Andrews, Denson and Bansel2023; Lehtonen, Salonen, Cantell & Riuttanen, Reference Lonergan and Labour2018). This is where the potential lies for education resources and their means of production to be both demonstrative and educative in their deployment of relational and ecological approaches that work intra-actively (Barad, Reference Beasy, Smith and Watson2014) in fostering connections between curricular, methodological and pedagogical agents (Brooke, MacDonald, & Hunter Reference Butler and Sinclair2024; Harris, Reference Healy, Mayes, Flynn and Edwards2016). Across this article, we work with Karen Barad’s (Reference Barad2007) concept of intra-action, where we pay attention to the ways that curricular, methodological and pedagogical agents become co-constitutively entangled in our articulation of a professional practice for education resource creation.
Curricular, methodological and pedagogic considerations for education resource creation
As specialists in curriculum and pedagogy deployment within their respective education settings, teachers are well versed in fostering relationality between and in their enactment of curriculum and pedagogy; this can be conceived as their becoming “curricula-pedagogic” (Ball, Reference Ball1990; Brennan, Reference Brooke, MacDonald. and Hunter2022; Brooke et al., Reference Butler and Sinclair2024). They also engage and work incisively with discipline-specific content knowledge and its associated methodologies and pedagogies in ways that can be described as “metho-pedagogic” (Gallagher et al., Reference Gavari-Starkie, Espinosa-Gutiérrez and Lucini-Baquero2022; Healy et al., Reference Hogarth2022; MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Hunter, Wise and Fraser2022). In saying this, researchers and curriculum developers continue to grapple with how to best support teachers to traverse and draw together different disciplines in education settings (MacDonald, Hunter, Wise & Fraser Reference MacDonald, Wise, Tregloan, Fountain, Wallis and Holmstrom2019; Wise, MacDonald, Badham, Brown & Rankin, Reference Wise, MacDonald, Badham, Brown and Rankin2022). This is pertinent, given that at the highest levels of governance, there is a recognition of the need to draw on multiple disciplinary perspectives to combat wicked problems such as those that inhibit the ambitions of sustainability (Lehtonen et al., Reference Lonergan and Labour2018).
In education settings, conceptual strategic reforms can occur rapidly, while their implementation on the ground happens more slowly. It is widely recognised that teachers continue to grapple with their enactment of evolving disciplinarities and derivative discipline acronyms, such as STEM and STEAM (Colucci-Gray & Burnard, Reference Colucci-Gray and Burnard2019; Harris & DeBruin, Reference Harris and De Bruin2018; Hunter, Reference Jukes and Reeves2024; MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald., Rees, Hogan, Richardson, Sinner, Osler and White2019, Reference Mainardes2020). Increasingly diverse concepts of disciplinarity are being touted as essential for engaging people in sustainability issues (Gavari-Starkie et al., Reference Gavin, McGrath-Champam, Wilson, Fitzgerald, Stacey, S.Riddle and Bright2022), and each evolution of disciplinarity is highly iterative and often contextually contingent. Education resources created in GLAM settings often explicitly engage with discipline acronyms (Lawson et al., Reference Lehtonen, Salonen, Cantell and Riuttanen2018; Park & Cho, 2022; Wise et al., Reference Wise, MacDonald, Badham, Brown and Rankin2022). They point to curricular, methodological and pedagogical considerations that invite disciplinary integration opportunities pursuable in and beyond GLAM settings.
Before we move into discussion of our professional practice of education resource creation, we start at the place and moment which gave cause for the resource explored in this article to be produced — this being Lake Pedder and the water[shed] project. While this article seeks to alight the why and how for demystifying the professional practice of education resource creation, it is appropriate to start at the impetus for the cause, need and purpose of the education resource creation being examined.
Lake Pedder and the water[shed] project
At the heart of the watershed project lies Lake Pedder, once a stunning feature of Tasmania’s Southwest Wilderness area (OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights, 2023). Designated as National Park in 1955, its protected status was revoked in 1967 for the Gordon hydroelectric power scheme development, sparking significant local and international protests (Restore Pedder, 2023). The flooding of Lake Pedder serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of conservation efforts and points to the importance of education in fostering essential conservation values required to prepare and inspire future leaders to protect, act upon and uphold global restoration goals.
