Ecofeminism ↔ Intraconnectivism: working beyond binaries in environmental education

ABSTRACT

Over the last decades, ecofeminist thought has moved into a ‘fourth stage critical ecofeminism’ (Gaard 2017, xvi), based on an understanding that humans are unavoidably part of a multifaceted and interconnected global ecosystem. This paper suggests that ecofeminist theory and practice can now grow further into a fifth stage: an era of expanded intersectionality that moves beyond the dualisms and hegemonies of neo-liberal patriarchal and colonial capitalist structures that can limit ecofeminist theorizing and material practice. This fifth stage must be based on an amalgamation of engaged theory, education, and activism, grounded in ancient wisdom and with the understanding that all material-discursive phenomena are interconnected. For this next era of ecofeminism, the terms intraconnectivism and intraconnective education (Siegel 2022) are proposed. Intraconnectivism offers a bridge that connects past theoretical frameworks with ecofeminist presents. It can build a helpful theoretical pathway through and amongst the non-dualistic educational pedagogies that are needed at this time, as well as expand understanding of the role that gender and other identities can play in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecofeminism
• education
• environmental education
• intraconnectivism
• interaconnective education

Introduction

There is no lack of eco-justice issues to interrogate, theorize, organize around, and transform using the analyses of an ecological feminism … an intersectional ecological-feminist approach frames these issues in such a way that people can recognize common cause across the boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species, age, ability, nation – and affords a basis for engaged theory, education, and activism. (Gaard 2017, 44)

Greta Gaard (2017, xvi) suggests that over the last decades, ecofeminist thought has moved into a ‘fourth stage critical ecofeminism’. The basis of this critical ecofeminism is an understanding that humans are unavoidably part of a multifaceted and interconnected global ecosystem and that the continued anthropocentric trajectory of seeing the world through solely human eyes ‘should be understood as forms of violence that will damage these systems’ (Hatten-Flisher and Martusewicz 2018, 4). This grounding in intersectionality, described as the ‘methodology of recognising the interconnection of all discrimination’ (Kings 2017, 64), is an integral and defining characteristic of critical ecofeminism. Has ecofeminist theory thus arrived at its pinnacle, with this aspiration to interconnect all issues of justice that exist on the planet at this time? I suggest that ecofeminist theory and practice can grow further into a fifth stage: an era of expanded intersectionality that moves beyond the dualisms and hegemonies of neo-liberal patriarchal and colonial capitalist structures that have limited ecofeminist theorizing and material practice. This fifth stage must be an era of exploration and entanglement at the ‘convergence of scholarship and embodied experiences’ (Gaard 2017, xxii); an era based on the above-mentioned amalgamation of engaged theory, education, activism with understandings of ancient wisdom and the interconnectedness of all phenomena.

The entanglements of a fifth stage ecofeminism are not only the horizontally webbed interconnections of eco-justice issues amongst humans and more-than-humans; they are also the four-dimensional¹ phenomena of the material-discursive world that include the non-material forms of education and activism. Posthumanist and material feminist theories suggest that attempting to look beyond the individual human towards multi-species and material collectives may hold a key to meeting current global challenges, as ‘new posthuman philosophical approaches generated within the scholarly activity of the Anthropocene offer a radical re-thinking of the relationship between the human subject and the world’ (Somerville 2017, 18). This fifth stage era of ecofeminism is therefore based on a deep and sustained recognition that absolutely everything is entangled (Barad 2007). Barad’s notion of intra-action describes the ‘mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ (Barad 2007, 33) and contends that these agencies only arise as a result of these entanglements – they do not exist as independent entities. In Barad’s words:

Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future. (Barad 2007, ix)

Once we understand our world as coming into being through intra-actions, we also understand that the term ‘ecofeminism’, with its strong etymological focus on the ecological and the gendered, only partially serves – especially when considering education. For this fifth stage of ecofeminist theory, I thus offer the terms intraconnectivism and intraconnective education (Siegel 2022).

