Learning within Places through Intergenerational Encounter signposts for an intergenerational place-responsive outdoor education
Greg Mannion University of Stirling, Scotland, UK
Joyce Gilbert Royal Scottish Geographical Society,
Perth, UK

!   What is:
!   Offer theoretical support – 3 premises
!   Look at some issues, tensions, barriers, and consequences

1.
Demographic changes –
40-50% over 50 by 2035; Bean pole families; env. justice, cohesion
2.
Childhood
UN Convention, children as agents, place & upbringing, obesity and health
3.
Learning & Sustainability
Lifelong, lifewide, - museums, workplace, on-line,
New: Partners – Processes – Places – Purposes

Example Project … Journeys in Nature –
SpeyGrian Educational Trust in partnership with RSPB, and local school and community groups. Cairngoms Local Action
Group, SCIP.
REPORT: www.scotcip.org.uk/files/documents/IG_Place-based_Education.pdf

There’s an old guy [in the village] … but always the first question he would ask you was “who’s your father?” And that was him trying to, to work out who you were and where you came from.
Place - Generation – Relations – Learning – Outdoor

100+ pupils, 9 journeys, 2 days, facilitators + locals
Also, cycling, canoeing, walking. Journey foci: natural & social history, legends, shelter, ecology, bushcraft, story

Pupil 1: how much things have changed.
Pupil 2: it makes you look back, and, like … how it was.
Pupil: the lifestyle that we have nowadays is not sustainable.

!   Through intergenerational placeresponsive education activities , the participants , the places , and the relations among them are co-produced.
!   Intergenerational place-responsive education is an open-ended, ethical, embodied, and situated activity that allows for skills, knowledge and values to be gained.
See : Mannion, G., Fenwick, A. and Lynch, J. (2013) Place-responsive Pedagogy: Learning from
Teachers’ Experiences of Excursions in Nature. Environmental Education Research.

What theoretical basis for this definition?
Intergenerational education
(a) involves people from two or more generations participating in a common practice in some place ;
(b) involves different interests across the generations to address the betterment of individual, community, and ecological well-being;
(c) requires a willingness to reciprocally communicate across generational divides with the hope of generating and sharing new intergenerational meanings, practices, and places that are to some degree held in common, and
(d) requires a willingness to be responsive to places and one another in an ongoing manner.
Mannion, G. (2012) Intergenerational Education: the significance of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘place’. In Journal of
Intergenerational Relationships, Vol. 10, No. 4.

(1) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent ,
(2) knowing or learning is an embodied and emplaced response to differences , and
(3) educational communication processes are non-representational.

1
. People and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent
An ontology of becoming
Barad: discursive practice = specific material (re)configurings of the world. All languaging of the world happens in the world and is part of its on-going reconfiguration. Rocks, soil, and people …dymanic and undergoing change.
Ingold: organism environment. … If the concept of the environment is to mean anything at all, it must refer to the interpenetration of organisms. Ingold 2003 p 305
Waterton: landscapes: not static backdrops [but are] fluid and animating processes in a constant state of becoming.
Our precognitive and embodied interactions with them draw us into equally fluid practices and performances.

1
. People and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent
Adult Local: It was giving the children a chance to interact with animals and realise that animals can be trusted and if you, if you are good to them they’ll, they’ll help you, which is what civilisation was built on I suppose.
I
Pupil: It’s like kind of ruining the lifestyle that it used to be.
You think?
I
Pupil: Yeah.
The new houses?
I
Pupil: Yeah.
How does it ruin the lifestyle?
Pupil: We already have enough houses, we don’t need any
more.
Pupil: Cause like new people come in and they’re not like
local.
I Right.
Pupil: So it, they kind of like bring in what they think.

