Contemplating contemplation

As educators, we often hope or assume that providing information about the pressing sustainability challenges we face is sufficient to help humanity change course. This may be facts about the crises before us, facts about the natural, social, and cultural systems in decline, facts about possible feasible alternative courses. Many weary of information-based approaches to education advocate for conceptual, worldview or value shifts. Many still insist that the problem is not merely the content of the environmental educator’s lesson but also the process, with calls for education that is more experience-based, issue-based, place-based, constructivist. For some, this has also meant that learning be participatory with the nonhuman beings and processes -to name a few.

The trend away from abstract content and towards meaningful contextualised activities and actions is a positive one. However, it is not sufficient. This paper suggests a different, complementary approach to pedagogy. Information, worldviews, experiences, and issues are experienced, processed, taken up or ignored in diverse ways depending on the person and their circumstances. The same seemingly compelling issue can be approached with gusto, hesitation, or downright terror depending on a number of interacting factors, including past experiences, one’s capacity for sustained reflection, current emotions and general moods, social circumstances, and even on whether or not one has had an adequate meal before the lesson. There are no simple linear causal relationships in this vast evolving ecology of interacting factors. An acontextual approach to process is not much of an improvement over an acontextual approach to content.

Given this complexity, one approach to education might be to focus on generalities. Perhaps it is possible to ascertain the sorts of approaches that work for most people and to employ such approaches in schools and other settings. This would seem the most obvious approach both for educators and for researchers. The experimental design would be relatively straightforward, the implications for practice easy to roll out, and the securing of funding for the research feasibly attainable in a climate that favour statistical generality as serious and reliable knowledge. There are obvious merits to this approach. Perhaps most striking is not its instrumental benefit but its psychological value. Especially given the urgency of contemporary problems, we may feel the need for something secure to stand on and to build upon. It would seem better to be able to make tentative, though applicable claims rather than to simply wallow in a messy web of “it depends.”

Except that, of course, it does depend. Any particular generality will be grounded in particular contexts which may or may not be adequately acknowledged, and which are themselves changing, however slowly. It might be that in the short term educating about mass species extinction propels people into action while in the long term it fosters resignation. It may be the other way around. It may be one way with one population and another with another. A generality may appear on one temporal scale but disappear on another. While all pedagogy is context dependent, this is especially true for topics which are emotionally or existentially heavy -which is obviously the case for increasingly weighty net of crises we are wrapped in.

A second reason for concern is that pedagogy based on evidence-based generalities only teaches to the bell curve. This expediency leads to another nonlinearity. Those on the edges of the bell curve can be pushed in dangerous directions through the very approaches deemed successful for the majority. A small number of disaffected students may wreak great havoc on one’s pedagogical aims. It would be a ridiculous and complex calculation to figure out when and whether the ends justify the means here, especially in cases where those outside the mean are also those most likely to end up in positions of power.  

A third reason for concern is that focusing on generalisable tricks and approaches treats education as something that an educator does to an educated. Even (or especially) when the generalization works, it sets up a situation where sustainability is ultimately an external and extrinsic imposition, rather than an autonomous, decentered generative process.

We look for and expect simple linear causal interactions. It makes our job as educators easier. There is a human (well, biotic) tendency to look for patterns to economize energy and time resources is part of this too. The sometimes desperate yearning for a way to teach for sustainability is born out of this.

I suggest and want to explore a different approach largely based on my experiments teaching a Master’s level course called “Educating for Environmental Citizenship.” Offered is a pedagogy that accepts the finitude of human knowing, casts suspicion on atemporal solutions, and seeks to foster humility, wonder, and resilience before the magnificent challenges that lie ahead. The aim is to catalyse the development of lifelong contemplative skills (this work fits into the constellation of ideas gathered together in a recent compilation (edited by Eaton, Hughes, and MacGregor 2017). For example, instead of trying to figure out what makes people engage in sustainability, such a pedagogy might aim to help people develop the capacity to pay attention to the various and evolving motivating and demotivating factors that occur in their own daily lives. This perhaps seems, on the face of it, an easy thing to do, but the fact is we are mostly oblivious to the way in which ideas, emotions, beliefs, knowledge, and social dimensions interact over time. And a stock of favoured theories, however habitual, parsimonious, or elegant, often obfuscates direct engagement with this complexity while cloaking ignorance in fancy and fanciful security. Luckily, as educators we do not need to figure this out in order to educate. In fact, we cannot do so. Cultivating a contemplative attitude requires attempting a contemplative pedagogy, where the educator dwells in confusion, combines grace and self-doubt, succeeds or fails. If teachers are not able to unshackle their own learning process, they will hardly be able to responsively work with others in doing the same. It is only through gaining a greater capacity to understand ourselves as thinking, growing, feeling, and acting beings that we can come to appreciate the sheer immensity of the ecology we are both within and to which we contribute. This does not involve abandoning generality entirely, but rather restoring it within the dynamic balance of two forms of observation. Education ought to help students develop appropriate generalities about themselves as well as the skill of abandoning generalities when they lose their helpfulness (see Affifi (forthcoming) for more on this dialectic). As citizens of the universe, we are continually pulled between the general and the specific, as patterns and their ruptures co-occur ubiquitously both within and without.