Intraconnectivist theory, thinking, and practice are defined firstly by its grounding in material-discursive intra-actions (Barad 2007) amongst the theorist/s, thinker/s, and practitioner/s, the stories, theories or actions enacted, and the timespace continuum of both the material and the non-material world (Siegel 2022). At its core, intraconnectivism is trans-disciplinary, trans-temporal and acknowledging of all ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad 2007) understandings of intraconnectedness (especially but not only First Nations understandings). Gough and Whitehouse (2020, 4) rightfully caution against a ‘historical amnesia’ in which ‘genealogical connections’ are ignored or forgotten; however, intraconnectivism offers a bridge or webbing that connects past theoretical frameworks that have contributed to ecofeminist presents. It co-generates futures and acknowledges purposeful complicity in emergence. It can offer a helpful theoretical pathway through and amongst the educational pedagogies that are crucial to develop at this time, as well as expanded understanding of the role that gender and other identities can play in education.

This paper unpacks the potentialities of intraconnectivist thinking, by first exploring the historical and present entanglements of ecofeminist theory and practice with minority-world² environmental education, before analyzing how a movement into intraconnective education can offer an interesting and useful pedagogical framework in this time of what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls ‘The Great Turning’ (Macy and Brown 2014, 5).

The nexus of ecofeminism and environmental education

As Gough, Russell, and Whitehouse (2017, 5) point out, over the past decades ‘a small group of environmental education scholars have attended to gender and promoted feminist theories and methodologies … . historically, this scholarship has remained somewhat on the margins of the field … .’. Although perhaps marginal, the thinking and writing on this topic have been thoughtful and important, and, as could be expected, much of it has been interconnected. In one of the earliest articles about the intersection between feminism and environmental education, Di Chiro (1987) started the conversation by pointing out that since environmental education is focused on problem-solving, feminist theory could potentially offer the field more thorough investigatory possibilities for the environmental issues that need solving. She theorized that applying a feminist analysis to environmental education research and pedagogies could be a crucial tool to gain a ‘greater understanding of the underlying causes of environmental problems and hence to move towards the goal of creating an appropriate educational context to aid in their resolution’ (Di Chiro 1987, 15).

In the interest of understanding these ‘underlying causes’, it is helpful to invite in the thinking of Val Plumwood who, in her seminal work Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), examines the history of the dualism between nature and culture (which she calls ‘reason’) that underpins the exploitation of both women and the natural environment. Plumwood contends that both women and nature can be seen ‘as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the “environment” or invisible background conditions against which the “foreground” achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the white, western, male expert or entrepreneur) take place’ (Plumwood 1993, 4). In this case, dualism is understood to be more than just otherness; she points out that the ingrained dualisms in many or even most minority-world cultures/politics/philosophies infer a relationship based on power imbalance. Plumwood (1993, 26) terms this the ‘master model’ and asserts that ‘in dualistic construction … the qualities (actual or supposed), the culture, the values and the areas of life associated with the dualized other are systematically and pervasively constructed and depicted as inferior’ (Plumwood 1993, 47, emphasis added). The understanding is that it is this feature of dualism, in which one entity is always already inferior to the other, that leads to the hegemonic continuation of societal norms and values in which both female and nature are seen as lesser.

Building on the arguments of Plumwood and others, Gough and Whitehouse (2003, 38), in an early analysis of environmental education research from a feminist-poststructuralist perspective, wondered how innovatory environmental education can actually be if it continues to dwell within the ‘powerful binary discourses holding a “humanised identity” firmly in place’. Fifteen years later, they offered a different analysis of environmental education, this time from a new materialist perspective, including a comprehensive overview of the potential offered by expanding ecofeminist thinking more strongly into materiality (Gough and Whitehouse 2018), which aligns clearly with Gaard’s critical ecofeminism (2017). They maintained their original argument, however, that ‘by refusing to separate “culture” from “nature” we are able to destabilize the culture/nature binary and develop further ethical and political positions to contend with the ecological realities we are now facing’ (Gough and Whitehouse 2018, 4; see also discussion in Hart and Gough 2020).

