Treat me as a place: On the (onto)ethics of place-responsive pedagogy

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil's body. Thinking with place-responsive pedagogy, I aim to extend a conversation toward exploring a child's body as a place. Place-responsive pedagogy, while it challenges a commonly endorsed child/brain/self/anthropocentrism by paying more attention to a place, its history, and human-nonhuman entanglements, still positions children as intellectual observers (of places) and multisensorial body-mind thinkers. I propose to attend to pupils/their movements as to ontogenetic phenomena. These phenomena necessarily emerge from the surplus of child-place relations. They are intelligent, complex, transmogrifying, attuning with the emerging ecologies, and growing with/from a place. Such conceptualisation disrupts an often-empty rhetoric that 'humans are part of nature', offering an account of an (onto)ethics.