The purpose of this section of the website is to introduce some of the ways in which ecoportraiture has been and is being used. We have started with summaries of five chapters in the book, but we hope to add new examples over time. None of these cases is intended as “exemplary”—each tells a story of a more-or-less independent research journey, in which ecoportraiture, understood in various ways, emerged as a deeply helpful methodology for addressing themes of learning-and-teaching-in-place. Each of the authors has their own take on what ecoportraiture is or might be, shaped by their own autobiography and inquiry; each offers different illustrations of what the process looks like, and what its rewards and challenges are.
Nora Timmerman (Chapter 2) wanted to understand how ecological educators “understand and negotiate the concepts of integrity and contradiction in their day-to-day lives.” She ended up focusing on three such educators – Madhu Prakash, David Greenwood and Ray Barnhardt – whom she visited and interviewed in the places where they lived and worked. In the course of writing up their portraits, she sought guidance from Jessica Hoffman Davis, aligning her work fairly closely with the methods and purposes of The Art and Science of Portraiture. She calls the resulting work “eco-ish portraiture,” in which photography, drawing, and gathering natural objects from each subject’s home region served to affirm the importance of ecological context. However, she also offers thoughts into how her research might have changed had it been conceived as ecoportraiture.
Kelly Keena (Chapter 3) undertook a study of children’s interactions with an outdoor natural space adjacent to an elementary school south of Denver, Colorado. She was drawn to portraiture because of its “search for goodness,” having come to realize that she was less interested in solving problems than in finding “a deeper understanding of how children saw themselves as part of something bigger than themselves, and when, or if, they isolated themselves apart from their natural surroundings.” Her background as a naturalist helped her collect a rich harvest of observations and stories, illuminating not only who the children were in that setting, but also developing a portrait of the Habitat itself, as felt and seen through their experiences.
Laura Piersol (Chapter 4) was a member of the research team associated with the Maple Ridge Environmental School, a project involving all three of this book’s editors (see also Datura, this volume). She was curious about how teachers’ and students’ relationships with the more-than-human world were changing in the context of spending every school day out in the forest. She ended up focusing on portraits of three particular children, two at the Maple Ridge school and one in another nature-based program on BC’s Sunshine Coast. While she began with conventional sit-down interviews, she soon found herself accompanying the children she was working with on many kinds of explorations. Drawings, photography, audio and video all proved fruitful ways of expanding the inquiry and gaining insights into the children’s observations, thoughts and feelings. At the same time she sought ways to welcome and acknowledge the presence of the more-than-human in the processes of teaching and research.
Sylvie de Grandpré (Chapter 5), a teacher on Ktunaxa territory in southeastern BC whose practice is deeply informed by her Quebecoise identity, was drawn to portraiture as a means of exploring how outdoor education could become more deeply aligned with Indigenous understandings of Land. Her chapter charts resonances between ecoportraiture and Indigenous research “to see if there are enough points of connection for mutual enrichment.” Moving through the themes of context, voice/stories, relationships, and processes/relational accountability, she does in fact find many parallels in the underlying values and purposes of these different traditions; however, she sees decolonization as a dynamic process that calls for ecoportraiture, too, to be alert and open to its own limitations. In that vein she offers a few suggestions for “subtle adjustments” to portraiture methodology to make it more effective as a decolonizing practice and mode of representation.
Michael Datura (Chapter 6) joined the Maple Ridge Environmental School project at the start of 2013. On one level, his chapter unpacks some of the dilemmas and tensions encountered by the research team in trying to chart and make sense of the ways in which learning was shaped in the forested parks and other natural settings that hosted the school. As an illustration, he offers a fresh and funny depiction of “a day in the life” of the Environmental School that he terms a “gesture drawing,” an example of “eco-friendly portraiture” that he proceeds to methodically and methodologically dissect. This in turn leads to deeper ruminations on the values, purposes and methods of eco-portrature, encouraging researchers to push the bounds of their own understandings and practices.