Abstract

Learning Nature presents exciting scholarship on the exploration of the concept of nature and its implications for education. The author—Ruyu Hung—argues that “nature” is a rich and fundamental source of meaning to enable one to learn to live a meaningful life and yet that what is taught about nature in many conventional curricula is severely limited, resulting in an impoverishment of meaning. The central aim of this book is to provide different approaches to the understanding of nature in order to show the fecund meanings that have rich educational significance and the implications for pedagogy. Interrogating the educationally meaningful conceptions of nature, this book identifies five themes to anchor our multifarious understandings of nature. Each theme with its implying polarities illuminates the significance of the human conceptualisation of nature as an on-going dynamic and dialectic process. The investigations invite the readers to envisage and reconfigure education so as to accommodate heterogeneous and plural views of nature and reveal the abundance of meaning to be had in different ways of experiencing nature in the context of one’s unique life.