1
. People and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent we “are in a knot of species co-creating each other”.
Haraway (2008, 42)

2. Learning / ( knowing) is an embodied and emplaced response to differences
!
!
!
An onto-epistemology !
We do not socially ‘construct’ nature.
Contexts (like natural places) are now containers.
(Edwards)
Knowing with our bodies in a connected way within the unified field of relations as living organisms
(Ingold)
Learning is on-going creative, active and made possible through intra -activity … within places .
(Barad)
Immediate, direct, emotional, aesthetic experiences.
Reflection is a kind of experience in a place.
(Q&S)
Difference is positive and arises through our connections and relations within and between different bodies, affecting each other and being affected
(H&T) !

2. Learning is an embodied and emplaced response to differences
Handling new materials, smelling pine marten dung, collecting supple willow for basket making, fire lighting, horseriding, wayfinding, shelter building, ..
. Meeting new people from different places and generations

2. Learning is an embodied and emplaced response to differences
Int: Have you any advice for schools elsewhere?
Pupil: Just to get out more and experience your own area. And just to be grateful for what you have compared to other places where they don’t have much at all.
Pupil (a): Yeah.
Pupil (b): Go out and explore your area and other places. Cause it is a lot of fun actually.
Pupil (c): And you learn more about like, like the, I can’t, like the area you live in, you learn more about habitats and all that. And it’s, I like it, it’s really fun.

3. Educational communication processes are non-representational
A performative approach
Requires a Shift …
.. from Representations
… to communicative performances.
… from Transmission and cognitive representation
… to active inhabitation through experiencing , witnessing, evoking, sensing, creating, probing, discovering, performing
… from Conforming
… to transforming and performing
Through perception: we apprehend, transform, and are transformed … Performances are on-going

3. Educational communication processes are non-representational
Pupils (various) Because its our families that used to live here !
people come in and they are not, like, local / They bring in what they think
Facilitator : I think its quite easy to become quite essentialist about sense of place and I find that a bit troubling sometimes
Local : I’ve also got a keen interest in Highland cattle as well. But yes there’s lots of people like me that have interest in different things. And I’m sure they could all contribute. […] And a lot of them feel uncomfortable around children nowadays because of all the stuff over child protection and everything.
Pupil : just anybody who lives around the area who actually knows something about it should just come in and teach it a bit.
Teacher : I’ve taught quite a few of them but there’s a few I didn’t know at all. But again it’s just getting to know them better.

3. Educational communication processes are non-representational
Teacher Interviews: "
Int: Hmmm, and how about local people?
T: Well again you’ve got to go through all of the checks.
Int: Yeah.
T: Criminal records and all that type of thing. That takes
time, it takes money as well.
T: You know, and [local] people do come in and they do it.
But it’s finding that slot for them in a way
T: …Just trying to keep up with your workload. To actually have the headspace ‘right how about going to chat to ‘so and so’ and see if they can come in that…’.
Time, timetable, workload, money, staffing, ratios, locals, links to curriculum, exam pressure

(1) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent ,
(2) knowing or learning is an embodied and emplaced response to differences , and
(3) educational communication processes are non-representational.

Socio-Material Contact Zones
School – Community (organisation)
Local – non-local (identity)
Adult – child (generation)
Professional – non-professional (role)
Now – past – future (time)
Indoor – outdoor (place)
Formal – Non-formal (Curriculum)

Involves explicitly teaching by-means-of-an-environment with the aim of understanding and improving human-environment relations .
Involves the intra-activity (Barad 2007) of:
(i)   educators’ dispositions and experiences of place,
(ii)   learners’ dispositions and experiences of place
(iii)   the ongoing contingent events in the place itself (eg activities of other living things).
Involves flexibility, creativity, a recognition of differences found in the ecological and social domains, and the ability to respond to places and the entities found there via the contingent facilitation of pupils’ first-hand experiences. (Mannion 2012)
Requires some new kinds of place-based encounters :
“The concept of the contact zone (Pratt, 1992) [for] the intersection of culturally different and often contested stories of place. [Includes] place stories of differently classed and ethnic communities, and of different religious, gendered, and sexually oriented collectivities.” (Somerville 2011, p6)

What would schooling look like if it was further informed by working on intergenerational relations and harnessing places as contact zones for learning?