The water[shed] project was conceived by OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights and presented in collaboration with Bett Gallery, in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, to support the Restore Pedder campaign. While it was designed around a physical art exhibition which was time limited, it maintains a digital presence (OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights, 2023). The digital archive houses the deliverables of the water[shed] project, which included major creative outputs in the form of an art exhibition, featuring the works of 50 significant Australian and international artists. Accompanying this exhibition is a substantial book publication featuring critical commentary from significant Australian and Aboriginal art historians, curators and essayists.
The water[shed] education resource
A comprehensive education resource (MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022) was produced in complement to these major creative outputs and made available as a printed booklet as well as digitally. Digital copies were made (and remain) available as a free download from the OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights website (OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights, 2023). In complement to the digital longevity of the water[shed] project, the education resource was designed for use both in and beyond the physical exhibition timeline, across the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030). In alignment with this global initiative, the resource seeks to inform classroom discourse pertaining to how we can teach and learn about the degradation of ecosystems and the intra-acting environmental and agential factors (Malone et al., Reference Malone, Tesar and Arndt2020) that permeate these.
The resource offers rich, evocative accounts in the form of assembled excerpts from artists and essayists’ visual and textual imaginings of Lake Pedder. For example, water[shed] artist, Sue Lovegrove, describes in her Mapping the invisible (2021) water[shed] artist statement how “an invisible lake lying beneath the surface of the water is a compelling image to imagine” (Lovegrove, as cited in MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022, p. 41). The conversation that ensues in A tale of loss and hope (MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022, p. 45) between Julie Gough’s water[shed] artwork Determined (as cited in MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022, p. 34) and Greg Lehman’s water[shed] essay prompts remembrance that “this story is not political or historical. It’s a cultural reimagining… It is the same for the Lake. It is a story of coming of age, of ceremony, and deep connection and respect for Country and all of its citizens” (Lehman, as cited in MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022, p. 34). These are just some of the excerpts from the water[shed] project that serve as a reminder that “the original lake is not forgotten. It lies quietly waiting, just 15 m beneath the dark, brooding body of water still officially gazetted as Lake Pedder” (water[shed], 2022, n.d).
The exhibition was shown over three weeks from 5 to 27 August 2022, coinciding with the 50th anniversary (1972) of Lake Pedder being subsumed into the flood waters of the Huon-Serpentine Impoundment in 1972. We encourage you to explore the multi-modal storying of the water[shed] exhibition materials as they are situated in the education resource and in relation to the professional practice of education resource creation offered here (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The water[shed] education resource, shared with permission from OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights. Embedded images shared with permission from Bett Gallery, Hobart. https://outsidethebox.org.au/assets/projects/watershed-restore-pedder/Watershed_Education_Kit.pdf.
The water[shed] exhibition includes the work of artists who encounter the concept of landscape and Country from diverse cultural perspectives, including works from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. “Landscape” is a term laden with European ideological connotations (Delphin & MacDonald, Reference Dezuanni, Zagami and Beavis2018), which substantially differ from the complex spiritual Aboriginal conceptualisations of a country being more than a physical place and a living entity with its own agency and spirit (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Delphin and MacDonald2015; Langton, Reference Lawson, Cook, Dorn and Pariso2021; Moreton-Robinson, 2020). Research shows that non-Indigenous teachers often feel varying levels of uncertainty in teaching diverse cultural perspectives and histories appropriately and with integrity (Bishop, Reference Bleazby, Thornton, Burgh and Graham2020; Bodkin-Andrews et al., Reference Bozalek, Bayat, Gachago, Motala and Mitchell2013; Ngarrngga, 2023b; Riley et al., Reference Rimmer and Taylor2019). We carefully considered the opportunity before us to alight the importance of working with an informed awareness of these tensions. This led us to scrutinise our choice and decisions pertaining to discourse and vernacular adopted across the resource (Hogarth, Reference Hunter2017; MacDonald, Reference MacDonald and Beasy2019). The resource deliberately limits using the term “landscape” throughout to respect the diversity of cultural perspectives featured in the exhibition, the historical storying and the deep history of Lake Pedder.
