Slow Pedagogy Associate Professor Phillip Payne and Dr Brian Wattchow

1
Slow PedagogyAssociate Professor Phillip
Payneand Dr Brian Wattchow
Project Summary The slow pedagogy we are
placing in education parallels the slow food
response to the McDonaldization of society and
its supersizing of our diets. We live in a
globalized world where persistent demands on our
increasingly scarce time are highly intensified.
The push for efficiency, productivity and even
more outcomes contribute to a time poor
condition. Fast food and fast learning seem
very appetizing responses to this time famine.
Our interest in slow pedagogy, curriculum and
educational policy and, indeed, the human
condition is to slow down the acceleration of
learning and teaching, as well as in our
relations with each other and with the rhythms
and patterns of nature. There are few remaining
opportunities in schooling (and pre-service
teacher education) for slow pedagogy. Outdoor
and environmental education are candidates
because they travel more freely outside the
fast time restrictions of schools and
universities and their regimented fast teaching
and fast learning timetabling.
Over the past 20 years of their university work,
Payne and Wattchow have explored, examined and
enacted versions of slow pedagogy in
environmental and outdoor education. However,
outdoor and environmental education are not
immune from the fast pedagogies imperative whose
take away practices threaten to limit learning.
Wattchow and Payne have developed a semester-long
unit of class and field work in the Sport and
Outdoor Recreation program at Monash University.
One aim is to encourage students to experience
for themselves and each other, and in nature,
different types of time and relationship and
reflect upon their learning. Postmodern and
globalized time now is understood and practiced
digitally as dot or blip time. There is
precious little time for Time. Not so long ago
modern times were measured analogically and
timetabled in a linear, arrow-like way via the
sweep of the hour or minute hand. Long, long
ago, time was slow and experienced through
natural bodily processes, the cycle of day and
night, the ebb and flow of tides, the movement of
the stars, seasonal changes and numerous other
rhythms of nature, both human and
more-than-human. Relations to ourselves, others
and natural places, are often now experienced
through layers of abstraction, particularly
through digital technologies. The immediate, the
sensual and the tangible are under siege by the
remote, the disembodied and the abstract
experience of the world. We live now, in this
moment, within numerous contradictions of
bodily-rhythmic experience, and linear-arrow
experience, and dot/blip-instantaneous time
experience. This embodied time dissonance may
well, as has been argued (Melucci, 1996, and
others), be a pathological source of the physical
and mental health problems that confront and
challenge children, their parents, teachers and
schools, and policy-makers. Payne and Wattchows
theoretical research and philosophical work is
ethnographically grounded in their curricula and
pedagogical efforts to slow down learning and
teaching in ways that authentically place
students in various outdoor environments, places
and natures. Their aims are twofold. First, to
understand the relationship between time and
relation experienced enigmatically by learners
and learning as a meaningful and durable
experience. Second, to understand how time and
relation consonance and attachments to (natural)
places might contribute to the reconciliation of
the otherwise pathological dissonances of inner,
social and outer natures. Their collective aim
for education and a slow pedagogy of the body in
place is to advance the philosophy of social
ecology and empirical basis of experiential
education, both of which are the key platforms
of the Movement, Environment and Community
research group in Sport and Outdoor Recreation
studies.