The ongoing dualism in environmental and feminist theory and movements often manifests as a binary between the ideas of care and justice (Estévez-Saá and Lorenzo-Modia 2018). Adams and Gruen (2021, 2) point out that although these two concepts can co-exist as complementary, they have more often been juxtaposed in a binary way, in which women’s ‘responsibilities and motivations were seen as a matter of justice OR as a function of our capacities to care’. Like Plumwood, they posit that ecofeminist thinking is important in its recognition of ‘dualistic thinking (that creates inferior others and upholds certain forms of privilege as in the human/animal, man/woman, culture/nature, mind/body dualism) as one of the factors that undergird oppression and distort our relationships with the earth and other animals’ (Adams and Gruen 2021, 2).

In an attempt to think of a world beyond dualisms, Harvester and Blenkinsop (2010, 125) suggest that not only environmental education but indeed every aspect of traditional forms of education should be analyzed and questioned in order to ‘dismantle the social and conceptual structures that support the logic of domination’ which includes the domination of the nonhuman world. They also theorize that an ecofeminist framework could help environmental educators situate the crucial but challenging work of transforming current dominant structures in a theoretical grounding that questions anthropocentric privileging. There is no doubt that gazing through an ecofeminist lens could sharpen the focus more clearly on the societal factors that influence and create (or prevent) collective change, and illuminate how these factors ‘influence the commitments of gendered people participating in green enterprises in private and public spheres’ (MacGregor 2021, 42).

As mentioned in the introduction, Gaard (2017, 32) clearly positions current ecofeminist thinking as a centre point of contemporary critical thinking, and declares its ongoing usefulness to the ever-deepening discourse around the ‘intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, species, and nation in a postcolonial, posthumanist framework’. Ecofeminism, however, is only one in a spectrum of necessary intersectional ‘alternative knowledges’ (Maina-Okori, Koushik, and Wilson 2018, 289), such as queer pedagogies, Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives, and biocentric ethics. As Di Chiro (2021, 825) suggests (nearly four decades after her initial writing about the intersection of environmentalism and feminism), ‘we are seeing more expansive and critical forms of “intersectional environmentalism” gaining traction every day’. Anti-racist, anti/decolonial, abolitionist, anti-ableist, and environmental justice movements are included in this intersectional environmentalism.

In summary, while it is true that the history, theory and practice of ecofeminism are multifaceted as described above, its entanglement with factors beyond gender and environmentalism must also be recognized in building new pathways for environmental education. It is to this task we now turn by exploring the historical development of the field of environmental education into the current potentialities of intraconnective education.

Environmental education → intraconnective education

A significant development in the field of modern environmental education was the movement towards education for the environment, rather than focusing only on education in or about the environment, as had been practiced traditionally (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 2019; Jickling and Spork 1998). The support for the idea of education for the environment emerged from the Tbilisi Declaration, formulated at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in 1977 (UNESCO 1977), and aspired to an international culture of environmental education that would include teaching towards pro-environmental behaviours, ethics, and lifelong learning. Years later, many in the field of environmental education are still entrenched in the pedagogies and practices of education in and about the environment (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 2019). There is no argument that this is indeed sometimes a necessary starting place for environmental education, depending on resources available, the mandates of external curricular frameworks, or local cultures and environmental engagement. It can also be argued that education for environment pedagogies and practice has not always been widely understood or accepted, and has not made great inroads into educational frameworks and practice in general (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 2019).

While education in, about and for the environment (Fien 1993) are all still important and useful modes of environmental education that will and should be continually developed and enacted in various settings, it is perhaps time now to turn our gaze more wholeheartedly towards education as the environment. Education as the environment is theoretically grounded in the understanding that all beings, including humans, are always already individually and collectively entangled in their environment, and that this entanglement is the result of the causes and conditions of the particular spacetimemattering and the apparatuses through which the entanglement is enacted (Barad 2007; Bodhi 2005). This is ontologically grounded in an understanding that ‘we are a part of, not apart from, our environment’ (Poelina et al. 2022, 398). While this knowledge has clearly been passed down over thousands of years of First Nations culture in Australia and globally (Bawaka Country et al. 2023), there also exist various minority-world educational pedagogies, along with previously discussed ecofeminist-based pedagogies, that share some of this understanding already. Some examples include: common world pedagogies (Taylor 2017), socio-ecological pedagogies (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 2020), and posthuman pedagogies (Malone, Tesar, and Arndt 2020), which all decentre humans and privilege collectivity. However, because of the particular understanding of non-linearity and agential potentiality that is necessary for this particular time on the planet, I suggest the term intraconnective education as an appropriate moniker for education as the environment. Intraconnective education specifically offers to engage in pedagogies that look beyond the standard binaries towards an inclusive, equitable, and balanced environmental education.