The following section of the article speaks to the context in which the water[shed] education resource was created, the aims and ambitions of the project and the positionality of this authorship team. As the authors of this article are the authors of the water[shed] education resource, we move between third- and first-person stance, where “we” is adopted to indicate and entwine our parallel authorship roles.
Context and positionality
To understand the convergence of contextual backgrounds underpinning the process of interdisciplinary education resource creation described in this article, it is important to acquaint readers with the authorship teams’ individual positionality and our professional contexts and how these permeate our entwinement of disciplinary narratives and subsequent meaning-making.
Abbey is a non-Indigenous Australian woman of Scottish ancestry (Clan Donald; Macdonalds of Sleat). Abbey grew up near MuritaFootnote 1/Port Sorell on the north-west coast of Lutruwita (Tasmania), unceded lands of the Palawa people. As an artist, teacher and volunteer, Abbey brings to all aspects of her work a strong personal focus on arts and interdisciplinary education advocacy, fostering teacher agency, community engagement and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Her research is used to inform the design, development and evaluation of content, curriculum and education resources for diverse education settings in school, museum, gallery and tertiary education contexts. She loves working with creative industries and philanthropic organisations looking to collaborate with education transformation stakeholders.
Kim is a non-Indigenous Australian woman with a convict and colonial settler heritage. While born on the lands of the Wamba Wamba, Latji Latji, Tatti Tatti, Waddi Waddi and Barapa Barapa peoples, her family moved to the lands of the Palawa people (Lutruwita) during her childhood. Here, Kim trained as a physical geographer and spent time knee-deep in Tasmania’s salt marshes before arriving into social science ways of understanding the world. For the last decade, Kim’s teaching and research work strongly features community connection and place-based inquiries centring on being of and for nature.
This authorship team lives in the Australian island state of Lutruwita (Tasmania). They share the parallel of growing up on this island in coastal towns and find kinship in these experiences of living and learning in proximity to waterways. They know there is still much to learn, unlearn and learn anew (McLeod et al., Reference Mcpherson, Forster and Kerr2020). They take this into their work together in the School of Education at the University of Tasmania.
Story and inquiry lines
As the authors of this journal article and the water[shed] education resource, we share a background of conducting qualitative research with teachers and students in education contexts, part of which involves their using creative, arts-based and storied methods for generating and analysing visual, spoken and written texts. As two teacher educators working in an Australian context, we acknowledge that our approach to doing this is invariably informed by our familiarity with the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA] Reference Riley, Monk and VanIssumn.d). In addition to this, we have sought to leverage our familiarity with this particular curriculum to identify synergies with globally resonant education and conservation agendas, including
The UNESCO Principles of the Decade of Restoration (2021–2030)
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2016)
Four [reworking] Pillars of Education to Sustain the Commons (Sobe, Reference Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ and Wilson2021)
In exploring the intra-activity of these, we networked materials of practice and curricular, pedagogical and methodological agents, enacting these into what became our professional practice of education resource creation. These permeate the water[shed] education resource, and we remind readers of the invitation and encouragement to explore the resource concurrently with this article.
The development of the water[shed] education resource draws from our relational paralleling and connecting with a global breadth and depth of education curriculum, pedagogy and policy agendas. While the resource identifies connections to global education agendas and specific curriculum, subject or learning areas, we found particular resonance with Sobe’s (Reference Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ and Wilson2021) reworking of UNESCO’s four pillars of education as a globally accessible interpolating device for helping teachers find and leverage multifaceted learning opportunities and legacies of Lake Pedder, as captured in the water[shed] project.
Through these four pillars of education, we co-created meaning from the water[shed] materials using visual-textual assemblages for interdisciplinary inquiry. Drawing from Duke’s (Reference Duke2010) insights on curatorial practice, we aimed to facilitate nuanced learning encounters rather than prescribe specific lessons. Our resource invites teachers to adapt our assemblages to their contexts, emphasising that there’s no singular interpretation. We have no say, nor do we seek to claim control over the direction and emphasis of classroom inquiries that can be pursued; we trust in teachers’ agency, their responsibility and response-ability (Bozalek, Bayat, Gachago, Motala & Mitchell, Reference Brennan2018) to do the work required to adapt and contextualise as appropriate.
