(this post is my contribution to a co-authored AAACS presentation with Nathan Hauser, May 12, 2023).
Sometimes Tricksters throw themselves under their own bus. I once brought Starbucks coffee to drink during a lecture on the impact of economic globalisation to Scottish students. Feigning nonchalance, I continued to teach as normal. But I was enlivened with anticipation, waiting for the contrast between my actions and my topic to be discovered.
But what if no one noticed? Trickster Pedagogy is only just beginning. Do I make the cup logo more visible? Or take more frequent sips to increase the chance of it being seen? Maybe I should break the class into groups, tasked with investigating how globalisation has creeped into our learning space. (Their Canadian teacher might then get spotted). Or do I let it go, accepting some students have observed it, and not all educational experiences require my guidance to digest?
If discovered, the pedagogy continues. Do I steer how students interpret the dissonance? If so, when and how? Do I eventually confess to the setup? Will doing so serve the ongoing meaning-making of the experience? Keeping silent may foster a skeptical attitude towards experts, or a need for students to scrutinise their own contradictions. But it might also generate apathy if students deem the problem is too ubiquitous to change. It might normalise the idea that it is ok to do the talk but not the walk, or at least the idea that it is normal to have such abnormalities in one’s (apparently?) socially conscious teachers. Admitting to the set-up might suggest other tricks are in store, “easter eggs’ like in a Stanley Kubrick film, and raise sensitivity and attention in general. Or it might foreground trickery as a teaching method, and stimulate my students’ desire to experiment with this pedagogy in turn. It also might re-establish my possibly jeopardised authority, for better and worse. My ego might compel me to confess, even if this conflicts with my pedagogical wisdom.
Trickster Pedagogy role in ecologising education
The hidden curriculum of school systems is itself tricking us into unecological ways of thinking, doing and being, even if it is ‘about’ ecological topics. Luckily, trickery is itself a way out. Here I outline two ways Trickster Pedagogy exposes and/or disrupts unecological educational patterns, and possibly reorients them more ecologically: 1) the way it exposes the relationship between explicit and implicit; and 2) how it can confront students with ecological levels and paradox. For each, I will briefly outline how Trickster Pedagogy works, give examples, and explain why it is important for ecologising education.
- The explicit, the implicit and the complicit
Trickster pedagogy counters the growing trend of explicit learning intentions and reduction of ambiguity in education. This approach risks habituating students to neatly structured learning, overlooking the unpredictable and complex nature of the real world. The world isn’t organized into easy propositions or models. To think otherwise is itself a terrible trick. It’s full of surprises, uncertainties, and ambiguous phenomena requiring patience and comfort with uncertainty. “Explicitification” can reduce people’s resilience in facing life’s inherent uncertainties and reduce our ability to sustain attention towards ill-defined situations or problems. It can also foster the misconception that uncertainty is insignificant or controllable in learning, and limit our capacity to appreciate the evolving, tacit nature of both human and non-human worlds—an urgent concern for educators navigating the complexities of the Anthropocene.
By merging pedagogy and curriculum, trickster pedagogy reconnects the means and ends of learning, fostering a more holistic understanding of the world around us.
- Encountering koans
A koan is a short anecdote which sometimes presents a monk’s cryptic response to a novice’s question. One, for example advises “if you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Koans show the value some Buddhist traditions place in answering by not answering at the level expected by the asker. The answer provided introduces an ambiguity or a paradox which forces the asker to consider the relationship between question and response, and to confront unconscious assumptions underlying the question in the first place. Many koans are not accessible to casual readers because the topic engaged is not a living problem for them. Indeed they are rooted in particular contexts of Buddhist practice. For a Trickster Pedagogue, the question is how to set up koan-like confrontations between a students’ expectations and alternative ways of handling what they are exploring.
As educators, we know explicit and implicit curricula are in constant interplay, one affecting the other, as what we do and how we do it co-inform one another, and as both interact with ourselves and our students across time. We can disrupt explicit curricula explicitly, by creating an expectation and then challenging it, in ways our students know is intended. Or we can disrupt implicit curricula implicitly, such as when we shift the tone of the room by changing our voice or turning off a light, without ever explaining what is going on.
But we can also play with congruence and incongruence across these modalities, creating explicit expectations and shirking them through how we implicitly engage with those expectations; or we can let implicit framings provide a context that we then defy explicitly. Like koans, the educational experience operates cross-modally, revealing not only that the content of some expectation leads astray, but that even the style, logic, habit, or some other hidden subordinate supportive structures of that belief were themselves complicit.