There are ‘endless possibilities that await our imagination and political will’ (Harvester and Blenkinsop 2010, 131) that will support us in transforming current educational structures into a new way of being that is both balanced and connected. Intraconnectivism, especially when applied to environmental education, offers one such possibility. Intraconnective education can first and foremost help address the binary thought and practice that is so ingrained in our present day Western/minority-world society (Adam et al. 2020) with regard to gender and most other issues of social and environmental justice, as discussed in the previous section of this paper. Secondly, intraconnective educational practice and theory can act as an important grounding for interdisciplinary education. Thinking, teaching, and researching through interdisciplinary paradigms is of utmost importance in a world full of complex problems, (Wattchow et al. 2013). Thinking and acting through an intraconnective educational lens can also help educators to critically question and reflect on thoughts, actions, and practice. Privileging the concepts of entanglements and intra-connections (Barad 2007) can assist in understanding the complexities that face us on the planet currently. Finally, intraconnective education helps to expand the concept of agency to the ‘potential that always already exists in an entity, both human and nonhuman – rather than something that needs to be received or obtained from outside sources’ (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020, 231). This potential is available in an infinite myriad of forms and circumstances, regardless of gender, race, or class, and understanding the implications of this agential potential is key to designing educational practice. How can this work in real life? These ideas will be expanded on throughout the second half of this paper.

Intraconnective education as a pedagogy for these times

Both ecofeminist theory and environmental education are grounded in the understanding that (minority-world) human behaviour, structures, and consciousness must change in order to meet the challenges of these times. Macy and Brown (2014, 4) offer a helpful reconceptualization of the types of pro-environmental behaviours needed in order to make these changes and ‘bring our lifestyles and consumption into harmony with the living systems of Earth’. They contend that there are three dimensions or types of such behaviours: holding actions to stop immediate environmental damage; structural transformations of society’s commons (e.g. economics, food and energy supply); and activities that shift consciousness and values (Figure 1). These behaviours do not need to exist in isolation; rather, they complement and reinforce each other. Furthermore, ‘beginning at one naturally leads into either of the others’ (Macy and Johnstone 2012, 27).

Figure 1. Three dimensions of environmental activism (Macy and Brown 2014).

All three of these dimensions are fundamental in helping to create and educate towards a life-sustaining society and world. They are not enacted exclusively by each other. They are situational but not always temporal; individual or collective efforts may be focused on one dimension of actions for a period of time, or two or three of the dimensions may be enacted at once. Thinking through the lenses of these three dimensions results in some clear ideas for intraconnective pedagogies and practices that can be enacted in large and small ways.

Holding actions

As previously discussed, intraconnective education is based on the fundamental idea that humans are a part of the earth, not individual entities that can function independently of our collective responsibilities (Braidotti 2017). We must therefore educate accordingly. Ecofeminist thinking has always been grounded in political thinking (Foster 2021); however, the field of environmental education has, in many cases, traditionally shied away from making political statements or explicitly teaching about or for specific positions or issues (Gough 2021b). Through intraconnective education, the time has now come to become bolder. As Orr (2020) articulates, avoiding teaching about the politics of environmental issues and education is already a political stance in and of itself; it is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current political and economic systems. It is clear that minority-world environmental education, in its attempt to squeeze itself into the scaffolding that the neo-liberal educational structure has built for it, has acquiesced to the politics of neo-liberalism (Hursh, Henderson, and Greenwood 2015). This is hardly surprising, but signs are promising that with the more recent turn towards a renewed interest in ecofeminist and material feminist thinking, there is ‘potential to reinvigorate an environmentalism that has failed to counter mass disillusionment and the rise of populism’ (MacGregor 2021, 44). Intraconnective education can help to break down that scaffolding and through that disillusionment by declaring its true interest and purpose: to offer education in the name of interdependency, balance, and diversity, rather than infinite growth and rampant individualism. Educating towards the understanding that we too are the environment and that everything that happens on this planet is intricately interconnected (Haraway 2016) is crucial. As Jukes, Clarke, and Mcphie (2021, 9) observe:

