sustainability education

Confronting ecologies and identities through Trickster Pedagogy

(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.

May 12, 2023

Education’s Copernican Revolutions

Do you remember when you learned the Earth revolved around the Sun? I certainly don’t. But why not? It is such a surprising fact, one astonishing enough to deserve inducing its own ‘flashbulb memory.’ Its surprise cuts in several ways. First, there is the obviously strange idea that we live on a sphere with no direction up and yet we do not fall off. Second, is the idea that we are constantly in movement, and moving very quickly too, around a giant ball of fire over a 100 times bigger than our own planet. This movement, this speed, and the spherical shape of the Earth are not felt in direct experience. Learning that the Earth revolves around the Sun is therefore a moment where we see that the way the world ‘appears’ is significantly different from what it ‘actually’ is. It is like Plato’s cave, but without the need for a convoluted metaphor. The duality between appearance and reality has reappeared in countless ways in human thought, but the Copernican revolution remains one of the most visceral possible encounters with this split.

That I do not remember learning it implies to me I learned it too early. There is a point when we can be told something without ‘getting’ why it is significant, and so when we do come to understand what the ideas means we do not feel its significance. It is almost like how children come to understand the meaning of words. Using them first, and gradually getting a more nuanced sense of the contexts they can be used, and only much later thinking about what the words actually mean. We seem to have a similar pragmatic engagement with ideas about the world, where ideas often regulate activity first and are only sometimes later popped out of this field of immersive, unreflected upon usage, to be engaged explicitly.

If not the Copernican revolution then perhaps there is some other idea that came to you at just the right time. The significance of its truth hit you like a thunderbolt, clutching your imagination, seizing your heart. What if there was only 100 such amazing ideas in our world, and say 15 more yet to be discovered? We do not know how many mind-bending ideas await discovery, and many of us hope there are an infinite in store. But it could be that all have been discovered, or that there are only finite left, or that it simply becomes too expensive (economically, ecologically, etc.) to keep discovering them. If we do not know, do we assume amazing ideas are a renewable resource, to be mined ad infinitum? Or do we treat such ideas with the same care and attention we ought to treat any potentially limited resource? What is the ‘sustainable’ approach to engaging with amazement or wonder?

One approach would be to dismiss the problem altogether. Even if there are just a few such ideas, it does not matter. The primary purpose of such knowledge is for it to be ‘used’, not for whatever effect ‘realising’ it may or may not have. The quicker people know how genes, atoms, solar systems, electricity, ecologies, etc ‘work’, the more able they will be in engaging responsively or productively in the world. From this counterargument, one might even suppose that the basic structure of the world ought to be learned quite early, so it is ‘first nature’ just like one’s mother tongue, rather than counterintuitive facts to be wrestled clumsily and spoken of with a lisp.

I do not know if that is true for some ideas. For example, perhaps there are ways of understanding the animals, plants and weather in one’s local ecology that seem to depend on early immersion to achieve fluency. But many of the big ideas I have in mind are not the kind with daily practical implications. Most of us continue to say ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ and navigate our homes or towns as though the earth was flat. So, let’s assume I am specifying the kind of scientific (but also philosophical, spiritual, etc.) ideas that have significant possible impact on humans conceptualise themselves and their place in the world, but not the kind likely needed for any obvious use in our quotidian lives.

If we can agree that there at least some ideas that are powerful but without immediate application in such daily contexts, and that such ideas can be taught at the wrong time, or the wrong pace, then some educational questions follow:

If there is a finite number of such powerful ideas, when and how should they be taught? My pedagogical intuition is that we should be slow and careful, inviting and provoking particular students in response to interests, thoughts and feelings we see developing in them. But until there is a broader understanding of the role of slowing such knowledge down, parents, the media, and others will surely ‘let the cat of the bag’ too early despite our discretion. I view this as short-circuiting students’ capacity for enchantment and nothing short of a normalised infringement on the rights of a child. It leads to people educated with a head full of facts but undernourished and underskilled in exploring emotions associated with such facts. It is also likely a violation of nature.
Is it possible to recover some sense of the power of such ideas even after we have habituated to them? If so, how? What kind of meditation, discussion, prompts, activities, language or art, or thought experiments might re-sensitise? Note that the answer to this would address a bigger education problem: our tendency to take many things for granted in our lives, and the benefits of reawakening feeling towards them.
If there are only a finite number of such ideas still undiscovered, then what pedagogical implications does this have for how we ought to pursue further inquiry into nature? Where do we slow down? Are there some questions which we simply let be unanswered? And how do we communicate such societal questions to students? Is it important to protect the eros of our encounter with the world in a pornographic age? And does the mystery we protect tell us something important about the world in turn, like how the fog on a mountain accentuates its contours while hiding its face?

