Phenomenological Deconstruction, Slow Pedagogy, and the Corporeal Turn in Wild Environmental/Outdoor Education

Abstract

A "slow pedagogy of place" in (environmental/outdoor) education has been enacted by the two authors over the past three years in a third year under-graduate semester-long unit named Experiencing the Australian Landscape. An integrated practical and theoretical, de- and reconstruction of fast pedagogies is now needed, we believe, if education is to make a positive contribution to overcoming the ecologically problematic human condition. Experiencing the Australian Landscape fosters an embodied sensory-percep- tual and conceptual-theoretical "sense" or "possibility" of place while assisting its participants to understand the relations of their body and nature, in time and space, as they are experienced phenomenologically. We hope the notion of a slow ecopedagogy prompts a reversal of the precarious prospects for experiential education in schooling and acts as a critique of the "take-away" pedagogies proliferating in education.