There is an absence of reference to specific curriculum frameworks in the anchorage of this education resource. Given the potential for global appeal of the water[shed] project, it is important that its’ education resource resonate with broad education agendas. In seeking to augment globally attuned entry points for classroom inquiry, we sought to emphasise what we felt were prime opportunities for inter and transdisciplinary inquiry. In mapping to global education and conservation agendas, we therefore sidestep approaches to curriculum mapping that can be static and overlook metho-pedagogical considerations pertaining to the role of place in the nexus spaces between curriculum/pedagogy, teaching/learning and people/place.
Mapping education resources to any particular curricular framework involves more than simply specifying links between content and context. When curriculum interpretation and enactment is seen as an ongoing process teachers actively engage in, contribute to and drive, we affirm their capacity to maintain the openness and fluidity that is essential for embracing new ideas and the practices inherent to realising these ideas (MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022). The storied assemblages of the water[shed] education resource are offered as connectible and open to further modification, where teachers and students can use these as impetus entry points for their own personally situated interdisciplinary inquiries.
Methodology
Lisa Grocott’s (Reference Harris2022) metho-pedagogical “playdate” approach was used to facilitate our working together to craft the education resource. Embracing the playdate’s principles of surrendering, contesting and iterating ideas, our collaborative process acknowledged the inherent unpredictability and multiplicity that comes with deconstructive/reconstructive thinking in a trusting and playful space (Grocott, Reference Harris2022, p. 179). Our collective aim, manifested through two-hour weekly get-togethers over three months, mirrored the playdate’s commitment to improvisation, communal belonging and the establishment of a social encounter that resonated with the diversity of our perspectives. We embraced messy tabletop mind-mapping alongside working synchronously in shared documents (Google Docs) to converge our parallel play experience.
Working with the water[shed] exhibition materials, curricular-metho-pedagogic agents and our parallel wisdoms brought to the project enabled the deconstruction of individual authorial voices (Grocott, Reference Harris2022, p. 179) and curation of these into the storylines described across the education resource. We approached this work with a deep sense of responsibility and response-ability (Bozalek et al., Reference Brennan2018; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016) to acknowledge our own teacher/teacher educator selves and teachers as agents in their own right who are capable of shaping their own assemblages of learning and inquiry. Active listening combined with a sense of curiosity and provocation enabled us to draw confluence between disciplinary differences and find new ways of encouraging interconnected meaning-making with curricula-metho-pedagogic agents. We also utilised the key tenets of the playdate framework to facilitate our address of article revisions.
In developing the water[shed] education resource, we engaged in individual and shared processes of reflection, learning and listening for ways to make sense and meaning of an increasingly fast-changing world. Our own wanderings and wonderings lead us to discover that UNESCO’s four pillars of education were reviewed and updated in 2021. These provided a globally accessible mediating device for articulating learning about the legacies of Lake Pedder, as captured in the water[shed] project.
Drawing from the UNESCO four pillars of education to sustain the commons
In reorienting the four pillars of education towards building capacity for the common good and action, the updated pillars offer a framework for charting lines of inquiry into and through the collective challenges we face today and into the decades to come (Sobe, Reference Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ and Wilson2021).
The four original and reoriented pillars are
learning to know > learning to study, inquire and co-construct together
learning to do > learning to collectively mobilise
learning to live together > learning to live in a common world
learning to be > learning to attend and care
Below, we detail our playful interpretations of working with and through the reoriented pillars. In this, we concurrently unfold and interrogate our working through the pillars to create an education resource. In so doing, we reveal the potential of these pillars for informing the creation of the water[shed] education resource.
Learning to study, inquire and co-construct together
In learning to study, inquire and co-construct together, we considered the intra-active possibilities of working with a global breadth and depth of education curriculum, pedagogy and policy agendas and their inherent agents (Barad, Reference Barad2007). We came together as two teacher educators from different disciplinary backgrounds to share and make meaning from the suite of creative, textual materials that the water[shed] project offered. With its explicit focus on environmental ethics, multispecies, culture and place of Lake Pedder, we set about considering different ways of knowing (Butler & Sinclair, Reference Conklin2020; Rousell, Reference Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie and Foster2020) across the water[shed] artists’ and writers’ contributions. This saw us considering diverse perspectives, including (but not limited to) disciplinary, cultural, environmental, socio-economic and political to make meaning.
