Teacher identity, activism, and empowerment: Entanglements with climate in Aotearoa, New Zealand

Abstract

Propelled by energy from fossil fuels, human population and agency have grown exponentially over the last century, resulting in rapidly increasing and potentially catastrophic anthropogenic impacts on the coupled systems of climate, ocean chemistry, ecology, and society. Education could bring about the fundamental change in human behaviour required to avert the potential dystopian futures predicted by climate scientists.

By applying a DeleuzoGuattarian analytical and methodological framework, this thesis researched the perceptions and desires of seventeen climate activist secondary school teachers in Aotearoa, New Zealand, as they try to make sense of the diffractions between their ambition to be changemakers for a sustainable future and the milieu of territorialising institutional, social, and economic assemblages resisting this change. The analysis of the participant narratives generated specific insights into opportunities to deterritorialise and decode educational institutions in order to promote a meaningful engagement with the fundamental questions of human relations with the more-than-human world.

This thesis promotes a critical-realist ontology for education to navigate the complex entanglements between social and material assemblages. The theoretical preparations for this research included a critical discussion of the epistemic relativism in constructivist philosophy and a critique of the ontological indeterminism in quantum mechanics-inspired agential realism.