There is no nature to save, but a more equitable future we can make. So in the midst, and on the wake, of continual disturbance we can compose a new liveable future … and maybe this is something that environmental education and environmental education research can do?

What does this look like in practice with regards to holding actions, or learning that will help halt or mitigate the damage that is being done? Intraconnective education invites environmental education as a discipline to first and foremost become clearer and more intentional in its public statements and stances (Orr 2020). The peak bodies’ mission statements must reflect the intention to meet the complex and immediate challenges that face the planet. For instance, the vision statement of the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) is ‘To connect through education to advance understandings and actions in relation to environmental and sustainability issues across all communities and education sectors’ (Australian Association for Environmental Education 2020). While the connection is obviously a good start, it could be developed into a more relevant and compelling vision statement such as ‘To connect and act both individually and collectively through intra-connective education to advance understandings and actions about the complex and interconnected environmental and sustainability issues that present deep and urgent collective challenges across all communities and education sectors.’

Secondly, when children and young people make it publicly clear that they understand global interconnectedness and that their main demand is to live on a life-sustaining planet (Holmberg and Alvinius 2020; Nissen, Wong, and Carlton 2021; Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles 2020), educators must overcome their apolitical stances to make it clear that this demand should be supported wholeheartedly, and then act to support the students publicly and clearly. That may manifest as public statements of support, mentoring, or organizational support. It should also include education praxis and research that is disruptive and defies a status quo mentality (Gough 2021a). Redesigning tertiary teacher education degrees and programmes so that environmental education – or better yet, intraconnective education – is a mandatory and core learning area for pre-service teachers is one place to start.³ Adapting the Australian Curriculum so that the Cross Curricular Priority of ‘Sustainability’ becomes a ‘Cross Curricular Requirement’ is another necessity. As Barnes, Moore, and Almeida (2019, 380–381) observe,

while the “idea” of prioritizing a particular learning area by making it transdisciplinary is admirable, the realization of a particular learning area, such as Sustainability, within other learning areas assumes that the enactors of curriculum (e.g. school leaders, teachers, students) see its value and importance.

That assumption is not always correct for a variety of reasons (Gough 2016; Hill and Dyment 2016), and as state and national curricula get more crowded and complex, environmental education/Education for Sustainability needs to be foregrounded instead of seen as an optional activity.

Thirdly, educational pedagogies and activities from early childhood through adulthood must actively emphasize collective inter-learning and intra-learning. Intraconnective education prioritizes collective learning and action by actively building and supporting entangled experiences of all types (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020), as well as designing experiences that support the learning of necessary group work skills and strategies. As Vandana Shiva (as cited in Gallay et al. 2020, 2) posits, ‘concepts such as the commons, interdependence, and collective action, are central to civic and environmental understanding’. Holding actions in this case means that the prioritizing and privileging of individual environmental action as the most useful and important forms of pro-environmental behaviour are reversed, so as to move clearly towards the privileging of collective action learning and action (Siegel, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, and Bellert 2018).

As mentioned above, educating towards holding actions alone is not sufficient; the next dimension discussed includes education towards transforming key societal structures.

