Pedagogies of ecological imagination : thinking with posthuman concepts in outdoor environmental education

Shifting how imagination is attended to, understood, and engaged with pedagogically in outdoor environmental education is the work of this thesis. Imagination as a tool for learning is under-researched but urgently required as educators respond to the ecological precarity of our times. I seek to highlight how imagination can contribute to outdoor environmental education in ways that reconsider relations in a more-thanhuman world, de-centre humans, and trouble human exceptionalism. Consistent with such concerns, I adopt a posthuman approach to map the content and expressions of imagination in a series of pedagogical encounters with pre-service educators and primary school students on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Kooyoora, Australia. In doing so, I reposition the role of imagination from a human phenomenon to one that proliferates the ecological and acts as a transversal force within pedagogical assemblages. By thinking and writing with theory, I explore two modes of imagination, difference through movement and time and collective imaginaries, and suggest these modes of imagination are accessible not only within places and material relations but also through deliberate ways of encountering places. I offer educators elements of practice to enable such encounters, including orienting to ecological imagination, thinking with landscapes in motion, attuning to sensory more-than-human stories, and thinking with difference. Further, I highlight possibilities for critical posthuman driven pedagogies to transform the inevitable accompanying sense of injustice and helplessness towards an affirmative ethic. The significance of this research is that it provides conceptual and practical tools to think with posthuman theories that generate pedagogies of ecological imagination to effectively respond to our times.