ABOUT ME
Educational Resercher
edolagoe@asu.edu
I am a biologist and an educational researcher. I've worked for over 15 years in developing and implementing environmental education programs in Brazil, partnering with local community leaderships and environmental agencies. I completed my Master’s degree in Landscape Ecology and Nature Conservation at the University of Greifswald, Germany, and worked for over 10 years after that in environmental management, education, and policy. For my PhD, I relied on posthuman literature and Indigenous scholarship to explore environmental education policies and practices in urban gardens, specifically investigating human-nature relationships and the knowledges/learnings enabled by them.
EXPERTISE
Environmental Humanities and Education + Critical Posthumanism + Postqualitative Inquiry
I study human-nature relationships through the lenses of critical posthumanism, Indigenous scholarship, and philosophy of education. My interest is in the material, discursive and affective relationalities, as well as their potential to help (re)signify human-nature relationships amidst the global climate crisis. I also conduct research on sustainability teacher training, specifically looking at how affective and artistic pedagogical approaches impact learning.
I engage with qualitative research in the intersection of Indigenous, Black, and (eco)feminist methodologies as well as in the space of arts-based research and postqualitative inquiry.
I teach graduate classes in environmental and sustainability education as well as qualitative research methodologies.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
This project culminated in my PhD dissertation, in which I trace the history of Western gardens in educational literature as well as the ontoepistemologies that underpin contemporary learning in gardens. Next, relying on post qualitative inquiry, I examine the relationships between humans, animals, plants and soil in and outside of gardens. Finally, I engage in more-than-human research by following the lead of a bird into the abandoned corners of the garden, learning from the multiplicity of life that thrives away from human control.
Published materials: Encounters in the Garden: Learning to ‘Become-With’ in Urban Spaces
Encounters in the Garden:
Learning to ‘Become-With’ in Urban Spaces
This project aims to trouble the colonial conceptualization of school gardens. Drawing on Haraway’s concept of worlding, Barad’s relationality and Ingold’s philosophy of lines we question what counts as a garden, as well as what happens when the lines of the curriculum are troubled in a school garden in South Africa.
Gardens as Wolrding Places: Leaves, Lines and Lives in Environmental Education
This research project combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together childhood memories of ‘common worlding’ through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play, by tactfully moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others.
Published materials: Memories of a Girl Between Worlds: Speculative Common Worldings
Wild Childhoods: Memory Work and Childhood in Nature
Turn it Around! is a youth-led artistic and participatory project to introduced policymakers at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) to a radical reimagining of climate futures. It is part of the UNESCO's Futures of Education initiative and includes youth's demands in response to the launch of UNESCO’s Future of Education report.
Turn it Around! Flashcards for Education Futures
In this project we investigate pre-service teachers (PST) readiness to implement transformative sustainability learning in their future elementary classrooms. Relying on the three components of the TSL framework (Sipos et al., 2008), heads, hearts and hands to focus deeply on an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability in TE that embraces complexity, intergenerational learning, and action-based pedagogies when teaching TSL.
Published materials: “When I act consciously, I can see a brighter world around me”: preservice teacher readiness to support transformative sustainability learning