Ecoportraiture

The Art of Research When Nature Matters

Sean Blenkinsop, Mark Fettes, Laura Piersol, Justin Dillon, Constance Russell

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781433192562
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781433192890
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: History

What changes in education, when it is not just humans whose teaching is sought and acknowledged? And how can educational research be accountable to the voices and agency of such more-than-human teachers, interlocutors, and kin? These have become pressing questions in an era of soaring interest in forest and nature schools, place- and land-based education. Ecoportraiture offers theoretical and practical guidance into an emerging methodology with deep roots in the anti-racist, emancipatory research tradition of portraiture initiated by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis. Bracketed by the editors' wide-ranging introductory essay and a closing critical conversation, five inspiring chapters take readers deep into the thinking and action that characterize ecoportraiture research. Ideal for researchers at all levels who want to explore more deeply how human learning is shaped and informed by the more-than-human, this book also invites a wider audience into the artful practice of close listening to the many voices of the natural world. Ecoportraiture seeks to evoke and to guide journeys of knowing that are both profoundly ecological and profoundly personal. This is an open-ended and transformative methodology: one that is less about finding answers than about asking better questions—about learning to participate more deeply, as student, teacher, parent, community member, and/or co-researcher, in the conversations of the Earth.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Foreword (David W. Jardine)
• 1. Ecoportraiture: Researching in Resonance with the More-Than-Human (Mark Fettes / Sean Blenkinsop / Laura Piersol)
• 2. Relationship, Complexity, Artistry, and Co-Creation in Portraiture Research (Nora Timmerman)
• 3. Getting to Goodness in a Green Schoolyard: Trusting the Process of Ecoportraiture (Kelly E. Keena)
• 4. Developing Ecoportraiture: Lessons from the Caddisfly and other Beings (Laura Piersol)
• 5. Indigenous Knowledge as Voice: Ecoportraiture and Indigenous Ways of Knowing (Sylvie de Grandpré)
• 6. Traversing a Mountain of Data: Ecoportraiture as Critical, Beautiful Risk (Michael Dé Danann Datura)
• Epilogue: Humility, Resilience, Becoming: Ecoportraiture as Conversation (Sean Blenkinsop / Mark Fettes / Laura Piersol)
• Contributors
• Index
• Series index