WWOOF Ecopedagogy: Linking ‘Doing’ to ‘Learning’

Abstract

WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an increasingly popular form of ecotourism in Australia. An ethnographic study of 10 young adult international tourists was conducted at five rural Victorian WWOOF sites. The objective was to examine the participants’ nature experience. As part of the ethnographic study, this article selectively reports on the ecopedagogy at the WWOOF sites, focusing on the potential linking of spatio-sensory ‘doing’ in the environment and conceptual ‘learning’ about (including from, for, and with) the environment. The WWOOF environment is designed physically, materially, and naturally. These dimensions can be interpreted in overlapping spatial levels. Each spatial level partially correlates with the dominant bodily senses. By analysing the participants’ reflexive accounts of their WWOOF nature experience, this article suggests that their spatio-sensory ‘doing’ contributed to their environmental ‘learning’, which is categorised into three heuristic types. These are called symbolic, transpositional, and transformative. This study empirically and conceptually adds to the literature on experiential environmental learning with a possible ecopedagogical model of incorporating spatialised bodily senses in curriculum design.

Ecopedagogy as an educational approach for vulnerable rural communities

“…While the concept of ecopedagogy proposed by some scholars (i.e. Bowers, 2004;Khan, 2010;Gadotti, 2011) was holistic and comprehensive, Payne's ecopedagogy was slightly different from other scholars as his research was related to an understanding of the body, time, and space experiences as a form of movement in different environments (Nakagawa, 2017).…”