Abstract:
Willing Workers On Organic Farms (WWOOF) is an emerging global ecotourism phenomenon. Due to its outdoor hands-on activities such as growing organic food, it is probable that participating in WWOOF (or, WWOOFing) makes a contribution to one’s experiential learning of environmental significance (Ballantyne & Packer, 2009). Ten young adult international WWOOF participants’ (or, WWOOFers’) nature experience at five WWOOF sites in rural Victoria were studied over a four-month period in 2014 in order to highlight the ‘informal’ educative potentials of WWOOFing. Inquiring into the nature of the WWOOFers’ experience revealed multiple nature-human relations.The ethnographic fieldwork included one-to-two-week participant WWOOFing/observation and two semi-structured interviews with each participant. As part of the ethnographic study, this paper re-presents findings from a hermeneutic phenomenological thematic analysis (van Manen, 1990) of the interview data. The transcribed data was qualitatively coded and thematised under the four ‘fundamental lifeworld themes’ (i.e. spatiality, temporality, corporeality, and relationality), in order to understand the existential conditions of the WWOOFers’ nature experience more comprehensively.Twenty existential themes were generated to represent the nature of the WWOOFers’ experience. The existential themes were gathered into five categories of nature-human relations: (i) humanised human; (ii) naturalised human; (iii) naturalised nature; (iv) humanised nature; and (v) ambiguous ‘human’-‘nature’. These ‘contested’ five categories of nature-human relations indicated how nature phenomenologically appeared multiple to the WWOOFers in their experience (Macnaghten & Urry, 1998). The findings suggest two key points about nature experienced in WWOOFing. First, nature is not simply an ‘alternative’ (eco)touristic place to which the WWOOFers escape from their urban living and naturally rejuvenate themselves (e.g. McIntosh & Bonnemann, 2006). Second, nature in WWOOFing is relationally complex and uncertain. Less anthropocentrically representing this complexity/uncertainty may be of importance in environmental education for nature. When the multiple human voices collectively become less meaningful noises, perhaps, nature may re-appear as the non-representational in its silence (Russell, 2005).References:Ballantyne, R., & Packer, J. (2009). Introducing a fifth pedagogy: Experience‐based strategies for facilitating learning in natural environments. Environmental Education Research, 15(2), 243-262. Macnaghten, P., & Urry, J. (1998). Contested natures. London: SAGE.McIntosh, A. J., & Bonnemann, S. M. (2006). Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF): The alternative farm stay experience? Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 14(1), 82-99. Russell, C. L. (2005). ‘Whoever does not write is written’: The role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 11(4), 433-443. van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany: State University of New York Press.