‘The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through’: composing dialectical lectures as environmental education

This paper illustrates and discusses 'dialectical pedagogy' through reflections on five lectures on plants composed for Environmental Education postgraduates and Initial Teacher science educators. It argues for dialectical pedagogy's place in 'ecologising' environmental education curriculum. Ecologising represents the fallible, ongoing attempt to attend to and improve ecological relations, and ecologising education entails perceiving educational processes as ecologies arising through open-ended, dynamic, co-constituting relations between living beings. To do so, this paper's dialectical approach draws from Hegelian tradition but rejects its deterministic and teleological assumptions, emphasising the flowing and inclusive interplay of thought, where earlier ideas contribute to an organic development rather than being invalidated and dichotomised. My approach considers both the dialectics of thought, the dialectical development of that which thought attends—in this case, plant life—and the dialectic between them. The paper presents lecture segments as artistic compositions, demonstrating how dialectical pedagogy can unshackle the life of the mind and its relation to the world. This approach aims to interrupt conceptualisations that deaden perception and participation in arising ecologies, inviting students into considering thinking as a living movement that builds itself up and breaks itself apart while reaching into and caring for the world.