
Noel GoughLa Trobe University · School of Education
Noel Gough
PhD (Deakin)
About
290
Publications
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Introduction
Noel Gough is Professor Emeritus in the School of Education, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include outdoor and environmental education, science education, curriculum theorising and postparadigmatic research methodologies. His current project is 'Resisting complexity reduction'.
Additional affiliations
July 2014 - present
July 2006 - July 2014
February 2005 - June 2006
Publications
Publications (290)
This essay explores ways in which environmental educators might break with their existing traditions of research and pedagogy by critically appraising climate histories and anticipated futures depicted by SF (science/speculative fiction) in print and audio-visual media. SF has engaged the politics of climate change for at least two centuries and, a...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. …Case… shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of … The Chatsubo …a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of gl...
This essay offers a rationale for deploying ecofeminist science fiction stories as object-oriented thought experiments in science and environmental education, with particular reference to
developments in genetics and evolutionary biology, and their
implications for human (and more-than-human) reproduction and kinship in the period following the det...
This presentation explores possibilities for nurturing “postcolonial moments” in transnational curriculum studies, on the understanding that postcolonialism involves the ambiguous struggling through and with colonial pasts in making different futures. The possibilities explored include reflections on–and constructive critiques of¬¬–selected concept...
My interests in gender issues in EE include queering evolution (and the genetic sciences that inform our understandings of evolution and reproduction) and ecofeminist speculative fictions as object-oriented thought experiments. Queering evolution In a chapter I co-wrote with Chessa Adsit-Morris (2021) we questioned the socio-political entanglements...
This essay offers a postcolonialist standpoint on transnational and international curriculum studies, addressing such concepts as “Asia as method”, the politics of “helping”, the “post-reconceptualisation” of curriculum studies, decolonising curriculum, and the contemporary relevance of love and care in framing curriculum problems and issues.
We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic m...
The term “cyborg,” as a combination of “cybernetics” and “organism,” was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in a paper presented at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conference on space exploration as a representation of a particular challenge of space travel: physically adapting a human body to survive in a host...
A review of Bruce Clarke (2020). Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.
ISBN 978-1517909123
In this essay, we argue that postqualitative inquiry is not a useful descriptor for environmental education research and that it is time to consider what comes after the posts. We argue that thinking with theory as a process methodology in the onto-epistemological framings of our research is more generative and opens up opportunities for this resea...
A review of: Alexander, Dorian L. , Goodrum, Michael, & Smith, Philip (Eds.). (2022). Drawing the Past, Volume 2 : Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World. University Press of Mississippi.
In her widely cited and influential “cyborg manifesto”, Donna
Haraway argues that “cyborg imagery” can provide a way out of
the maze of dualisms we have used to explain our bodies and our
tools to ourselves and concludes by asserting that she would rather
be a cyborg than a goddess. We depart from the cyborg/goddess
distinction by invoking a widely...
In her widely cited and influential "cyborg manifesto", Donna Haraway (1991, 181) argues that "cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" and concludes by asserting that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess". We depart from the cyborg/goddess distinction by...
This chapter explores the generativity of comics/graphic novels and their filmic adaptations as contributions to the “cultural literacy” of science educators by examining: (i) representations of science in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen ; (ii) the unique capability of sequential art to depict key scientific imaginaries, such as...
This chapter explores the concept of worldviews in tertiary outdoor environmental education (OEE) programs. We discuss how worldviews are constructed based on our understandings of the world and our place within it, drawing on the role of social and cultural norms and assumptions influencing the ethical frameworks we might adopt. The chapter offers...
I have consolidated into one document, the entries I provided for Pamela Gossin's edited volume Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (Greenwood Press 2002) which was compiled under the aegis of the Society for Literature and Science (later known as the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts).
All of these entries were written to strict word...
Jill Williams and Sara Tolbert (2021) suggest that neoliberal reforms in Arizona have ‘ironically positioned science classrooms and science teachers as high potential sites of/for resistance’ to these reforms (p. 72). This forum response explores a number of ethical questions for American science teachers that arise from the political influence of...