Experiencing crossmodal relationships and indeed incommensurabilities acquaints the student and teacher to the kinds of shifts entailed in ecological thinking. For example, upon hearing an environmental educator articulate that ‘the problem with the current globalising zeitgeist is that people are operating in a mechanistic worldview. They see things in linear cause and effect relations. If only they saw things more holistically, we could transition towards sustainability’, the trickster pedagogue might ask: ‘that is a nice explanation for what is happening. What ‘cause’ do you propose to get to this holistic worldview?’ The ultimate solution to this question is not to provide such a cause, which is directly asked for in the question, but to realise that the framing itself relied upon the very kind of thinking it was calling out. This would be a koan-like trick.
Trickster pedagogy and classroom relationships
Being a trickster can seem scary to some teachers because of the different kinds of relationships and responsibilities it brings out. In this section, I present three different relational dynamics that can arise through trickery: 1) how trickery can magnify and expose teacher vulnerability, 2) how it can threaten and restore trust, and 3) how it develops and makes transparent the ecological nature of ‘teacher identity.’ These situations are rich for critically interrogating and redeveloping more flourishing relationships with self, other humans, and the more-than-human.
- Making oneself vulnerable
Like telling a joke, or acting out a role (themselves often tricks), tricks can fail. Setting up an experience which risks landing flat is more self-exposing than some other pedagogies. Further, we might intend our tricks to open scenarios electrified with drama or excitement, but this depends not only on the skill of our execution but on the “buy-in” from our students. Students’ lack of emotional engagement can be highly embarrassing or feel like rejection. When our tricks involve topics in which we are ourselves emotionally invested, especially those pertaining to our highest values, these feelings only magnify. And so teachers might resist the drama for fear of such vulnerability.
Cultivating the capacity to be vulnerable, and to support another when vulnerable, is important for a world in turmoil. The illusion of control exacerbates the ecological crisis. In our experience, with an open attitude, the occasional failed trick can deepen classroom relationships, humanising the teacher in the eyes of the students, fostering a learning community, and disarming the space of what’s then possible.
- Threatening and developing trust
That said, tricks can also be emotionally disruptive and lead to socially complex situations for a teacher to navigate. I remember the time two experienced teachers taking a professional development Master’s course with me became quite hostile after a trick. I had set a task where students were told their online discussions would be assessed according to a rubric that would be provided. As the online discussions progressed, a student soon enough raised the question: “How can we know if we are doing this discussion correctly if we haven’t been given the rubric?” After letting the question sit for a while, I jumped in: “Yes, how would you know? What does good quality mean to you given your insights so far?” Answers from students trickled in at first, but gradually the discussion thread was tumbling with momentum, splintering off further thoughts and questions not merely about ‘quality’ in this context, but also about the function of assessment. After the online discussions, we reconvened in class, and I said, “I told you a rubric would be provided, but I didn’t say who would be creating and using it to evaluate your work.” My students soon realised what was happening. Response ranged from amusement to anger, highlighting assumptions about the nature and purposes of education. Confrontation with implicit assumptions can be visceral in a way not easily achieved through other pedagogies, so important work needs to follow to make sense of the experience and rebuild trust. In some way, this means being even less of a trickster than the average teacher, so as to connect at the level of the person and not through our ascribed social roles.
- Exploring teacher identities
My Initial Teacher Education students are working out new identities. There are many competing voices on what that means, and some of them do not tend in directions that ultimately sustain and flourish, themselves or others.
I am interested in what ways ‘teacher personas’ are tricks, and paradoxically how they may actually enable the experiencing, sharing and developing of more authentic identities. If teaching is an art, do we, as Ursula Le Guin suggests, “lie to tell the truth?” I sometimes reflect on this paradox with my students, as of course, my ‘teacher persona’ is prone to do, opening questions about the nature of the self and relationships.
For example, as a teacher, I have a manner of being, a way I speak and am silent, listen and curate, foreground and background, that is sometimes very different from how I am when not in the classroom. Teaching is a performance. But it is not so simple as to say I am pretending to be something I am not. Sometimes I feel like aspects, or possibilities, of who I am are brought out, elaborated and distilled, through the kind of concentrating space that is ‘being a teacher in a classroom’. Sometimes I ‘try on’ a way of being for reasons that seem to make educational sense. When I feel what it is like, and what kind of self emerges through the subsequent interactions that ensue, I sometimes realise that this way of being, once a mask, is in fact an essential part of who I am becoming, or want to become. Perhaps the fact that this mask suggested itself, and not some other, indicates something of the dialectic between the truth and the trick. Perhaps not. In any case, I experiment with students in an ecological alternative between naive essentialism and constructivist views that might otherwise threaten our capacity to develop teacher identities grounded in deepening values, while inviting the active shared discovery our own true masks. (for earlier reflections on masks, see On teaching oneself).
Thanks to my inspiring friend, the Maestro Trickster, Anthony Weston.
For a later published paper on related ideas, see Affifi & Hensley (2024)
Affifi, R. & Hensley, N. (2024). Trickster teaching and the anthropocene: Disrupting the explicitification of pedagogy, people and planet. Environmental Education Research. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2024.2434608