***

Contemplative approaches are unlike reflexive or reflective approaches.  Reflective approaches are primarily cognocentric, that is to say they involve thinking as their primary tool (Eaton, Davies, Williams, and MacGregor, 2017). In particular, they are metacognitive, in that they usually involve thinking about thinking. Thinking is an activity that makes certain demands on time. When thinking happens it has a range of rates of change within which it can occur. If the rate of change is too slow, thinking does not occur. It is a river that dries up when it does not flow at a certain speed. When success is viewed primarily as the capacity to develop new thoughts about something, anxiety can easily emerge in arid times. The mind will want to stay within a thinking modality at all costs, and as we shall see some of these costs are expensive. As such, reflective approaches demand that a certain rate of progress of occurs.

The main methods that reflective approaches have for breaking down habitual ways of thinking are critique and synthesis. Critique generally involves employing ready-made ways of analysing assumptions, ways that are themselves habituated thought processes. Likewise, while synthesis involves the combining or recombining of ideas and methods, it depends upon styles of argument that either one has had in the past or has acquired through learning from others.

In general, reflective approaches do not provide the space and time for other resources to engage in developing understanding. A cognocentric approach tends towards greediness,  we strive for answers with hands outstretched and grasping. We seize the idea that comes to mind that seems good enough, often without even knowing it. To consider carefully whether “good enough” is itself good enough might break the flow of the thought that has just emerged and lead us right back to the arid void. And so, we often build up and tear down compositions made like prefabricated LEGO blocks, and scarcely open ourselves up to the harder work of considering whether these LEGO blocks really are the shapes that we think they are. Or the shapes we want or need. The resources needed for this work come from a different space than pure thought (whatever that is). It is a space that runs parallel to thought at all times but which constantly runs the risk of being ignored for the rich resource it is, and trampled over when thought is elevated in exclusive importance. The resources I am referring to are the feelings of the body, emotions, and the various ways and degrees to which we are conscious of them. The skills we need to develop would equipe us to pay attention to these feelings, to how they emerge, persist and evolve, and to how thought eventually takes them up and organises them in different ways, contributing to the feelings themselves as it transforms them.

What this involves is reconceptualising the nature of the process of understanding.  Instead of considering understanding as primarily a cognitive process, we now recognise that cognition itself is better considered as one component of a set of skills and experiences. (Alternatively, we could simply redefine cognition, stripping it of its computeristic analogies and restoring to it the role of feelings, body and the environment). Violence is done to the whole person and consequently to the world when this field of skills and experiences is backgrounded and a sub component within it –thought– is elevated in importance and falsely considered to be the creative engine propelling things along. A contemplative approach is primarily seen as an antidote to this kind of epistemological greediness and it does so through opening up a space. It opens up a space through developing the capacity in people to be patient – patient without an answer, without progress, without immediately jumping too readily available building blocks. It develops a sense of trust that the ecologies of the soul are more-than-conscious and more-than-personal, percolating at rates that do not always conform to our conscious demands. Most importantly, it does not do this through another cognocentric move. It does not seek to convince a thinker to trust ambiguity, uncertainty, regress, and the assorted confusions that come with paying attention. It is a lesson that cannot be provided by a Powerpoint slide or through a blogpost. Logic is easy, but cheap. The importance of contemplative approaches may easily be accepted if the argument given in defence of it is persuasive enough. But these argument alone are insufficient to equip anyone with the capacity to do the work of paying attention in these ways. For this reason, contemplative approaches are primarily experiential and the role that cognition plays within experience can only be fully understood by experiencing it in contemplative ways.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research. doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1699026

Eaton, M., Davies, K., Williams, S., and MacGregor, J. (2017). Why sustainability education needs pedagogies for reflection and contemplation. In Eaton et al. Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education (Chapter 1). London, UK:

Routledge.Eaton, M., Hughes, H.J., and MacGregor, J. (Eds.) (2017). Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education. London, UK: Routledge.