Written by: Marijke Hecht (1) and Christopher C. Jadallah (2). -

(1) The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. (2) University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Abstract: Science education that provides learners with opportunities for deep and direct engagement with water and water-related processes is critical to address the many threats facing waterways across the globe. Posthumanist, new materialist, and Indigenous perspectives on nature-culture relations offer expansive theoretical frames that can guide educational research and practice to more substantively consider water - and all of its more-than-human entanglements - as an essential actor building more just social-ecological futures. We push for a broadening of approaches to ethnographic data collection that includes accounting for the agency of more-than-human beings. To ground our discussion, we present vignettes from two informal science education programs, each of which conceptually and physically immersed learners in small streams to engage in scientific inquiry and data collection activities that informed ongoing ecological restoration of two watersheds. From these vignettes, we consider how methodological approaches guided and informed by posthumanist, new materialist, and Indigenous perspectives can and should inform research on learning and the design of L/land-based learning environments.

Keywords: water, informal science education, more-than-human, methodology