Following Constance Russell, Tema Sarick, and Jacqueline Kennelly’s (Can J Environ Educ 7(1):54–66, 2002) pioneering foray into the generative possibilities of mobilizing queer theorizing in environmental education, we were encouraged to follow them a short time later with our own collaborative explorations of this academic territory (Gough et al.,...
This essay expands our previous exploration of queer theory’s potential to reinvigorate environmental education scholarship and practice, by queering commonplace understandings of evolution. Drawing on Darwin’s original ideas and writing, we explore the complex, creative and coevolutionary dimensions of life, and the implications for educational th...
This is an invited response to Williams, Jill, & Tolbert, Sara ‘"They have a lot more freedom than they know": science education as a space for radical openness', forthcoming in Cultural Studies of Science Education.
This chapter explores the generativity of comics/graphic novels and their filmic adaptations as contributions to the ‘cultural literacy’ of science educators by examining: (i) representations of science in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ (1987) graphic novel Watchmen; (ii) the unique capability of sequential art to depict key scientific imaginaries, s...
Review of Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene by Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson & Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen
This article takes Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific “fact.” Our approach is informed by our methodological commitments to understanding writing as a mode of inquiry and our preference for diff...
We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic m...
A personal reflection on my travels and collaborations with the late William E. Doll, Jr.
This article (accepted for publication in a Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies Special.Issue on science studies) takes Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific “fact.” Our approach is...
Review of Wake, Hisaki, Suga, Keijiro, & Yuki, Masami (Eds.). (2018). Ecocriticism in
Japan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, hardback, v–296 pages, ISBN 9781498527842
Invited for publication in the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies
You can read the full text of this reviee at https://rdcu.be/bEDjH
Presentation to Asian Studies faculty and students, University of Western Australia
This essay recounts two episodes in my career as an academic science educator, one from near its beginning, another from near its end. Each story attempts to subvert disciplinary boundaries and conventional ways of representing science in education. They are connected by their twin foci on laboratories as iconic representations of science and the f...
This is the Chinese translation of an invited presentation to faculty and graduate students in the Institute of Curriculum and Instruction, East China Normal University, Shanghai (1 November 2010) and the Faculty of Education, Nanjing Normal University, China (4 November 2010). The English version is available at https://www.researchgate.net/public...
Shadow education has been studied in areas such as comparative education, educational policy, sociology of education, education and economics, and lifelong education, but mainstream Anglophone curriculum studies have largely ignored this phenomenon. We argue that shadow education should be considered as an emerging (and significant) focus of curric...
In the year of Ursula Le Guin’s passing, it seems timely to acknowledge and celebrate the unique exemplifications of the speculative imagination that she performed throughout half a century of writing SF (science fiction/fantasy/fabulation) stories and critical essays. This essay offers three semiautobiographical vignettes of the author’s engagemen...
Presentation to a panel, “Teachers ‘Work/Lives and Curriculum Making” ,at the 6th World Curriculum Studies Conference (IAACS 2018), Melbourne, December 9-12, 2018
"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us…In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
—John Steinbeck (1962) Travels with Charley in Search of A...
This commentary responds to the seven articles in this issue by reading them through lenses of tinkering and tailoring, juxtaposing and extending them with other writings across a range of fields. Disrupting and displacing methodologies in science education is not something new. There are multiple examples from two and more decades ago where scienc...
In the year of Le Guin's passing, it seems timely to acknowledge and celebrate the unique contributions she made to public understanding of science and technology through SF (science fiction/fantasy/fabulation). Donna Haraway refers to Le Guin as one of her "partners in science studies, anthropology, and storytelling" (others include Bruno Latour a...
In this essay I suggest some ways in which science teacher educators in Western neoliberal economies might facilitate learners’ development of a critical literacy concerning the social and cultural changes signified by the concept of biopolitics. I consider how such a biopolitically inflected critical literacy might find expression in a science tea...
Using the figuration of queer tango, we conceive this essay as a performance that responds to three Canadian Journal of Environmental Education articles, each of which calls for the creation and circulation of more queer scholarship in environmental education. We explore Mark Vagle's (2015) suggestion of working along the edges and margins of pheno...
