Watery configurations of animals, children, pedagogies and politics in a suburban wetland

This chapter argues that, beyond knowledge, skills and understandings, learning for sustainability requires the mobilisation of affect, matter and imagination in pedagogical spaces that open to difference and transformation. This requires recognition of the co-implication, interdependence and necessary entanglement of what have been conventionally separated as “human” and “non-human” worlds. This chapter does not provide a comprehensive case study of the project we called Love Your Lagoons (Somerville et al., 2015), but, rather, it follows moments of immersion in the lives and deaths of wetland creatures. I will argue that these affectively potent pedagogical encounters between young people and animals opened students to new configurations of learning about themselves and others in the world.