Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:52:18.598Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WWOOF Ecopedagogy: Linking ‘Doing’ to ‘Learning’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2016

Yoshifumi Nakagawa
Yoshifumi Nakagawa*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Yoshifumi Nakagawa, Monash University, 29 Ancora Imparo Way, Clayton VIC 3800, Australia. Email: yoshifumi.nakagawa@monash.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an increasingly popular form of ecotourism in Australia. An ethnographic study of 10 young adult international tourists was conducted at five rural Victorian WWOOF sites. The objective was to examine the participants’ nature experience. As part of the ethnographic study, this article selectively reports on the ecopedagogy at the WWOOF sites, focusing on the potential linking of spatio-sensory ‘doing’ in the environment and conceptual ‘learning’ about (including from, for, and with) the environment. The WWOOF environment is designed physically, materially, and naturally. These dimensions can be interpreted in overlapping spatial levels. Each spatial level partially correlates with the dominant bodily senses. By analysing the participants’ reflexive accounts of their WWOOF nature experience, this article suggests that their spatio-sensory ‘doing’ contributed to their environmental ‘learning’, which is categorised into three heuristic types. These are called symbolic, transpositional, and transformative. This study empirically and conceptually adds to the literature on experiential environmental learning with a possible ecopedagogical model of incorporating spatialised bodily senses in curriculum design.

