Introduction
We share with our fellow Australians our love for Country, our land and our seas that brings us together and makes our futures inseparable. ( Reference Perkins and Kelly Perkins, 2019 )
For Perkins, who delivered the 2019 Boyer Lectures, the hope is to end the silence relating to Aboriginal sovereignty. We endorse her sentiment, and here is our small story of hope.
At the outset,Footnote 1 we wish to acknowledge the Noongar and all Indigenous custodians of the lands on which we live and work, and pay our respects to their human and more-than-human knowledge carriers past, present and continuing. By way of personal introduction to our research group, we are a social worker, a scientist, a social scientist and a communications professional, and are connected through the common experience of growing up in NoongarFootnote 2 Country, the southwest of Western Australia. Three of our group conducted the empirical research, while the fourth was part of this project at the outset but was overseas during the active phases, so shared in reflecting on the analysis, synthesis and conclusions. We are all environmental educators and university scholar-researchers; two are Noongar language speakers, one being Indigenous to the southwest and three fellow Australians whose ancestors are Indigenous elsewhere.Footnote 3 As a result of this study, each of us is now part of a re-emerging katitjin bidi, learning journey. We will say more about this shortly.
We set out to explore a pedagogy for learners to encounter place using AboriginalFootnote 4 perspectives (Williams, Bunda, Claxton, & MacKinnon, Reference Williams, Bunda, Claxton and MacKinnon2018; Morrison, Rigney, Hattam, & Diplock, Reference Morrison, Rigney, Hattam and Diplock2019, pp. 34–36). Put simply, our intention was to engage more deeply in our home place by recognising and celebrating 60,000+ years of storied history, because its omission maintains the silence of the status quo (Nakata, Reference Nakata2018). This decision offered us the opportunity to confront the dualisms embedded in our everyday use of English language and to incorporate relational ways of thinking (Williams, Reference Williams2018). We heeded Indigenous writers such as Styres (Reference Styres, Tuhiwai Smith, Tuck and Yang2018), who writes, ‘We, all of us, must develop a critical discourse that explores the ways colonial relations are and continue to be perpetuated and maintained through relations of power and privilege’ (p. 32). We wanted to decolonise our thinking, recognising that our lands have been colonised (Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014).
Like other sections of a katitjin bidi, learning journey, arising across the southwest landscape (e.g., Stocker, Collard, & Rooney, Reference Stocker, Collard and Rooney2016), our part recognises Aboriginal epistemologies ‘as a way to inspire society to reimagine regenerative futures’ (Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina, & Palmer, Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz, Poelina and Palmer2019). We wanted the relational worldview and epistemology already explained through Noongar language to enhance our practice and strengthen the pedagogy (Bennell, Reference Bennell1993; Bracknell, Reference Bracknell2015, Reference Bracknell2017; Wooltorton, Collard, & Horwitz, Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2019b).
Our purpose in this article is simply to tell one of our stories, this time about development of a pedagogy. Occasionally we use Noongar language to emphasise the point that the concept does not simply translate into English, because Noongar concepts are relational. Let us consider katitjin bidi, learning journey, for instance. Katitjin means know or understand, including complex systems. Bidi means trail or path, usually beside a river, and includes the travelling experience itself. An extension of bidi is bidier, which means leader who knows the trails through the karlaboodja, homeland, and can speak for place. However, it is more than this, because karl is both home and fire — the bidier decides when the home-place must be fired. In addition, boodja means Country, a deep, complex, kin-based, socio-ecological relational system, bound by cultural responsibilities, obligations and rules. All of this means a katitjin bidi is more than a simple learning journey. It includes place-based obligations and responsibilities to care. In this way, knowing means commitment to action, to participate, a fully embodied, practical and postconceptual way of understanding and living into one’s place.
The pedagogy we call ‘becoming family with place’ applies the concept of ‘becoming family’ originally developed by Buchanan, Collard, and Palmer (Reference Buchanan, Collard, Palmer, Westoby and Banks2019). To refine it, we use a Cooperative InquiryFootnote 5 methodology that uses an extended onto-epistemology (first published by Heron, Reference Heron1996), the basis of which is as follows:
For I give, and so find, meaning in four ways: by meeting reality through immediate encounter [experiential knowing]; by construing it in terms of imaginal patterns [creative or presentational knowing]; by construing it in terms of the concepts that come with language [conceptual or propositional knowing]; and by action in relation to it [post-conceptual or participative knowing]. ( Reference Heron Heron, 1996 , p. 204)
In our active research, we participated in seven cycles of exploration using four basic methods.Footnote 6 We believe the learning enabled us to come to know our place in an enriched, more fulsome way. Below, we review literature, develop the theory and methodology, and finally, we present our data and discussion of the outcomes.