The Outdoor Council of Australia’s renaming of Australian Journal of Outdoor Education (AJOE) as Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education (JOEE) follows deliberations among Australian and international stakeholders in outdoor education about the future of publishing in the field and raises a question about the relationships of outdoor and env...
Since at least the beginning of this century, the literatures of research methodology in the social sciences have increasingly focused on what are now being called new empiricisms and new materialisms. My purpose in this essay is to appraise the potential of these approaches for outdoor environmental education research. I begin by reviewing some of...
This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education cont...
This chapter is performed as a conversation between its co-authors and, therefore, most parts of it are written in the first person singular; we will signal in subheadings which one of us is 'I' in these sections. In recent years Deleuze and Guattari have inspired each of us to perform educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry in distinctive bu...
This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural...
In 2016, the Anthropocene Working Group recommended to the 35th International Geological Congress meeting in Cape Town that it adopt the term ‘Anthropocene’ to name a new epoch of geological time dominated by human impact on the Earth. Since the concept of Anthropocene was advanced, it has prompted many academics and educators to ask ‘what next?’ f...
This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resou...
In ‘Consciousness and Complexity in “Waking Life”,’ Teresa Dobson and Tammy Iftody argue persuasively for interpreting Richard Linklater’s film, which deploys innovative animation techniques to portray discussions of theories of consciousness, from a complexivist perspective. They demonstrate how complexity theorizing might inform interpretive prac...
This is the English language version of an nvited presentation to faculty and graduate students in the Institute of Curriculum and Instruction, East China Normal University, Shanghai (1 November 2010) and the Faculty of Education, Nanjing Normal University, China (4 November 2010). It includes the images and text added to assist non-Anglophone read...
This paper explores the generativity of comics/graphic novels as resources for postmodern science education by focusing on (i) representations of modern (Newtonian/Baconian) scientific concepts in Watchmen's narrative themes and (ii) the unique capability of the sequential art medium to represent key concepts in postmodern science, such as complexi...
"I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ … Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things." (Alasdair MacIntyre 1984, p. 216)
In this essay I address the question, '˜What am I to do?' as an outdoor and environmental educator with some respo...
In Educating the Posthuman, John Weaver (co-editor of this volume) describes me as a ‘forefather’ of posthumanist curriculum scholars and ‘the Philip K. Dick of curriculum studies.’ Because the publications on which Weaver bases his generous judgments represent somewhat static positions rather than the messy flux of their becomings, this essay offe...
This paper explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resourc...
From the Editors' Preface:
Noel Gough’s chapter on curriculum, informed by narrative theory and poststructuralism, is guided by the question, How does globalization work? rather than, What does it mean?Based on his long experience as a curriculum specialist, Gough depicts how difficult and complex is the process of curricular renewal and the freque...
Most of what we (collectively and individually) claim to ‘know’ in (or of) environmental education comes from telling each other stories of educational experience. These stories, together with the myths and metaphors they employ and the texts (oral and inscribed) in which they are embedded, merit close and critical examination. To look more closely...
As one of the contributors to the first issue of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education ( AJEE ) in 1984 (and to a further seven issues between 1991 and 2009), and as a sometime member of its editorial board (1991–1994) and the editorial collective that edited four issues (1999–2002), I have been privileged to witness at close hand its d...
2014 represents the 30th year of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education ( AJEE ), making it one of the oldest academic journals in environmental education still in publication. The oldest is The Journal of Environmental Education , founded in 1969. Another journal, The International Journal of Environmental Education and Information , wa...
I wrote ‘Narrative and Nature: Unsustainable Fictions in Environmental Education’ in 1991 as a revised version of a paper subtitled ‘Poststructural Inquiries in Environmental Education’ that I presented at the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Association for Environmental Education in September 1990. To the best of my knowledge, these pa...
Complex systems are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. Reconceptualising curriculum, teaching and learning in complexivist terms foregrounds the unpredictable and generative qualities of educational processes, and invites educators to value that which is unexpected and/or beyond their control. Nevertheless, concepts associated with s...
This essay offers a critical history of approaches to ‘thinking globally’ in environmental education research, with particular reference to the production, reproduction and widespread circulation of assumptions about the universal applicability of modern Western science. Although the transnational character of many environmental problems and issues...