April 13, 2023

Impatience with Impatiens

I was born and raised in a settler city sprawling through the middle of traditional Anishnaabe territory. Despite living and breathing land kept by Anishnaabe people, my education occurred within, and indeed maintained, a bubble separating me from this broader cultural world. I grew up with a love, admiration and care for the living world around me, and yet even here, my stock of concepts was influenced by people born to those across the Atlantic, not by the children and tenders of my own watershed.

Despite this all too familiar scenario, a number of concerns with the environmental narratives circling about crept into my consciousness. One concern was with the term ‘invasive species’, a label cast so casually by those within my bubble. Even if these creatures were shaking up existing ecological balances, it bothered me that adults taught children to vilify them under the guise of ‘education’. I wondered if the phrase victimised not only Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Purple Loofestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and countless other animals and plants, but also the young recipients of these words, replacing the possibility of enchantment in their story of the world with experiences of judgment and division. When the xenophobic language of the populist right in Britain and North America regularly hit my social media feed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the stock of metaphors used in politics was being imported into ecology. I was struck by an apparent contradiction: many of my environmentalist friends were appalled at the use of such language in the human realm but adhered to it unflinchingly in the field of the green, the feathered, and the furry.

How could the impulse to ‘other’ others be condemned in one context but taken up in another? I pondered whether something Jungian was at work. Even if invasive species were sometimes causing disturbance to local ecosystems, is calling them ‘invasive’, creating ‘eradication programs’ and all the rest of the militarism, really the best way to approach them? Are many of us settlers and globally mobile citizens unsettled in our depths about where we ‘should’ be living? Are environmentalists projecting onto other species a darkness within? What inner work do we need to do before treading into questions of how we might treat these prolific newcomers?

Now living in the land where my grandfather was born, and still not feeling quite at home, I stand at the edge of the Water of Leith, watching its inexorable flow under the crisp, winter sun. I imagine clusters of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) clambering along its edges sometime after the summer crests and the days start shortening again. The government has occasionally called the Royal Marines in to destroy this showy, pink flower, and researchers are investigating biological diseases to wipe them out. But bees have accepted this plant into their web of relations, delighting in what seems a joyous frenzy from its copious nectar. When does a plant— or a person —become native to a place?

Newspapers regularly remind us of ‘pollinator collapse’ set in motion by a collision of threats; from pesticide use to habitat destruction. Might Himalayan Balsam’s flourishing be part of ecological rebalancing rather than disruption? Few questions so quickly furrow my ecologist friends’ brows. Perhaps their irritation is warranted. Alongside other local species, bees seem to favour Himalayan Balsam (Horsely, 2016). The presence of Himalayan Balsam may thereby reduce the pollination of other species, some already curbed by its fecundity. But like many ecological studies, how we bracket our vision turns out to be crucial. A study must have a beginning and an end, and conclusions are drawn from within these boundaries. While the results are in a certain sense objective, the decision of when to start and stop the study is not. In this case, as long as the Himalayan Balsam’s nectar exceeds the needs of the bee population, bees may well favour it to the detriment of other plants. But such a scenario is obviously temporary. At some point Himalayan Balsam’s plentiful supply will increase pollinator populations but can no longer supply the demand. Other less alluring food sources are then sought out. Davis (2011) calls this ‘the car dealership effect’. In recent years, some popular science books have argued that invasive species seem to cause fewer extinctions than previously assumed (Pearce, 2015; Thomas, 2018). Perhaps they jump in to fill opening niches and catalyse evolutionary change?