Literature: Reconnecting people and place
It is well documented that our everyday occidental languages are constrained in their ability to reconnect people and environment (e.g., Abram, Reference Abram1996; Latour, Reference Latour2017; Williams, Reference Williams2018). For example, the fact that there is a word for ‘nature’ communicates a false message of separation between people and ecosystem; similarly, colonial processes have marginalised and ‘othered’ Indigenous peoples (Tuck et al., Reference Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy2014). More recently, related notions such as individualism, linear thinking and abstraction have been shown to make learning difficult for everyone (Yunkaporta, Reference Yunkaporta2019).
Indigenous languages tend to explain knowledge systems using pattern thinking, connections and relationships through a relational worldview. These understand human cultures as part of complex ecological systems such that they arise or co-become as self-organising systems. For this reason, Aboriginal epistemologies and ontologies are required for sustainable futures and, in fact, human continuity on Earth (Dodson, Reference Dodson2010; Yunkaporta, Reference Yunkaporta2019).
Natureculture
Generally, Aboriginal languages carry the understanding that place is a natureculture (as described by Whitehouse, Reference Whitehouse2011), which recognises landscape as comprising systems of human interdependence. Bawaka Country et al. (Reference Country, Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Lloyd, Tofa, Sweeney and Maymuru2019) illustrate this using the concept of co-becoming:
For Yolŋu people, Country means homeland. It means home and land, but it means more than that too. It means the seas, and the waters, the rocks and the soils, the animals and winds and all the beings, including people that come into existence there. It means the connections between these things, and their dreams, their emotions, their languages and their Rom (Law). It means the ways we emerge together have always emerged together and will always emerge together (Country et al., 2016). This co-becoming manifests through songspirals, known more commonly as songlines or dreamings. Songspirals are rich and multi-layered articulations, passed down through the generations and sung by Aboriginal peoples in Australia to make and remake the lifegiving connections between people and place. (p. 683)
Country, from this perspective, is animate, agential and active in the process of co-becoming. People carry responsibilities and obligations, such that response and response-ability are at the heart of co-becoming as Country and ‘anchor us in infinite cycles of kinship, sharing and responsibility’ (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Country, Suchet-Pearson, Wright, Lloyd, Tofa, Sweeney and Maymuru2019, p. 684). This is also the case in Noongar Country, where boodja is a holistic, agential concept that includes socio-ecological systems (Wooltorton, Collard, & Horwitz, Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2017).
In Noongar language, the term boodja, Country,Footnote 7 refers to ecosystems of which people are implicitly a part. Likewise, boodjari means full of life, pregnant. The term boodjari is an extension of boodja, which means nourishing terrain, a term first used by Bird Rose (Reference Bird Rose1996), who noted this particular concept in other Indigenous languages. Therefore, an ethic of care, or love, underpins profoundly empathic human interrelationship with place, trees, animals and each other; kurduboodja, love of place.
Noongar Onto-Epistemology
In a relational worldview, to carry meaning, concepts cannot be extracted from their cultural and geographical contexts. For instance, in Noongar language, a concept of ‘the long now’ — comprising the notions of kura, yeye, and burdawan (past, present, and future) — is necessary to understand related concepts such as boodja, Country, and moort, family (Harben, Collard, & Stasiuk, Reference Harben, Collard and Stasiuk2005; Wheatbelt Natural Resource Management, n.d.). This is because the stories and impacts of the past, including colonisation, remain present in our landscapes, experiences, and in our hearts. Similarly, the future is here as well — in our hands, in our landscapes, and in our children. In this way, boodja, Country, is still alive and the spirits are still here, as are the memories, the knowledges, the shadows and the archetypes (Scott, Roberts, Woods, & Roberts, Reference Scott, Roberts, Woods and Roberts2011; Wooltorton, Collard, & Horwitz, Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2015). When you walk in the bush at dusk in the southwest, you might hear twigs break and a whistle! Aliwa, look out! It might be a little mischief maker, mamara. Stay near a light or a fire.Footnote 8 These stories live in the southwest, they are shared and alive (Bennell, Reference Bennell1993; Mia, Reference Mia, Morgan, Mia and Kwaymullina2008). And katitjin bidi needs this southwest context, which is place-based, creative, critical, conceptual and meaningful.
Methodology: Cooperative Inquiry
Our methodological aim is to think, practise and learn in ways that re-centre these previously marginalised relational knowledges and voices, including the agency and voice of Country. We acknowledge that colonial structures and relations continue (Styres, Reference Styres, Tuhiwai Smith, Tuck and Yang2018), and we are conscious that as academics we participate in those structures and relations by virtue of working in tertiary education, a hierarchical, exclusive system.
In describing Cooperative Inquiry, Heron (Reference Heron1996) proposes four interconnected methods. Each produces different ways of understanding, to construct a more sophisticated, participative way of knowing. These methods are: direct experience; creativity (such as music, art or poetry) to reflect upon the experience; critique or critical conversations about the experience for concept development; and finally, the epitome, the ‘know-how’ or the knack, the participative knowing that synthesises all of these ways of knowing. One cycle involves each method, the outcome of which is an integrated but initially tentative form of knowing. The idea of the process is to continuously cycle knowledge forms — over and over again. The process is engaging and embodied, enabling the integration of sensual, creative and critical-conceptual knowing for participative, integrated knowing place and its stories.
Data sources, evidence and interpretation
The three active researchers engaged in an extended place-visit to a watershed in the southwest of Western Australia in January 2018. Our process was participative, responsive and practical; we planned activities but were flexible, and we completed some experiential cycles without the reflective cycles in between, returning later to complete them.
Across our three-day excursion, our experiences included the following activities:
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Reading Pascoe’s (Reference Pascoe2014) Dark Emu as a common text to consider Aboriginal agriculture;
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Physical and biological water testing at two locations along the river;
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Canoeing on the river;
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Walking to sites, observing elements of built and natural environment and their relationships;
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Visiting the tourist bureau to observe how the town markets itself, its local products and history;
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An ‘on Country’ visit to explore our individual connections to the landscape, reflect on the possible significance of sites to the land’s Aboriginal owners (such as rock formations and scar treesFootnote 9 ), and observe settler agriculture and land management techniques;
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A dinner with friends to hear their stories of migration, settlement and livelihood;
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A recorded conversation between the three of us to explore our connections to this place and our various relationships to Country and First Nations peoples as fellow Australians.
Collectively, these experiences made up our learning journey towards deeper engagement with our home-place. Our aim has been to think, practise and learn in ways that refocus previously marginalised relational knowledges and ways of knowing, such as the agency and voice of Country. Therefore, we present the data visually and verbally to creatively illustrate the story of how we came to understand our place differently.
Discussion — Active research group perspective
For us, the Cooperative Inquiry research methodology enabled an enriched understanding of our place through cycling methods comprising experience, creative reflection, concept development, and practical knowing. The research became the basis for a pedagogy: ‘becoming family with place’. We now understand our place in a more relational way: as storied and agential, with a deep history of human participation, care and love — and a painful recent history. We see that boodja, Country, has its own ways that are both mischievous and sacred. It communicates pain as droughts and socio-economic issues trouble its people.
The minutiae of our sensual experiences — the sounds of water, smells of mud, exhilaration of birds in unanticipated direct eye contact, deep-felt calm — produced in us a gratefulness for the ecosystem in its liveliness. This was accompanied by a deep appreciation of millennia of Noongar generations who cared for and enhanced it through strong relationships of care. The creative activities extended the experiential appreciation in unexpected ways — deepening the experiences and enabling recognition of connections.
Upon these experiences the conceptualisation brought the actions to words and relationships to theory. The postconceptual reflections synthesised and contextualised ‘being-with-place in-place’. After multiple cycles, the knowledge of place includes a feeling of care, responsibility — and love. And we realise the learning cycles need to go on and on, on and on.
Generating Knowledge from Ways of Knowing
For us, a cyclical knowledge-generating process was not entirely predictable, particularly as the research was underpinned by genuine participative decision making and had authentic cooperation as its goal (e.g., see Heron, Reference Heron1996, p. 174). The process was unfolding, irregular and at times tricky, but at the same time often resulted in both confronting emotions and surprisingly profound epiphanies.
Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2016) describes six paradoxes of place, one of which is:
To live more gently and sustainably on the earth and with each other, our places need to be reinhabited, reimagined. Yet, in order to reinhabit places without reinscribing damaging cultural patterns, places also need to be decolonized. Historical wrongs need to be acknowledged, reconciled, healed. This is a thorny paradox. (p. 11)
For us, the process enabled comprehension of this sometimes unsettling paradox. We acknowledge Harasymchuk (Reference Harasymchuk2015, p. 295) in his synthesis of the two constructs of reinhabitation and decolonisation toward a third space of culturally responsive practices, in the social project of confrontation and dislodging of dominant assumptions and systems of thought. A katitjin bidi can be a third space for the southwest when underpinned by Noongar concepts (Stocker et al., Reference Stocker, Collard and Rooney2016).
Towards decolonisation
Inspired by shared readingFootnote 10 of Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2014), it is not surprising that many of our conversations pointed to the need for decolonisation, enabling the resurgence of Noongar knowledges and skills. Literature reveals that the current southwest Australian sense of home, the ideal of domestic life including foods, gardens and socio-cultural production, is an English vision first brought with the colonisers (Barnes, Cameron, & Willis, Reference Barnes, Cameron and Willis2010). However, Australia’s old, climatically buffered, infertile soils and resulting diversity of native plants show no resemblance to English conditions, resulting in deforestation and habitat destruction, in turn causing species’ vulnerabilities and extinctions, acidification and rising salinity levels in soils and groundwater, threatening fragile wetlands and accelerating food insecurity (Hopper, Silveira, & Fiedler, Reference Hopper, Silveira and Fiedler2016). When the colonisers arrived, local foods were plentiful and reliable but largely invisible to them (e.g., Wollaston, Henn, & Burton, Reference Wollaston, Henn and Burton1948).
This context produced many interesting and painful conversations for us, particularly as most of our excursions visited or passed through farms at the height of summer where difficulties with changing climate and volatile economics were being experienced. Another conundrum arises: Is this about the ethical imperative of ecosystem and cultural revitalisation against a narrative about the significance of farmers producing food for the world? It seems perfectly logical to us that decolonising food security at the same time as our southwest places begins with making Noongar knowledge and natural landscapes ‘visible’ and deeply respected again. We comprehend the political depth and emotional difficulties implicit in this position. It calls into question the ways in which we as Australians ‘know’ and understand. There are implications for environmental educators here, about knowledge, knowing, and how we come to know it.
Discussion — Full research group perspective
Our project required us to decolonise our thinking. We see in hindsight — reflecting upon our place-based reflections over and over again — that this is to decolonise our mental and emotional landscapes at the same time as our cultural, social, physical and ecological landscapes, which feels to us like an application of a relational worldview. There is much to confront, causing distress and anguish, at the same time as emergence of beauty and comfort.
Decolonisation of the heart
We each have very different experiences with Aboriginal perspectives, in the sense that two of us have lifetimes of experience and speak Noongar language, one being a cultural custodian. In other ways, as a group we are representative of the southwest, in that we also have very diverse political, social and academic backgrounds. This diversity enables our collaboration to function as overlapping mentoring partnerships, with the scientist steering sometimes, the social worker leading where required, and the Noongar speakers contributing as needed. This is a model implemented in other katitjin bidi projects (e.g., Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard, Horwitz and Ellis2019a). In this particular case, a Noongar cultural custodian was involved in the preplanning and supported the reflective writing process at the end.
Through this process, one of the most frequently repeated words in the data is ‘love’. Kurduboodja, heartlands or love of place, is underpinned by kin relationships with place. It is described as follows:
In this system moort, in the sense of a person’s relations, can be animals or plants in a particular place. An example of this is the statement: ‘“Yongka” [kangaroo] is my uncle and “jarrah” [a species of tree] is my brother’, which makes sense through a kinship structure which includes human and more-than-human kindred. This way people are tied to place in a manner that guarantees meaning and familiarity, a connection called: gurduboodjar … love of place. This is ‘home’, in the sense of the English adage ‘home is where the heart is’. In Noongar language, it is the place with whom one is related and where one’s more-than human relations are established, as they have been since time immemorial. So home-place is also Noongar family which involves the implied familial obligation to care for all these many-species relations including the ground. (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Collard and Horwitz2017, p. 2)
To be at home in Noongar boodja means to be familiar with place: to be related to place through family.
Spirituality and connection with place
Not surprisingly given the stories in the southwest, spirituality was a strong component of our data. Each of us has experienced the sacred in nature, an ineffable knowledge of animate, living Earth. It can accompany a profoundly peaceful sense of home, warmth — of being cared for at the same time as reciprocally caring. On the other hand, there is an accompanying sense that the sacred needs deep respect — mischievous forces and energies can also be present.
Relational concepts in the environmental humanities are increasingly spiritual/intuitive, such as the Nyikina concept of liyan (Poelina & McDuffie, Reference Poelina, McDuffie, Morrissey and Healy2018), which translates to wirrin in Noongar. This is the place-based intuition linked to knowledge that leads a person through inner knowing, and warns them when they need to go a different way. Wirrin, in the case of intuition with Country, is a skill of sensuality. There is a long southwest story about kwop wirrin, good spirits, and warra wirrin, bad spirits (e.g., Collard, Harben, & van den Berg, Reference Collard, Harben and van den Berg2004). This seems to us to be at least partly to do with ways of knowing and how we come to know. In a personal communication about balyits,Footnote 11 Palmer (Reference Palmer2019) explained that his three decades of being with Aboriginal people has taught him a different, relational way of knowing and understanding. He said: ‘There are many more things I could say but yes, the city has plenty of them little things and yes I know where baalup nyinniny [they stay]’.
A 60,000-year southwest narrative: Who owns this knowledge?
After much discussion ‘on-Country’, then with the active research group, and finally in the writing and reflective stages with the full research group, it seems to us there is a conundrum not yet confronted, which is that of knowledge ownership. This will be an ongoing conversation for us, but for the moment this research group understands the context as follows.
There is Noongar cultural knowledge that is restricted to its custodians (Bracknell & Scott, Reference Bracknell, Scott, Barwick, Green and Vaarzon-Morel2019). There is colonial (mainstream) knowledge, which you will find in the history and science books and continuing public conversations. That is shifting, but it seems to us to still be steered by powerful colonial interests (e.g., Kerins & Green, Reference Kerins, Green, Russell-Smith, James, Pedersen and Sangha2019; Perkins, Reference Perkins and Kelly2019). And there is a third space, katitjin bidi, which synthesises the strengths of both categories towards the emergence of knowledges that reveal the revitalisation of Noongar language, culture, dignity and leadership (Bracknell, Reference Bracknell2019; Bracknell & Scott, Reference Bracknell, Scott, Barwick, Green and Vaarzon-Morel2019), and the regeneration and revitalisation of complex ecosystems, life, heart and kurduboodja, love of place, in the southwest. We call this southwest knowledges.
Southwest knowledges
This knowledge is understood in the southwest, and is available to all — written in books and people’s lives and stories, in forests, in species, in the landscapes, on maps and it continues from the dawn of time. In the ‘long now’, all of these traditions, languages, ecosystems, joys, pain, frustration and massacre sites are still here — hiding in full view. For good and bad, this is who we are in the southwest, and cultural-ecosystem revitalisation offers the opportunity to strengthen this narrative to facilitate regeneration. It is already co-owned. For instance, many Noongar phenomena have been witnessed by fellow Australians, such as the Mayanup stones described in the data (Hayward, Reference Hayward2009), which two of the researcher’s families directly experienced.
Similarly, there is a place in the southwest called Mumballup, a Noongar word meaning place of the mamara, little black hairy mischievous fellows who live under the big boya, boulders, at Mumballup, and are noort — they stink! But wait, they are also said to be good judges of character. These fellows continue to make themselves apparent to this day, to passersby irrespective of ancestry, political persuasion or state of mind (Bennell, Reference Bennell1993; Bennell & Thomas, Reference Bennell and Thomas1981; Mia, Reference Mia, Morgan, Mia and Kwaymullina2008).