Actions for structural transformation

Educating towards structural transformation is another dimension of intraconnective education. Some of the pedagogies and teaching practices that are commonly cited when describing environmental education are indeed efforts already implicitly aimed at structural transformation. Gough (2016) provides an example with her description of Sustainable Schools that are geared towards creating sustainable school cultures and practice overall; other examples are recycling and waste reduction education which ultimately aims to restructure how humans deal with the vast quantities of waste we produce (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel 2019) and kitchen garden and food foraging projects that attempt to break the chain of mass agricultural food production and processing and build new (old?) ways of feeding ourselves (Bergan et al. 2021; Zuiker and Riske 2021). While the goals of these forms of environmental education (education about and for the environment) are admirable, the means to achieve those goals must be reconsidered. Rather than educational pedagogies based on knowledge transference and capacity building, which is often the basis for education about and for the environment, environmental education pedagogies must continue to develop their enactments of material-discursive intraconnectedness and collectivity. It is then that they transform into intraconnective education pedagogies.

One example that illustrates the enactment of this possibility is included in a chapter previously co-authored by this author titled A Critical Cartography of Waste Education in Australia: Turning to a Post-humanist Framing (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel 2019), where, in a section entitled ‘A waste pedagogy without the waste’, we write:

Firstly, let us trouble the word waste, based on the Latin vastus meaning empty or desolate. Arguably, this is a word based firmly in a humanist outlook. Humans have invented the idea of empty, whereas in the other-than-human world (or more-than-human world) true emptiness is hard to find. By way of simple example, an ‘empty’ bowl is actually full of air. Humans⁴ have also invented the idea of waste, and have now taken it to the extreme … In the natural world, there is no such thing as waste. Fallen leaves, bird droppings, dead insects are not ‘waste’; they are end products of natural phenomena that eventually becomes part of the humus of the forest floor that then nourishes new plant life … . How can we have waste education pedagogies without waste? There are modes of thinking about the environment that does not put human activity necessarily at the centre, and we suggest that waste education should move towards embracing what can be termed a posthumanist framing.

There are three key ideas from this posthumanist waste education pedagogy that can usefully be applied to intraconnective education in general. The first core concept is that the foundational goal of educational praxis should be for students to learn ‘how everything in nature is interconnected and entangled’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel 2019, 217). The second core concept suggests that once this interconnectedness is understood, deep investigation into the materiality of the focus of the study is crucial. The third core concept is that it is necessary to trouble the dominant capitalist paradigm that privileges the individual over the collective, and to strongly question the idea that the individual is responsible for ‘saving the planet’. As Hird (2013) observes, the reigning emphasis on individual responsibility and ‘the presumption that the world can be contained and controlled by human forces’ (120) has resulted in the current ‘stewardship approach to environmental issues where humans are positioned as the heroic saviours of the earth’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Siegel 2019, 217). Educational design and practices that follow these three intraconnective concepts will help the discipline (and society as a whole) move beyond this stewardship paradigm into structural transformation.

The first two dimensions of intraconnective education are outward oriented – both holding actions and structural change include learning about and engaging in positive change in the world. The third dimension focuses on inner learning and change as an individual but also, just as importantly, as a collective. The next section explores this dimension.

Actions for shifting consciousness

The third dimension of Macy and Brown’s (2014) pro-environmental actions is that of shifting consciousness or transforming ingrained thoughts and habits. This dimension is primarily about our ethical entanglements in the world, which should arguably be considered foundational to all educational pedagogies and practice; as Barad (2007, 391) points out, ‘ethics grounds human experience (not the other way around)’. Ethical behaviour, at its core, is about enacting response-ability (Haraway 2016) within all the relationalities and entanglements of our lives, and it has never been more important to ‘invent forms of ethical relations, norms and values worthy of the complexity of our times’ (Braidotti 2013, 186). First Nations ways of knowing (Kimmerer 2013; Yunkaporta 2019), and theoretical paradigms such as Barad’s (2007) agential realism and Buddhist concepts of mutual causality (Macy 1991; Siegel 2022), indeed ground intraconnective education in solid ethicalities through their insistence on relationality and response-ability.

It is important to note here that the entanglement of ethics with intraconnective thinking is a much older understanding than the last fifty years of eco-feminist theory and minority-world environmental education theories. Indigenous worldviews in general, and traditional ecological knowledges (TEK) specifically, are living examples of intraconnective frameworks. In writing about Indigenous ‘philosophical ecologies’, Deborah Bird Rose (2005, 303) describes how, in Australian First Nations ways of knowing:

Rather than humans deciding autonomously to act in the world, humans are called into action by the world. The result is that Country, or nature, far from being an object to be acted upon, is a self-organising system that brings people and other living things into being, into action, into sentience itself. The connections between and among living things … thus constitute Law in the metaphysical sense of the given conditions of the created world.