Others point out many invasive species run rampant because they have no natural predators. Maybe so, but the best way to ensure a predator develops is to let a would-be prey expand its range. If there is any ecological rule, it is that an unexploited niche is an evolutionary opportunity. It is not clear how long we’d wait for animal grazers to step in, but we can be confident opportunistic microbes will quickly emerge. Again, the question is timescale. People are currently testing fungi that might infect Himalayan Balsam (Tanner et al., 2015)— but we know that if we didn’t, something would evolve anyway. What is the rush? What kind of hero story do we need to maintain? Why do we need to insist that the intervention restoring balance come from us rather than nature? And how does this hero story link up with the villain story? Is there a tragic feedback loop between guilt and hubris? Instead of revelling in a nature increasingly manipulated to fulfil an image we’ve concocted from the arbitrary past, might we not become careful students and attentive lovers of the process by which ecosystems adjust and accommodate change? Is nature an active intelligent process or a static process to be preserved? Might ecosystems’ self-regulation exceed our comprehension? The biosphere, after all, evolved myriad creatures in complex co-existence with all their countless fascinating features. Surely the arrival of new species— be it through hitching on the backs of birds, on logs projected into the seas by violent monsoon rivers, or through continental merging —is nothing new in the story of the Earth. What role does patience, indeed humility, play in conservation?

With these thoughts in mind, I google how Anishnaabe people view invasive species. As many Anishnaabe people still live in intercourse with the land, I imagine invasive species might impact them more directly than urbanites who malign new species’ encroachments on their places of leisure. Reo and Ogden’s (2018) ethnography of indigenous Anishnaabe communities reveals some common features lacing through a wide variety of views and practices towards invasive species. Anishnaabe people are likely to view invasive species as migrating communities or, as they call them, nations. Many consider every nation to have gifts to share, and accepting their gifts fosters reciprocal responsibilities of care and respect. Human and more-than-human nations may not yet know or understand the gifts a new nation might bring to a place, but all have an active role in co-determining the new relationship that will emerge. So, whilst important food and medicines are often significantly affected by the arrival of a new species, for the most part the attitude is ‘let’s wait and see’. In other words, the process begins with listening.

Perhaps we need not wait for fungi or bacteria to make food of Himalayan Balsam. It has been around the British Isles long enough for many of us to know how delicious its yellow seeds can be. To me, they taste a bit like watermelon. If more of us consumed this offering with gratitude, their numbers might be controlled but not eliminated, and our community made the better for it. That might be a better lesson for our children.

References

Davis, M. (2011) ‘Do Native Birds Care Whether Their Berries Are Native or Exotic? No.’ in BioScience, 61(7): 501–502

Horsely, C. (2016) ‘Alien invasions! Himalayan Balsam, friend or foe?’ in Buzzword 32, November 2016

Pearce, F. (2015) The new wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation. Icon Books: London, UK

Reo, N.J. & Ogden, L.A. (2018). ‘Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species,’ in Sustainability Science 13: 1443-1452

Tanner, R.A.; Pollard, K.M.; Varia, S.; Evans, H.C. & Ellison, C.A. (2015) ‘First release of a fungal classical biocontrol agent against an invasive alien weed in Europe: biology of the rust, Puccinia komarovii var. glanduliferae,’ in Plant Pathology, 64(5):1130-1139.

Thomas, C.D. (2018) Inheritors of the earth. Penguin: New York

February 13, 2021

Contemplating contemplation II: Dewey’s “qualitative thought”

This is a further development of an earlier blogpost, entitled “Contemplating Contemplation”

Given the logocentric tendencies of modern western culture, it is unsurprising that the need for a contemplative approach has been systematically disparaged and neglected. Even Derrida, arch critic of logocentrism (1976), with his busy weaving and winding of words, could hardly escape its grasp. Education theorists who do venture broader conception of thinking and embodiment are quickly contained; liquidated of their explorations in secondary interpretations. This is perhaps most striking in the case of John Dewey (Pappas, 2016). For Dewey, language and linguistic thinking was a small fraction of embodied cognition, which he referred to as “qualitative thought.” He considered qualitative thought to be the non-reflective, non-linguistic, affective and evolving base that contextualises lived situations. As a base, it contextualises everything that occurs in a situation, including the forms of logical thinking that emerge in it. As such, Pappas and others (ex. Johnson 2008) strongly critique the attempt to sequester Dewey’s (1916; 1930) observations about qualitative thought to soft subjects, like art and aesthetics, and insist that this embodied affective dimension is key to understanding even (and perhaps especially) the processes underlying the seemingly coolest empirical work or most austere and abstract reasoning. Recognizing the phenomenological dimensions of American pragmatism, they seek to bring to contemporary awareness an observation pithily captured well over a century ago by William James: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (James, 1890, p. 256). (Here is a lecture by Mark Johnson, one of the leading philosophers working to heal the right between thought, feeling, and the body).