Considering the evolving curriculum landscape and the water[shed] project’s alignment with the UN Decade of Restoration (2021–2031), we carefully crafted a resource to foster transformative learning (UNESCO, 2021) beyond specific curriculum cycles. In Australia, curriculum typically undergoes review every six years (ACARA, Reference Riley, Monk and VanIssum2023), but teachers’ readiness to adopt new resources can be hindered by factors like reform fatigue (Stacey et al., Reference Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig2023). Thus, we sought to story global education and conservation agendas in ways that engaged agents of pedagogy and curriculum intra-actively, such as but not limited to curriculum and pedagogical content and discipline knowledge.
We set about identifying key themes, curiosities and points of interest that emerged via our engagement with multiplicity and diverse agents of cultural and disciplinary ways of knowing, being and doing (MacDonald & Beasy, Reference MacDonald, Coleman, Healy, Diener, Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski and Mouza2022; Warren, Vossoughi, Rosebery, Bang & Taylor, Reference Whatman, Wilkinson, Kaukko, Vedeler, Blue and Reimer2020) across the water[shed] exhibition materials. We observed the water[shed] artists’ statements and catalogue essays adopting discourses akin to working across and between different disciplines (i.e. cross and interdisciplinarity), rather than beyond them (transdisciplinarity). This was especially apparent with respect to discourse of working relationally with matter and agents of art, science and geography. We shared our formative interpretations along the way with contributors and supporters of the water[shed] project, intra-actively drawing their feedback and affirmations back into our own becoming ecological process (Brooke et al., Reference Butler and Sinclair2024) for education resource creation.
In our learning to co-construct this education resource, we actively took carriage of the labour required to engage meaningfully and relationally with global and local curriculum, pedagogy and policy agendas, knowing that such deep engagement takes time and space that teachers have increasingly less capacity for (Stacey et al., Reference Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig2023). By actively attending to this learning together, interdisciplinary meaning-making and question creation, we co-constructed a series of storied assemblages — described throughout the resource as “tales.” The notion of tales is a nod to the storying that we made with the water[shed] materials. Rather than specifying what teachers could do in response, we described the intent of the storied assemblages as a catalyst, impetus and provocation for classroom inquiry. In doing this, we model outcomes of our own relational engagement with and meaning made of water[shed] while concurrently recognising the deep expertise that teachers’ possess and bring to their contextualisation and working with education resources. It was this process of learning to study, inquire and co-construct together that informed our storying of the “tales” that thread across the water[shed] resource.
Learning to collectively mobilise
Teachers and students exhibit remarkable resilience, creativity and adaptability in navigating environmental, social and political challenges (UNESCO, 2021), contributing actively to collective efforts despite systemic obstacles. We too found cause to support efforts and contribute to this collective mobilisation in our education resource creation.
The necessity for education and industry stakeholders to pool resources for sustainable education initiatives is widely acknowledged (Beasy et al., Reference Bhattacharya, Carroll Steward and Forbes2023; Bleazby et al., Reference Bodkin-Andrews, Denson and Bansel2023). When learning to collectively mobilise, we discovered being clear and sincere in the communication of aspirations, agendas and goal setting was important to attend to at the outset. Doing so helped us to build rapport with key stakeholders involved in the creation of visual and textual materials for the water[shed] exhibition (artists, writers, environmental and social change organisations, curators, designers, teachers),and to create an education resource that met their expectations. When education resources acknowledge the deep expertise of teachers, they provide means for teachers to contribute to the call to collectively mobilise. In our own learning to collectively mobilise, we too felt compelled to contribute to the significant global imperative of sustainability and living in support of the common good (Sobe, Reference Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ and Wilson2021).