This core understanding of ethical interconnectedness does not exist only in Australian First Nations worldviews – indeed it is a common metaphysical framework of many First Nations cultures around the world (Kimmerer 2013; Yunkaporta 2019). It is clear that the roots of agential realism and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, to be discussed shortly, intra-connectively trace back to the deep and abiding understanding of First Nations worldviews. It is important that we as educators continue to acknowledge and pay our respects to these cultures, their knowledge holders, and the lineage of stories from over thousands of years.

In a previous paper about the relevance of agential realism to environmental education (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020), we suggested that agential realist theory, with its attendant grounding in issues of justice (Barad 2017; Barad and Gandorfer 2021), is not only applicable but highly relevant to developing an intraconnective environmental education. In particular, we identified four reasons why agential realist theory could/should be applied to environmental education. These same four reasons can explain why intraconnective education in general (including but not limited to the application of agential realist theory) is so crucial to the shifting of consciousness necessary in current environmental education frameworks and systems.

The theory of agential realism recognizes that all phenomena are entangled and that these entanglements result in dynamic agencies and potentialities (Barad 2007); it is an ‘entangling theory-practice affair’ (Murris 2022, 2, emphasis in the original). This is reflected in the core definition of intraconnective education (Siegel 2022). Thinking through agential realist theory, intraconnective education can therefore help address the binary thought and practice that is so ingrained in our present day Western/minority-world society (Adam et al. 2020). As discussed in the first half of this paper, these hegemonic binary discourses ‘extend their reach into all aspects of educational practice, forming limited and limiting ideas and stories of human versus nature, male versus female, black versus white, and mind versus body' (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020, 279). Intraconnective educational practices that are based on the understanding that phenomena are not either/or, but rather lie somewhere on a moving spectrum of potentialities, can support the shift away from binary thinking.

Secondly, intraconnective educational theory acts as an important grounding for an interdisciplinary educational paradigm. As Wattchow et al. (2013, 207) state, ‘the world badly needs citizens who can see and work in inter-disciplinary ways’. Instead of the separate discipline learning methodologies that are currently practised, ‘we could consider all learning as always already an intra-connected whole’ (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020, 230). Although there are some nods to interdisciplinarity via the Cross-Curricular Priorities in the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority [ACARA] n.d.) interdisciplinary learning must be foregrounded as a matter of urgency. After all, ‘through fracturing the segregations and separations established in traditional single disciplinary approaches, learning can be grounded in real-life situations through intra-actions with all agential beings’ (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020, 230). This enacts an ethics of inclusivity that can be embodied through intraconnective education.

Thirdly, intraconnective education is relevant to this dimension of shifting consciousness in that it expands the definition of agency ‘as potential that always already exists in an entity, both human and nonhuman – rather than something that needs to be received or obtained from outside sources’ (Brown, Siegel, and Blom 2020, 231). Enacting potentiality in response-ability is a core component of intraconnective education, and understanding that this potential is available in an infinite myriad of forms and circumstances is key to designing educational practice. This definition of agency is also expanded to include more-than-human entities, with the understanding that it is not only humans who can enact pro-environmental behaviours. There are of course other developing fields outside of education that are based on the understanding of non-human agency; for example, biomimetic theory and praxis (Fisch 2017, 807) recognizes a ‘relational ecology of human and nonhuman actors’. Intraconnective educational praxis and theory offer the field of education the potential to move out of the anthropocentric inner circle into a wider field of entanglement.

The fourth reason that intraconnective education can help shift consciousness is that it can help students to critically question and reflect on their thoughts, actions, and practice. Privileging the concept of entanglements and intraconnections can assist in understanding the ethical complexities that face humans on the planet in general, and in education more particularly. These four points summarize the potentialities that agential realist and intra-connective thinking can offer towards shifting consciousness and transforming thought into true intraconnective praxis.