The result of this Deweyan fracture has had reaching impacts educational considerations. One of his most popular applied ideas is certainly his famous reflective loop (1910), arcing thinking and action in an experiential circuit. The originary and ongoing role of the qualitative dimension of thought is pervasively ignored in popularized descriptions of this concept, rendering it a seemingly mechanical process. This ignorance reflects the epistemological bias of his readers rather than his position (Alexander 2013). An education that recognizes the importance of qualitative experience, seeks to develop skills in which people can pay attention to them as a necessary part of devoting oneself to understanding and developing thought. This follows from the fact that a qualitative dimension is both the fountain and foundation for any logos. To do this, what is needed is more explicit contemplative pedagogies.

With contemplative approaches, we learn to slow ourselves down. This can assist in thinking in copious ways, one of which is that it enables us to examine single propositions. We can take a single claim which we have (unreflectively or reflectively) assumed as true, and let ourselves explore the relationship between that proposition and the more-than-linguistic reality it births from and seeks to describe. It takes seriously the notion that “language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought” (John Dewey LW 5:250). In so doing, it unhinges us from a dogmatic allegiance to what James and Dewey called “intellectualism.” James (1909) described it in these terms:

We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of “nothing but” that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought.

But key to the success of such an approach is a release from the obsession with the relationship between epistemology and language -from correlationism. To understand the qualitative context out of which a linguistic articulation emerges, we must be able to let ourselves experience and pay attention to the unique character of the situations we find ourselves in. This involves cultivating openness, which means (in different situations) self-compassion, a sense of wonder, humility, appreciation, and peace (we shall have a sense to explore how these are connected). Openness depends upon, and yet enables these and other affects developed through contemplative approaches. One consequence of openness is that inquiry will involve moments -many moments in fact- where the mind drifts from its object of attention. It accepts this movement because openness develops trust that the mind may be at work even if progress is not clear and available to conscious thought, either in conceptual terms or in in felt experience. The emotions, feelings, and thoughts that emerge from a particular focus must be allowed freedom to flow as they may. Paying attention to qualitative thought therefore means letting it evolve as it will. If the conscious mind seeks to police what type of thought is allowed or type of feeling experienced, it will tend to conform understanding of the topic at hand to preset contours. When this inversion occurs, such thinking redirects the quality of the lived situation from which it emerged. While this may be necessary at certain stages of understanding (here is where Dewey’s very specific use of the term “instrumentalism” comes in –where a purpose for intervening in the situation is taken up and the relationship with one’s environment coordinated thereby), it goes against the very nature of exploration. In other words, it may that some of the thoughts and feelings we have are indeed “tangents.” The flow of experience is such that unconnected ideas, feelings, or thoughts do jump into the current. At some point, we will need to make a decision about what is relevant and what is not relevant in our understanding of our topic. The point is only that this decision cannot be made ahead of time without stifling clearer listening, and consequently better responsiveness and creativity.

Given the famous (and now quite old) stories of Kekule, Poincare and others, the more-than-rational “logic of discovery” should really be at the forefront of education. An attentiveness, an openness and the capacity to receive, has been repeatedly shown to be a necessary (but not sufficient) element in creative and scientific endeavors. But its value extends far beyond these spheres. One area of crucial importance is the ethical dimension. In this fast moving world, with the urgency of the ecological crisis ever looming, can we allow ourselves remain in a state of ethical perplexity, patiently awaiting the consolidation of a proper response? It seems that the skill will become increasingly difficult as it becomes evermore necessary, as the demand for panic-alleviating solutions drives easily accessible cognocentricism. Can the jump to Deweyan instrumentality before adequately engaging in Deweyan listening do anything but exacerbate what is likely also a crisis in our capacity to attend? I suspect that navigating between panic and patience will become a defining challenge for environmental education in this century.

References

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

Alexander, T. (2013). The human eros. New York: Fordham University Press.

Derrida, J (1976), Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Dewey, J. (1930, 1984). Qualitative thought. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, Vol. 5 (pp. 243-262). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Essays in experimental logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. DC Heath and Co.

James, William (1909/1979) The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’, Harvard University Press, pp. 135-136.

James, William (1890). Principles of psychology, Volume 1. Dover.

Johnson, Mark (2008). The meaning of the body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pappas, Gregory F. (2016). John Dewey’s radical logic: The function of the qualitative in thinking. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52(3), 435-468.

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.

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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.