In our own learning to collectively mobilise, we came to appreciate how multi-stakeholder and multi -disciplinary collaboration can be a complex endeavour to mobilise, particularly when pursued in education settings. We recognised that drawing together disciplinary and other ways of knowing and doing indicative of different curriculum learning areas and subjects can facilitate greater conceptual understanding in students than learning content from each subject in isolation (Brand & Triplett, Reference Brand and Triplett2012). To enable this, we attuned to the interactions and flows between agents (such as, but not limited to, curriculum, methodology and pedagogy) in ways that sought to show rather than tell in our storying. The water[shed] artist statements and catalogue essays detail the mobilisation of methodological approaches and philosophical stances that permeate the cultural and visual art practices featured in the exhibition. From these, we wove curricular, methodological and pedagogical considerations into our education resource storying in ways that integrated disciplines, issues, ideas, problems and possibilities presented in the water[shed] exhibition. In articulating overarching storylines of complex interrelated themes that form the basis of concern and radical hope of water[shed], we sought to create space then for teachers and students to consider how they might mobilise their capacities for collective action in the meaning they make from their own and others’ lived experiences.
Learning to live in a common world
The themes we identified emerged by entwining diverse perspectives to articulate synergies between different ways of knowing. Increased awareness of these can lead to shifts in responses to questions of multispecies justice amid climate change and mass extinction common to us all (Rousell, Reference Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie and Foster2020; United Nations, Reference Usiskin2021). In looking into, across and between the artworks and artist statements, we noticed explicit engagement and working with agents of interdisciplinarity, such as people, methods and tools and art, science and geographically oriented matter and materials.
The convergence of different disciplines in education settings serves various functions and dysfunctions. For example, education research continues to grapple with a common and enduring curiosity to define intra, multi, cross, inter, trans and further prefixes for disciplinarity (Cunningham, Reference Cunningham2018; MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Wise, Tregloan, Fountain, Wallis and Holmstrom2019). These are constantly being reimagined and renegotiated, particularly in onto-epistemological and axiological scholarship in, from and for education settings broadly (Mainardes, Reference Manathunga2022; Whatman et al., Reference Wise, MacDonald, Badham, Brown and Rankin2023). However, there can be a lag in teachers’ uptake of new initiatives into curriculum deployment (MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Wise, Tregloan, Fountain, Wallis and Holmstrom2019). The entrenched disciplinary siloing in Australian schooling, especially in secondary education, hampers interdisciplinary enactments. Standardised testing pressures often deter teachers from taking risks and embracing curiosity (MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Wise, Tregloan, Fountain, Wallis and Holmstrom2019). To this end, we are aware of the affordances that education resource creation enables for risk-taking and experimentation that might not be common for all.
Recognising interdisciplinary practices in the water[shed] materials, we positioned our education resource creation and subsequent discussion within the discourse of interdisciplinarity. While we appreciate and are open to the rich potential of transformation and transdisciplinarity, there is adequate cause to be mindful of the work that needs to precede this and that creates the foundation upon which decolonisation of disciplines (Manathunga, Reference McLeod, Thakchoe, Hunter, Vincent, Baltra-Ulloa and MacDonald2009; Warren et al., Reference Whatman, Wilkinson, Kaukko, Vedeler, Blue and Reimer2020) and transdisciplinarity can flourish. While the water[shed] education resource can be adapted to accommodate a range of disciplinary aspirations, we found common ground in the decision to think, act and co-create the resource out of the common liminal spaces between and across diverse disciplinary cultures. We sought to work with the same onto-epistemic openness being asked of teachers and industry collaborators as agentive thinkers who actively participate in and contribute to reimaginings of disciplinarity discourse (Warren et al., Reference Whatman, Wilkinson, Kaukko, Vedeler, Blue and Reimer2020).
Learning to attend and care
Education resource developers must keep across evolving priorities and the factors influencing teachers’ energy and capacities to engage. Sustainability education agendas should balance aspirations for authentic experiences with awareness of external pressures affecting teaching and learning (Gavin et al., Reference Glasnović Gracin and Jukić Matić2021). Depending on how resources balance these considerations, they can either enable or hinder teachers’ ability to become ecological in their relational curriculum and pedagogy enactment (Hickey & Riddle, Reference Hickey and Riddle2022).
