Embodying pedagogista

This chapter describes the research practice that produced this thesis by drawing on

methodological thought that aligns with the concern for practice-oriented research in critical

environmental education studies. It includes a description of two interconnected yet distinct roles of researcher and educator. These interconnected roles that make up the educational research practice also align with a paradigm of research which explicitly acknowledges my active role in the research process and the way in which research practices do not simply observe and describe but also “produce realities” (Law, 2004, p. 13). The challenge in this regard becomes about embodying both roles, and their interconnections but also honouring the value of critical distance or differentiation between them.

Part of the work in this thesis has been navigating and working reflexively with my role as an educator and researcher in a generative research project. The role of the researcher has been produced in the university system is a problematic. I arrived at this thesis with an awareness of (and intention not to become) researcher as the agent of the coloniser (Mamdani, 2011), the neoliberal exploiter, the masculinist abstractor (Michelson, 2015), the structural

asymmetries between researchers and their participants, which is at the very least defined by the privilege of access to university facilities and could be more in terms of other axes of difference (Nagar, 2014). Becoming familiar with these debates, I found myself lodged and stuck between multitudes of critique and loud status quo researcher positions, without the ability to enact different practices.

Transgressive research practice calls upon researchers to move with the critique of the potential challenges of the researcher role towards creation of re-invented roles. This goes together with research that is interested in resisting the power hierarchies created by knowledge production and harnessing the practice of research for emancipatory goals.

Scholar activists argue that there are research practices which can enact situated solidarities (Routledge and Derickson, 2015) which we could think about as a withness that is directed towards the common good. Similarly, scholar activists working in environmental justice argue that reflecting and reinventing the researcher role is crucial for engaged, critical, radical or transgressive research which resists dominant and predefined roles in dominant forms of knowledge production (Temper, McGarry and Weber, 2019). This resonates with argument of Sayed et al. (2017, p. 61) writing in the context of teacher education where to “decolonise ... can be understood as a challenge to give expression to an imaginary beyond existing thought and institutions that have become normalised as unchanging and unchangeable”. I needed a way to enact the changeability and realise the possibility of transformative potential in research practice. I wanted to be more humble, more attuned, less abstracted than the

‘better knowing academic’ and I needed to have time to read and think within the big

influencers of thought (the scholarship). Thus, situating research practice and allowing ourselves to enact new roles that are responsive to the ethical intent of our research, is critical work to moving this research along with ethical integrity and in better solidarity with the world.

My interest in being engaged and in solidarity with those active and affected in our education system found itself a role in the pedagogista as defined in the Reggio Emelia approach (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014; Murris, Reynolds and Peers, 2018; Nxumalo, Vintimilla and Nelson, 2018). A pedagogista is a supporter of teaching and learning whose task was to integrate the multiple components of an emergent educational system, originating with the Reggio Emelia schools in Italy. This reflexive role has been further imagined by educational researchers in the context of decolonised, anti-racist environmental education in North America (Nxumalo, 2016; Nxumalo, Vintimilla and Nelson, 2018). A pedagogista is:

… someone who works collaboratively with all the protagonists within an

educational endeavour to promote critical and dialogical encounters that consider the specificity of the pedagogical project as well as its relations with the broader

philosophical vision and commitments of the […] learning setting. (Vintimilla, 2016 in Nxumalo, Vintimilla and Nelson, 2018, p. 434)

The role of the pedagogista is located in the image of the child (Filippini and Bonilauri, 1998, p. 128). Pedagogistas are situated in a school and are responsible for holding the school system and integrating its components to foster a broader system of learning, facilitating the learning of teachers, learning about the learning of children. Their job is active reflection, drawing on resources from within and without the school, to support a flourishing school space. Their work with educators relies on multi-dimensional documentation – also known as visible listening – as “children have 100 languages” (Malaguzzi, 1987; Murris, Reynolds and Peers, 2018) and are in the process of constructing knowledge and theories about the world through these. Processes of visible listening are also about fostering curiosity about the child’s learning shifting gear from ‘assessing’ what has been learned and focusing more on what is occurring (Wien, Guyevskey and Berdousis, 2011). Knowing that their observations of learning will be partial, the pedagogistas make traceable inferences that are taken into dialogue with others.

The pedagogista was not an invention from my small field experience; I was tapping into a role that exists within an education system and is inspiring educational thinkers across the

world. Bruner noted that Reggio Emelia schools were ‘a true university’ due to the reflective practice instituted there (Rinaldi and Gandini, 1998, p. 121). I felt the role of the pedagogista captured a practice of educator scholar activist work: a role within an education system whose task it was to begin from the image of the child, reflect on practice and integrate the multiple components of the educational system so that all protagonists might flourish. In this role, I had a firmer ground and purpose from which to continuously reflect on the structures that shape the fieldwork encounters, rather than focus on my own identity, thereby enabling dialogical reflexivity (Routledge and Derickson, 2015, p. 393). In this chapter I describe the movement between and the differentiation of the pedagogista and educator that informs the research practice of this study.

3.1 Map of this chapter

In the first half of this chapter I describe the reflective practice of this PhD in terms of the researcher, pedagogista and educator roles. I draw on recent methodological scholarship in social and educational sciences highlighting why this is a chapter about informed and reflective praxis and more-than-method. In the second section, I embody the educator and talk about two areas of thought that informed the design of my workshops: the arts-based creative practice and emergent curriculum. In the third section, I describe the nature of analysis in this study which is a dialogue between pedagogista and educator.

The next half of the chapter describes the in-the-field processes of access, positionality, data generation and analysis, and ethics. These include: making contact with environmental education organisations, my entry into the primary context of this research, Philippi Cape Town, co-designing the water inquiries and a table which lists the multiple modes of data generated and the tools I drew on to ‘listen’ to and analyse what was emerging. Ethical concerns are woven through these sections and consolidated at the end. The final sections look at integrity and trustworthiness of the study followed by a consolidated discussion of the practices employed to grapple with this study.

FIRST HALF

3.2 ‘Senses of method’: Ways of being and becoming in research practice

My hope is that we can learn to live in a way that is less dependent on the automatic.

To live more in and through slow method, or vulnerable method, or quiet method.

Multiple method. Modest method. Uncertain method. Diverse method. Such are the

senses of method that I hope to see grow in and beyond social science (Law, 2004, p. 11).

Bhaskar’s description of the social world goes straight to the heart of what educational research needs to consider: that ontological phenomena studied in the social sciences are characterised by open systems. An implication of this is that in contrast to positivist⁶ research traditions, the researcher is a part of what they study and the open system is unpredictable and uncontrollable as it is characterised by complexity, constellational and emergence (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 80). However, it is also possible to explain phenomena of the world and know them more fully for the purposes of action. This tension of embracing the complexity of reality and not lazily surrendering the ability to know it, is a productive tension that begins to lay the critical realist ontological ground for generative research.

In the spirit of research practice in an ontology and epistemology characterised by emergence, scholars built a language with which we can think about research. In their thinking about complexity in educational research, Kincheloe and Berry (2004) offered the bricolage approach to research. The term ‘bricoleur’ describes “a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the tools available to complete a task” (Kincheloe, 2000, p. 2) .This idea is applicable to the reality that there are multiple forces shaping researcher choices and thus the research. A bricoleur takes care to be weary of ‘order’ that is promoted in monological reductionist research processes because it is sometimes that order becomes deaf to the

‘cacophony of lived experience’ (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004, p. 5) It is not about rejecting the importance of methods but rather about embracing the “more than method” or the methods assemblage (Law, 2004). Importantly, it is about recognising that methods must be developed in relation to the context.

The methods assemblage and the making of this study is necessarily accompanied by what McGarry has termed “reflective praxis based research” (McGarry, 2013, pp. 47–48).

Reflexivity is the ‘inwardised form’ (Bhaskar, 2008, p. 8) of the third moment in the dialectic – totality - which can be understood as the moment of building a better theory or explanation (further described in Chapter 4). To bring ‘bright ideas’ closer to ‘realities’ we need to build and sustain “practices that can cope with a hinterland of pre-existing social and material realities” (Law, 2004, p. 13). Part of this practice is the sense we make as we go – the

6Positivism I understand as a research approach with an implicit ontology that is assumed to be universal. Its premise is that the only thing that exists is that which can be measured and sensed.

reflexive research. The methods assemblage is located with the school-going learner in South African urban space and their experiences of environmental learning. The assemblage is informed by reflexive educator-researcher practice, arts-based inquiry and Reggio Emelia inspired deep listening to what emerges in our encounters.

3.3 Educator hat: Elements guiding inquiry processes