Riverspeaking: Transformative Learning within a Relational Ontology

Abstract

The co-authors perturb the modernist ontology of rationalism, cognitivism, progressivism, and the view of the self as autonomous that is predominant in current transformative learning theory. Entering into a co-learning relationship, one author as a scientist and the other as a social scientist, we have been exploring radical relationality as a new ontoepistemology. Through our stories of social and environmental transformative learning that we have had in relation to the rivers of the Rocky Mountains, we use the term Riverspeaking to explain this relational ontology and its importance for theorizing transformative learning. Informed by Indigenous ways of knowing and the work of physicist Karen Barad to further understand a relational ontology, we suggest that transformation is not just about ‘form’ but also about matter, process, and making meaning in (be)coming of the world. That is the meaning of the concept Riverspeaking.