Purpose Students and educators are grappling with socioecological crises that deeply affect their communities and everyday lives. Engaging such issues in the context of English Language Arts is particularly relevant in this moment, but instead, educators are increasingly limited by highly prescribed curriculum, effectually minimizing literacies. The purpose of this paper is to learn how educators are mobilizing literacy pedagogies outside classrooms through place-writing and place-walking as critical and relational pedagogies. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 17 educators who had participated in a Summer Writing Institute (SWI) at a western Canadian university, designed to engage teacher-writers in/with issues of place, power and pedagogy. With a focus on diffractive methodologies and what data do, the study takes a post-qualitative approach to practitioner inquiry to better understand teachers’ experiences of place-writing and place-walking in practice. Findings The paper moves to offer four propositions and questions: creating strong and confident communities of meaning-makers who know their voices matter and can make a difference; realizing the relational potential of bodies, affect, place and materiality in language, learning and literacies; changing systems, not kids – creating meaningful experiences outside the classroom and in the community; and moving in and out of complex crises and issues relationally, with respect and proper protocols, over time. Originality/value Responsive to calls for more research on learning outdoors with adolescents, the paper highlights middle and high school examples in a Canadian context. Theory and practice are interwoven through socioecological, decolonial and relational lenses – in part, as educators resist, (re)story and re-imagine neoliberal and neoconservative challenges and constraints.
Honeyford et al. (Fri,) studied this question.