In attending to this, we took care with and carriage of the disciplinary identity, skills and knowledge brought to our encountering of the water[shed] materials and were mindful of the opportunity education resource creation affords for learning and making meaning with different disciplinary discourses and practices (Manathunga, Reference McLeod, Thakchoe, Hunter, Vincent, Baltra-Ulloa and MacDonald2009). To avoid inadvertently further contributing to teachers’ reform fatigue, shifts in the vernacular of disciplinarity and the acronyms intended to encourage interaction and integration were carefully considered. This is our commitment to working with a relational and ecological approach that calls for development and deployment of pedagogical practices that leverage both this and that, rather than this or that (Brooke et al., Reference Butler and Sinclair2024). While the themes of our “tales” may at first appear polar or binary on the surface, it is in the space between that we broaden and deepen understandings of our own lived experience through storying. In this respect, our attending to care diffracts collaborative, qualitative approaches where intra-acting storylines reverberate careful meanings of teaching, learning and professional interactions (Beattie, Reference Beattie1995).
In our attentive approach, we delved deeply into relational ontologies and pedagogies of place, during which we came to better appreciate how pedagogies of place are central to Indigenous ways of living, learning and knowing (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Delphin and MacDonald2015). Stories are intrinsic to human expression, shaping our understanding of the world (Abbot, Reference Abbott2020). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures have long embraced embodied storytelling (Bunda and Phillips, Reference Bunda and Phillips2023), predating Western narrative concepts (Phillips et al., Reference Phillips, Bunda and Quintero2018). When storying with this in mind, we carefully consider, negotiate and navigate what works and, subsequently, find ourselves positioned to better understand who and what our knowledge creation can be in service of (Drake et al., Reference Drake, Dziekan, Gilbert, Mehzoud, Pearce and Pearce2019). The process of generating storied assemblages of the water[shed] visual and textual materials allowed us to speculatively wonder and search for inclusive and non-alienating ways and means to story care for people and place.
Relationality enabled with and through the UNESCO four pillars of education
Barad (Reference Barad2007, p. 170) reminds us that “matter’s dynamism is generative … in the sense of bringing forth new worlds, of engaging in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world.” Those that produce education resources have the responsibility and response-ability to critically engage with the motives, the context and the broader curricular-metho-pedagogical agents that entwine in the making and reconfiguring of matter — to honour the intra-active and co-constitutive qualities of curation (Barad, Reference Barad2007). It was our sense of response-ability that we sought to “attend and care” with and for the teachers who are entangled inseparably from developing education resources. Understanding and enacting a “collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices through our capacity to respond” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p. 34) led us to situating the assembled stories in the resource in interdisciplinary spaces.
The UNESCO pillars acted and intra-acted with us too, directing and challenging us to step outside of ourselves and be conscious of the ecosystem in which the education resource was seeking to inhabit. When we came together to create teachable moments with the visual and textual water[shed] materials, we found that diffractive patterns of discussion and sharing were generated with the undulations in our approaches. These emerged necessarily and concurrently as resonance and dissonance to ideas explored through the process (Barad, Reference Barad2007). In working diffractively in the process and practice of education resource creation, we can and should work with this and that. We are not only working with curricular agents; we are working with methodological methods and pedagogical tools for meaning-making in disciplinary subject and in the human subject (Burnard et al., Reference Burnard, Colucci-Gray and Sinha2021). Being open to sitting in the discomfort (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016) of not knowing or not fully grasping was part of our navigation of interdisciplinary terrain.
As the world increasingly becomes defined by precarity as a consequence of environmental, social and economic crises, we must find ways to support and embrace approaches to and for creating and engaging with the shifting imperatives of education. We recognise the indispensable role that education — and education resources — can have in empowering teachers and students and nurturing future leaders to actively pursue and attain global restoration goals and contribute towards sustainable life. Through engagement with the pillars, we came together to draw insights through one another as we attended and responded to the details and specificities of relations into a complex web (Barad, Reference Barad2007; UNESCO, 2021). We did this not only with the thoughts and perspectives of each other but in relation to and with the ecology of the ecosystem we were immersed in for education resource creation.
Teachers continue to navigate shifting policy priorities — often politically motivated and amidst reform fatigue (Dilkes et al., Reference Duke2014; Savage, Reference Savage2016; Stacey et al., Reference Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig2023). Attending to ontological and epistemological shifts requires time and space for grappling and sense-making. In our entanglements with the pillars, what emerged was a recognition that teachers and students are being invited to “collectively mobilise,” which demands for us as entwined educators/education resource creators to support and enable this in ways that properly account for their lived experience and situational complexities. As response-able agents, the creation of the resource was sensitive to the intellectual demands and tensions that must be traversed (Barad, Reference Barad2007). We made the decision to be responsive to the contextuality of the water[shed] artists, essayists and the teachers we seek to engage and support and attune our storying to interdisciplinary opportunities and curiosities.
In assembling stories, we recognised and sought to value teachers’ agentic capacity to respond with their own curiosities that may be kindled through engaging with the education resource. And so, rather than providing templates or bounded products for teachers and students to “complete,” we offered our own curricular-metho-pedagogically informed professional practice of education resource creation.
At the same time, the pillars guided us towards undertaking a dynamic process through expressed values of “co-construction, collective mobilisation and attending and caring.” In working through UNESCO’s four pillars of education (2021) with the intra-active nature of materiality, we attended to relationships, seeking out and reverberating responsibly and response-ably feedback from the Science Teachers Association, water[shed] artists, essayists, curators, Aboriginal Education Services, artists and academics. We did so with an awareness of the imperative for relational engagement with the water[shed] knowledge makers and holders (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AIATSIS], 2022). This iterative process of drawing in and with relationality is a testament to our genuine readiness to engage with, hear and better understand diverse perspectives, histories and possibilities for the future of Lake Pedder.
The campaign to restore Lake Pedder is a powerful symbol of hope in increasingly troubling times.
The plan to restore Lake Pedder is courageous and visionary.
Education in all forms, across all fronts, has its clarion call, a watershed moment to contribute.
As a gesture of our commitment to contribute to the above, this article offers a rationale and practical approach for demystifying the professional practices that underlie education resource creation. Professionals engaged in the practice of education resource creation can work curatorially in their assemblage of education and conservation agendas and curricular-metho-pedagogical agents to create constellations of ecological perspectives and educative opportunities (MacDonald et al., Reference Mahon2024). The four reworked pillars of education (Sobe, Reference Stacey, Gavin, Fitzgerald, McGrath-Champ and Wilson2021) can help mediate intra-activity between and guide curation of curricula, methodological and pedagogical agents in education resource creation. In making the professional practice of education resource creation transparent, we hope to make it easier for teachers to identify the positional motivations (who, why) and methods (what, how) that underpin the production of education resources they might consider utilising in their classrooms.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank OUTSIDE THE BOX/Earth Arts Rights, the Education Sustainability Learning Centre (Department for Education, Children and Young People), the Australian Association of Environmental Education Tasmania and the Science Teachers Association of Tasmania for generously supporting the production of the water[shed] Education Kit. We also acknowledge and give thanks for the ongoing advocacy efforts of the Restore Lake Pedder campaign.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
The authors are reporting on their process of creating the water[shed] education resource. We are cognisant of the potential this creates to speak favourably in want of promoting the resource. Concurrently, as the people responsible for the resources’ creation, we are best placed to speak to the practice and experience of producing it. To accommodate these co-potentialities (working with this and that), we reflected carefully upon the intra-activity of our personal/professional practices and engagement with the agents explored across the article. At the time of writing this article, Author 1 is seconded to the role of Senior Academic Fellow (Indigenous Exhibition Learning) at the University of Tasmania, working directly with Ngarrngga. Ngarrngga is noted as one of the education resource examples in the front matter of this article.
Ethical standard
Nothing to note.
Author Biographies
Abbey MacDonald is a Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at the University of Tasmania. Her interdisciplinary arts-based research is used to inform arts, cultural and education policy development and museum and gallery education resources. She partners with environmental conservation and social change organisations to tackle some of the most pressing challenges educators face today.
Kim Beasy is a Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Tasmania. Kim centres her work in education for sustainability, and her teaching and research emphasise engaging diverse communities in social, environmental, economic and cultural dimensions of sustainability.
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