Keywords

WWOOFecopedagogyspacesenseenvironmental learning
Type
Feature Articles
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 1 - 17
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ballantyne, R., Packer, J., & Sutherland, L.A. (2011). Visitors’ memories of wildlife tourism: Implications for the design of powerful interpretive experiences. Tourism Management, 32, 770–779.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death (I.H. Grant, Trans.). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bonnett, M. (2013). Self, environment, and education: Normative arisings. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 87–92). New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowers, C.A. (2004). Revitalizing the commons or an individualized approach to planetary citizenship: The choice before us. Educational Studies, 36 (1), 45–58.Google Scholar
Brandt, C.B. (2013). Landscapes as contexts for learning. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 275–283). New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, L.R. (2011). The democracy of objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chawla, L. (2001). Significant life experiences revisited once again: response to vol. 5(4) ‘Five Critical Commentaries on Significant Life Experience Research in Environmental Education’. Environmental Education Research, 7, 451–461.Google Scholar
Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: partial truths. In Clifford, J. & Marcus, G.E. (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cronon, W. (1996). The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In Cronon, W. (Ed.), Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature (pp. 69–90). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Davis, R. (2013). A place for ecopedagogy in community literacy. Community Literacy Journal, 7, 77–91.Google Scholar
Deville, A., & Wearing, S. (2013). WWOOFing tourists: Beaten tracks and transformational paths. In Reisinger, Y. (Ed.), Transformational tourism: Tourist perspectives (pp. 151–168). Oxfordshire: CABI.Google Scholar
Deville, A., Wearing, S., & McDonald, M. (2016). WWOOFing in Australia: Ideas and lessons for a de-commodified sustainability tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 24, 91–113.Google Scholar
Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone.Google Scholar
Fawcett, L. (2009). Feral sociality and (un)natural histories: On nomadic ethics and embodied learning. In McKenzie, M., Hart, P., Bai, H., & Jickling, B. (Eds.), Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education (pp. 227–236). Cresskill: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Fawcett, L. (2013). Three degrees of separation: Accounting for naturecultures in environmental education research. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research in environmental education (pp. 409–417). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fontana, A., & Frey, J.H. (2005). The interview: From neutral stance to political involvement. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 695–728). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.Google Scholar
Gadotti, M. (2011). Adult education as a human right: The Latin American context and the ecopedagogic perspective. International Review of Education, 57, 9–25.Google Scholar
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gilbert, R. (2003). Ecotourism and education for sustainability: A critical approach. International Review for Environmental Strategies, 4 (1), 75–83.Google Scholar
Goralnik, L., Dobson, T., & Nelson, M.P. (2014). Place-based care ethics: A field philosophy pedagogy. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 19, 180–196.Google Scholar
Gruenewald, D.A. (2013). A critical theory of place-conscious education. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 93–100). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Huebner, D. (1987). Curriculum as concern for man's temporality. Theory Into Practice, 26, 324–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hung, R. (2014). In search of ecopedagogy: Emplacing nature in the light of Proust and Thoreau. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46, 1387–1401.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
James, P. (2006). Globalism, nationalism, tribalism: Bringing theory back in. London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jardine, D.W. (2000). ‘Under the tough old stars’: Ecopedagogical essays. Brandon, VT: Solomon Press.Google Scholar
Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, & planetary crisis. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Law, L. (2001). Home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong. Cultural Geographies, 8, 264–283.Google Scholar
Leggo, C., & Sameshima, P. (2014). Starting stories: Fiction and reality in educational research. In Reid, A.D., Hart, E.P., & Peters, M.A. (Eds.), A companion to research in education (pp. 539–548). Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity: Conversation with Philippe Nemo (R.A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Low, K.E.Y. (2005). Ruminations on smell as a sociocultural phenomenon. Current Sociology, 53, 397–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacCannell, D. (1999). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
McIntosh, A.J., & Bonnemann, S.M. (2006). Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF): The alternative farm stay experience? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14, 82–99.Google Scholar
McKenzie, M., & Bieler, A. (2016). Critical education and sociomaterial practice: Narration, place, and the social. New York: Peter Lang.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLaren, P., & Jandrić, P. (2014). Critical revolutionary pedagogy is made by walking: In a world where many worlds coexists. Policy Futures in Education, 12, 805–831.Google Scholar
McNaughton, M.J. (2010). Educational drama in education for sustainable development: Ecopedagogy in action. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 18, 289–308.Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, M.C., & Mair, H. (2015). Organic farm volunteering as a decommodified tourist experience. Tourist Studies, 15, 191–204.Google Scholar
Nakagawa, Y., & Payne, P.G. (2011). Experiencing beach in Australia: Study abroad students' perspectives. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 27, 94–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakagawa, Y., & Payne, P.G. (2015). Critical place as a fluid margin in post-critical environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 21, 149–172.Google Scholar
Nakagawa, Y., & Payne, P.G. (2016). Educational experiences of post-critical non-place. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1242802 Google Scholar
Nowaczek, A.M.K. (2013). The next stage of eco-travel: Facilitating transformation through personal ethics. In Reisinger, Y. (Ed.), Transformation tourism: Tourist perspectives (pp. 169–179). Oxfordshire, UK: Cabi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Payne, P.G. (2005). Lifeworld and textualism: Reassembling the researcher/ed and ‘others’. Environmental Education Research, 11, 413–431.Google Scholar
Payne, P. (2009). Postmodern Oïkos. In McKenzie, M., Hart, P., Bai, H., & Jickling, B. (Eds.), Fields of green: Restoring culture, environment, and education (pp. 309–322). Cresskill: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Payne, P.G. (2013). (Un)timely ecophenomenological framings of environmental education research. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 424–437). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Payne, P.G. (2014). Vagabonding slowly: Ecopedagogy, metaphors, figurations, and nomadic ethics. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 19, 47–69.Google Scholar
Peters, M.A. (2013). Greening the knowledge economy: Ecosophy, ecology, and economy. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 498–506). New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pink, S. (2004). Home truths: Gender, domestic objects and everyday life. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Reid, A., & Payne, P.G. (2013). Handbooks of environmental education research: For further reading and writing. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 529–541). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rickinson, M., Lundholm, C., & Hopwood, N. (2009). Environmental learning: Insights from research into the student experience. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Simmel, G. (1997). Simmel on culture: Selected writings (Frisby, D. & Featherstone, M. Eds.). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Urry, J. (2002). The tourist gaze (Second ed.). London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Walmsley, E. (2005). Race, place and taste: Making identities through sensory experience in Ecuador. Etnofoor, 18, 43–60.Google Scholar
Wals, A.E.J., Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., & Dillon, J. (2013). Tentative directions for environmental education research in uncertain times. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J., & Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research in environmental education (pp. 542–547). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
WWOOF Australia. (2016). Do you want to work on an organic farm? Retrieved from http://www.wwoof.com.au/ Google Scholar
WWOOF International Ltd Association. (2016). Welcome to WWOOF. Retrieved from http://wwoofinternational.org/ Google Scholar
Zeisel, J. (1984). Inquiry by design: Tools for environment-behavior research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar