Finding Our Way Home: An Ecological Sense of Self and Honouring the Places We Are From

Abstract

This article explores the role of the pedagogy of place, specifically places where we feel at home and how they have acted pedagogically upon us. It also examines the role of the pedagogy of the imagination and how we locate ourselves within cultures and worldviews. Indigenous people understand the environmental ecology and the cultural ecology of a place as a living animated wholeness. Indigenous people and their lands are an interwoven whole. This living wholeness as well as the individual parts are struggling for survival. As an Indigenous scholar, artist, educator I have tracked my lived experiences within this integration of the biosphere with the ethnosphere and witnessed how they have created a specific sensibility, view of the world, and perspective on environmental education. This article describes how these experiences became the foundation for the creation of an Indigenous pedagogical approach to environmental education and eventually informed a course for in-service educators. The final section of the article outline this pedagogical approach as well as its resulting curriculum and concludes with a vision of the implications for such an Indigenous arts-based process in environmental teacher education.