congress

One week, two confrence-esques

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Creative Commons License photo credit: jnthnhys

I’m in la belle provence for the next seven days attending & presenting at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress and participating in the 10th Seminar in Health and Environmental Education Research (you can read more about the outcomes of the 9th seminar). The congress is during the latter half of the seven days in Montreal and the seminar happens from Thursday May 7th to Sunday May 10th in beautiful Montebello, Quebec (seeing as I’ve never been there, I should reserve the beautiful adjective until after I return).

For the seminar on Environmental Education (EE) research, I’ll be spending time in conversation and thought wondering why, for example, the above photo “screams” environmental education. More than just that, and perhaps more importantly for EE research, if the experience depicted above screams EE, what other kinds of experiences might we be missing as researchers? The theme of the seminar is “Making a Difference” and looks to be focusing on just how we can make the kind of research that gets done under the name of EE make a difference–for the environment, obviously, but also for different populations, including humans as well as non-humans. Think of EE research done in the name of social and environmental justice in addition to strict education about the environment. At least, that’s going to be my M.O. going into it ;) I’ll be pushing the non-human agenda, as is my want; so much so that I’m pleased to be co-facilitating a session titled “How can we move beyond the human?” with Leesa Fawcett, Sue Hamel, Gail Kuhl, Jan Oakley and Traci Warkentin. The whole event should be great food for the brain.

While I wasn’t initially enthused about presenting my research at WEEC via a poster, I’ve come around and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of turning some of my preliminary findings into a poster. Part of the fun is getting to be a bit controversial with the poster–I can put forward some of the more challenging findings, and see how the masses react. It will be interesting to see what kind of reactions, if any, I get from my poster. I do have a provocotive title (Am I being a tease? The poster is titled “Birding ≠ Bird Conservation”) so I’ll see if that gets me in trouble from any birding environmental educators.

I’ll be tweeting the WEEC confrence using the #weec5 hastag. Follow along and add your own voice if you’re going to be in Montreal. Tweeting confrences seems to be de rigeur for tech confrences. We’ll see if anyone in EE is into twittering too.

The abstract I submitted to the 5th World Environmental Education Congress

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Hosted in Montreal next spring, this congress is kind of like the Olympics of the environmental education world: held biennially, it draws together academics and practitioners from around the world. I just submitted an abstract for a paper that is largely based on my dissertation research. Here’s the 250 words-or-less abstract:

Bird-watching remains one of the few ways that people continue to have direct experiences with wild animals; animals which are increasingly recognized as indicators for the overall health of ecosystems worldwide. Birders, as a community of practice, offer an opportunity to investigate how adults engage with non-formal environmental learning about the more-than-human world. With little more than an interest in birds and the right kind of technology, a motivated person has the opportunity to participate in citizen-science projects, the likes of which have been recognized as a source of “good” scientific information about bird populations. Yet, birders are not a heterogeneous group and birding is not a heterogeneous act. Echoing Haraway’s notion of partial perspectives, local knowledge about birds is created within a mediating web of relations. This paper describes the preliminary findings of a qualitative research project, using a modified approach based on grounded theory, which investigates the multiple practices of birding. Looking behind official accounts of birdwatching, the project describes the multiple ways that birds, places, practices and knowledges are produced. Meaningful bird conservation and by extension, a sustainable relationship with the more-than-human will require the committed attention and action of a wide variety of human stakeholders. The results of this research offer an opportunity to examine the varied motivations and behaviours that citizens of our Western society engage with bird life.

We’ll see if it gets a nod…