Other metaphysical theories such as Buddhist philosophy can also offer potentialities in the quest for shifting consciousness in environmental education through the ideas of mutual causality and dependent origination (Macy 1991), as well as other concepts that are helpful in moving towards ethical ways of being in the world. One particularly useful concept is eco-Buddhist scholar Thich Nhat Hanh’s (2008, 82) concept of interbeing:

There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us, from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean to a movement of a galaxy millions of light years away. All phenomena are interdependent. When we think of a speck of dust, or a flower, or a human being, our thinking cannot break loose from the idea of self, of a solid, permanent thing. We see a line drawn between one and many, this and that. When we truly realize the interdependent nature of the dust, the flower, and the human being, we see that unity cannot exist without diversity. Unity and diversity interpenetrate each other freely. Unity is diversity, and diversity is unity. This is the principle of interbeing.

This description of interbeing is not a hard one to understand; its simplicity, clarity, and applicability to everyday existence would make it a useful tool to apply as part of any intraconnective educational experience, for any age from small children to adults, that helps move towards a shifting of consciousness.

Holding actions, actions for structural transformation, and actions of shifting consciousness: as all of these actions are woven into the theories and pedagogies of environmental education, a clearer picture of intraconnective education emerges.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this paper, I suggested that the time is ripe for ecofeminism to move towards a ‘fifth stage’ of expanded intersectionality, based on engaged theory, education, and activism. Phillips and Bunda (2018, 61) argue that ‘storying intersects the past and present as living oral archives’ and, in this case, it is crucial to move away from the past story of ecofeminism as a limited, essentialist movement (Piersol and Timmerman 2017; Foster 2021) into a new story of intraconnectivism. This story of intraconnectivism is a story where ‘individuals no longer float free of discourse, or morality, or the earth; they are epistemologically, ontologically, and ethically entangled with each other and with the matter of the earth’ (Davies 2021, 132). Of course, this is an aspirational story, as we clearly live in troubled times where individuals are classified and mistreated according to gender, sexuality, race, class, and more. Ecofeminist thinking and action continue to support the fight for systemic change (Gough and Whitehouse 2021) and as such, will always be a crucial theoretical framework to continue to work through and support. Moving towards that aspirational story, however, requires additional ways of thinking, being, and acting – and that is exactly what intraconnectivism, and intraconnective education, can offer not only the field of environmental education but all fields of education that are grounded in social and ecological justice.

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Lisa Siegel

Lisa teaches environmental education, interdisciplinary education, and philosophies of education at Southern Cross University, where she is also a researcher in the Sustainability, Environmental, and Arts Education (SEAE) Research Centre. She is a passionate environmental educator with over 30 years of experience in developing and facilitating educational experiences for children, young people, and adults. She is a founder and board member of the not-for-profit Centre for Ecological Learning on Gumbaynggirr Country in Bellingen, NSW, Australia, and has recently been elected as national president of the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE).

Notes

1 I include time as the fourth dimension.

2 For an explanation of the term minority/majority world, see Akpovo, Nganga, and Acharya (2018) who explain that the term minority-world is used to describe ‘wealthier regions of the globe, which constitutes a small percentage of the world population, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The term majority-world can replace the term third world, as this term constructs a discourse about third-world countries being less developed’ (202).

3 Some important discussion around teacher education in relation to environmental education was had during the design and initial implementation stages of the Australian Curriculum (see Cutter-Mackenzie, Clarke, and Smith 2008; Smith, Collier, and Storey 2011; Wilson 2012; Mills and Tomas 2013), and the issue has been addressed subsequently by a number of researchers (see especially Dyment and Hill 2015; Evans et al. 2017; Ferreira et al. 2019; Gough and Gough 2022); however, this discussion needs to be foregrounded more strongly in the current milieu.

4 Since this book chapter was written, it has been brought to my attention that not ALL humans have invented the idea of ‘empty’ and ‘waste’; rather these inventions should be attributed to colonizing and extractive human cultures throughout history and in the present.