Complex systems are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. Reconceptualizing curriculum, teaching and learning in complexivist terms foregrounds the unpredictable and generative qualities of educational processes, and invites educators to value that which is unexpected and/or beyond their control. Nevertheless, concepts associated with s...
Digitalisation, the Internet, open access initiatives, and trends towards multidisciplinary scholarship are affecting academic publishing practices in diverse ways. In this essay I focus on questions, problems and issues of academic ‘gatekeeping’ (the conventional quality assurance role of journal editors and reviewers) that arise in complex networ...
Defensible curriculum decision-making requires that there be available to practical deliberation the greatest possible number and fresh diversity of alternative solutions to problems. Visions of alternative futures arise from many sources, and in this essay I focus on two such sources that tend to be under-represented in both school and higher educ...
This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in
environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field’s heteronormati...
In this essay I explore a number of questions about purposes and methods in science education research prompted by my reading
of Wesley Pitts’ ethnographic study of interactions among four students and their teacher in a chemistry classroom in the
Bronx, New York City. I commence three ‘lines of flight’ (small acts of Deleuzo-Guattarian deterritori...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2011000100017
Este artigo questiona o relativo silêncio da teoria e da teorização queer sobre apesquisa em educação ambiental. Exploramos algumas possibilidades para tornar queer apesquisa em educação ambiental ao criar (estimulando outras/os a fazer o mesmo) narrativasde Camp Wilde, um local imaginário que nos...
Foreword for David R. Cole (2011), Educational Life-forms: Deleuzian Teaching and Learning Practice (pp. vi-xii). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
In this semi-autobiographical essay I explore the representation and performance of imaginative inquiry practices in educational inquiry and other disciplines, with particular reference to ‘thought experiments’ in the natural sciences and comparable practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I will share a number of experiences of writ...
Modern accounts of evolutionary mechanism pay little attention to the pattern and logic of Darwin's explanation, but recognition of the logic of Darwin's explanation has significance for our understanding of evolution and for our appreciation of the extent to which Darwin's concept of evolutionary mechanism accords with modern evolutionary thought....
Complex systems are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. Reconceptualizing curriculum, teaching and learning in complexivist terms foregrounds the unpredictable and generative qualities of educational processes, and invites educators to value that which is unexpected and/or beyond their control. Nevertheless, concepts associated with s...
This essay brings together two lines of inquiry. Firstly, I revisit research on futures in education conducted during the
1980s and re-examine some of the propositions and principles that this research generated about “the future” as an object
of inquiry in education. Secondly, I argue that the language of complexity invites us to rethink education...
This essay performs a number of our collaborative responses to thinking (differently) with Deleuze in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry. Deleuze and Guattari have inspired each of us in distinctive ways. Single‐authored products include a series of narrative experiments or ‘rhizosemiotic play’ in writing educational philosophy and theor...
In this semi-autobiographical essay I explore the representation and performance of imaginative inquiry practices in educational inquiry and other disciplines, with particular reference to ‘thought experiments’ in the natural sciences and comparable practices in the arts, humanities, and
social sciences. I will share a number of experiences of writ...
Complex systems are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. Reconceptualizing curriculum, teaching and learning in complexivist terms foregrounds the unpredictable and generative qualities of educational processes, and invites educators to value that which is unexpected and/or beyond their control. Nevertheless, concepts associated with s...
No abstract (Introductory paragraph follows:
This essay revises and extends a brief contribution to the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Gough, 2006) in which I responded to Tom Barone and Martha Lash’s (2006) invitation to characterise Australia’s current ‘educational imaginary’, a term they used to describe ‘a set of broadly disseminated image...
In this essay I explore the usefulness of literary fiction in social and educational inquiry 1 by focusing on the genre of the crime story, with particular reference to the ways in which positioned readings of crime fiction might inform understandings of research methodology (see also Gough, 2002). Like Cleo Cherryholmes (1993: 1), I want to break...
Questions
Question (1)
I inavertertently uploaded a duplicate copy of a conference paper. I want to delete the version of the paper dated Jan 1999 which has no abstract:
Conference Paper Tales of a travelling textworker: troubling ‘freedom’ in pos...