Finally, there is the realisation that people in the southwest have a substantial Noongar vocabulary even though we may not realise it, as it is part of our floral and faunal nomenclature and our place names. Jarrah, marri, karri, tuart, kwenda, woylie and chuditch and more are common southwest species, and Manjimup, Boyanup, Mumballup, Dardanup and hundreds more are common place names — and these are everyone’s business (Collard, Harben, & Rooney, Reference Collard, Harben and Rooney2015). Katitjin bidi has a long history in the southwest: there is plenty to build upon to renew ourselves, our places and our stories. Everyone in this research team is a member of multigenerational southwest families, and now we recognise that we are each already family with our place. Our new task is to share this place-based Noongar-English knowledge, and sing up that story. It lives here in the southwest, along with the agency of boodja, Country, through wirrin — spirit, and empowered by Noongar language. This is a relational worldview, and we are all in this together. Katitjin bidi means that all of us in the southwest must own and live by our cultural responsibilities.
On local-global knowledges
Broadening the circle of relationships within the ‘long now’ brings to mind Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2015) Chthulucene, an emerging epoch that she refers to as ‘past, present and to come’, which we all need to work towards:
Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collaborative work and play with other terrans,Footnote 12 flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that include people will be possible. I am calling all this the Chthulucene — past, present, and to come. (Reference Haraway2015, p. 160)
It seems the ‘long now’ is arising worldwide, along with the idea of becoming family with place. For instance, Haraway (Reference Haraway2015) calls for humans to ‘make kin’ for multispecies ecojustice and to embrace diverse human people. As we see it, this local endeavour has global implications.
Conclusion
We cannot live in the past, but the past lives in us. (Attributed to Charles Perkins, in Perkins, Reference Perkins and Kelly2019)
This is an interesting way to reflect on place-based Noongar histories, particularly in relation to the Noongar concept of ‘the long now’. In finding a way to explore Noongar perspectives on place, we were surprised to find the pedagogy for ‘becoming family with place’ was capable of producing substantial emotional engagement, requiring skilful, intentional collaboration between us as learners and across our varied disciplinary knowledges. The pedagogy for improving place-based relationship requires empathy and emotional honesty as the basis of social skills for collaboration, as part of the experiential, creative, critical and post-conceptual ways of knowing, being and doing. Our pedagogical practice produced conundrums for us with potential to produce emotions such as hope and hopelessness, empowerment and disempowerment, necessitating skills in conflict resolution and in discipline integration. We acknowledged the deeply politically embedded nature of the sciences, and of worldviews themselves. And by the way, how do you know what you think you know? Do you really only ‘think’ it? On what basis can you claim it to be true?
The grappling implicit in the process enabled us to accept that conundrums exist and are part of the southwest story. They live in us too, along with millennia of Noongar culture, language-embedded stories and very recently, colonisation of people and place. We now understand we are already family with place. Parts of this story need talking up, and perhaps this article will be the first of our continuing efforts to do this, to re-incorporate people, language, narratives and voices silenced by continuing colonial power.
We invite you to incorporate this pedagogy into preservice teacher education programs and other university courses, as well as primary and secondary schools, to facilitate conceptual change and insight about interconnectedness. We invite you go to a place near you, and listen to its story. It is there in the landscape, hiding in full view. Aliwa! Look out!
Sandra Wooltorton is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow (Education) at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia (Broome Campus). She has conducted and published interdisciplinary research in fields such as sustainability education, research for social change, Aboriginal education and environmental philosophy. Sandra has participated in Noongar culture and language research for many years, and is very interested in the relationship between people and place. She is a strong advocate and campaigner for social and environmental justice.
Peta White is a science and environmental education Senior Lecturer at Deakin University. Peta has worked in classrooms, as a curriculum consultant and manager, and as a teacher educator in several jurisdictions across Canada and Australia. Peta gained her PhD in Saskatchewan, Canada where she focused on learning to live sustainably, which became a platform from which to educate future teachers. Her passion for initial teacher educator, activist environmental education, and action-orientated methodologies drives her current teaching/research scholarship. Peta’s current research interests follows three directions including science education, sustainability and environmental education, and collaborative/activist research.
Marilyn Palmer teaches in the ECU School of Arts and Humanities Social Work Program on the South West Campus. As a foundation member of the program, she has been actively involved in developing and teaching the curriculum, focusing on ecosocial work in the contexts of gender, professional practice, and collective interventions. Her ongoing research endeavours include ecosocial work theory and practice, community gardens, academic ecojustice activism, and transformative leadership in disaster recovery.
Professor Len Collard is with the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. Len has a background in literature and communications and his research interests are in the area of Australian Indigenous Studies, including Nyungar interpretive histories.
