The nature/cultures of children's place learning maps

This article explores the question of how we can teach and learn beyond the nature/culture binary for a more sustainable world. It is based on a study of place-based learning for sustainability in a primary school in Latrobe Valley, Gippsland, Australia, the site of brown coal-fired energy production. The focus of the article is on primary school students' wonderings and learning maps produced in response to their educational activities in a local wetlands. The learning maps are analysed using the lens of 'thinking through Country' which offers a contemporary translation of an Aboriginal onto-epistemology in which nature and culture are conjoined (nature/culture). Using this contemporary Aboriginal onto-epistemological framework as a lens for analysis focuses the reading of children's place learning artefacts on the possibilities of moving beyond nature/culture binaries in place-based learning. The reading identifies the ways that children's place learning can enter representation and language without losing the materiality of embodied place connection. In this way place learning becomes available as nature/culture for pedagogical work and opens the possibility of new ways to teach and learn for planetary sustainability.