Rewilding biology may certainly involve more transects, ID keys, multisensory exploration, and outdoor time. However, I argue a much more pervasive transformation is needed. In a nutshell, the problem is that while the living world as directly experienced might seem wild, classroom explanations hardly acknowledge the role that wildness plays throughout biological processes. With the exception of “genetic mutations” in natural selection and antibodies in the immune system, the overall lesson students learn about the biological world is that it is fundamentally composed of functional and dysfunctional mechanisms. This is out of step with what scientists observe a multiple biological levels of organisation, where in each case, the capricious and the coordinated combine.
Consider that it is now known that most proteins are “intrinsically disordered”, constantly fluctuating between indefinite ranges of configurations, and disrupting the notion that enzymes and signalling molecules are predictable mechanisms. However, in the Scottish (as elsewhere) high school biology classroom, proteins are described as having fixed structures altered only by external factors. Proteins are hardly unique. Scientists also know that most genes are sometimes (when?) ‘alternatively spliced,’ with some genes capable of producing thousands of different protein variants. An indefinite number of proteins, each which can produce an indefinite number of structural conformations. (And even between transcription and protein synthesis, there are several other wilding processes (such as post-translational modifications), which I will ignore here). I will also ignore the synergistic interaction between these various processes (Niklas et al. 2015).
The point is that from genes, to cells, tissues, organs, organisms and ecologies, within and between each level arises both new structures and regularities, and new kinds of indeterminacy. Such open-endedness not only enables more diverse functionality, but also the possibility of new functions to accommodate unpredicted situations, and is key to the resilience, creativity, and evolvability of life. This is not only happening in the long, slow and invisible timeline of Darwinian evolution. It is happening right now as each organism around you (and you, as well) is engaging with a specific situation that, in significant or nuanced ways, has never occurred before. We all need a repertoire of possibilities up our sleeves.
Common-sense intuitions are right, life is wild. When in the forest or the field, we see themes, like “oak” or “squirrel” or “inkcap mushroom.” A biology student may come to believe that the oak tree is merely the expression of a genetic programme modulated by ‘the environment’, or the squirrel simply performing preset instincts to pass on its genes. But in direct experience we can feel each particular being’s uniqueness, and sense its freedom. One reason why field studies is important is that it provides direct encounter with a wildness that is pervasive, yet occluded in the presentation biological process at other levels in the curriculum. It can teach us about the nature and role of the capricious, and give us clues for what to look for as we rewild our various mechanistic explanations.
There is no pedagogical or ethical justification not to foreground wildness in biology curricula, but students exit Scottish (and other) education system believing “properly functioning” biology is fundamentally mechanical. I can think of two main reasons why mechanistic explanations persist despite much evidence. The first is habit. In the 20th Century, much of biology tried to achieve rigorous scientific status by producing causal explanations modelled on a Newtonian worldview. The momentum of this aspiration is still felt in vestigial biological metaphors, textbooks, and modes of reasoning. The second is economical and practical. Industries benefit from finding more or less reliable mechanisms, because they can be harnessed or manipulated in various ways. I think these two reasons co-conspire in ways that are not to the ultimate benefit of students, nor society and nature. Mechanistic presumptions unhelpfully distort how people approach diverse contemporary issues, from ecological management to biotechnology. Our pedagogies too become mechanistic.
And yet, even here we should expect life to be rewilding our efforts. The mechanistic conservation scheme will give rise to unanticipated ecological developments, the biotechnological intervention to unconceived side effects, and the classroom dynamic will quickly show us that our mechanistic approaches are hardly performing the functions they were intended for.
(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.
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
Like artists, teachers face situations where they must make sense of and respond to dynamic tensions. For artists, this may involve things like the interplay between light and dark, detail and blurriness, foreground and background, and, of course, the relationship of these tensions with one another. Educators may have versions of these same aesthetic problems, but unlike the artist, they occur within educational situations and can be thought of as educational tensions. Educational tensions are complex problems which involve grappling with, and possibly dialoguing between diverse or contrasting factors that matter educationally. When and how do I bring myself into my teaching, and when do I hold back from doing so? When do I quietly support a student who is lacking confidence, and when (and how) do I challenge them? When and how do I resist department and school authorities’ plans or practices? And so on.
One approach is to collapse the tensions, perhaps by concretising them into “if x, do y” algorithms. Another is to embrace the chaos by concluding that it simply a matter of ‘balance’, which often ends up being whatever compromised position one ends up taking, retroactively justified. Sometimes we surrender to an ad hoc alliance between our motivations to control and our desire to abdicate responsibility. While it is inevitable (and good) that we develop habits thinking and action that categorise similar situations together (and from which arises the possibility of categorical responses in turn), two complex situations may be similar along many key dimensions but require very different approaches. Complex dynamic situations have too many parts, ill defined parts, and are changing on their own and through our interaction with them. When to go with existing habits and when to doubt them? Another educational tension.
Getting a sense of how things hang together and develop, where they might go, and one’s place in the ecology, is an ongoing aesthetic process, and responding requires artistry. But what is required to respond with artistry, and what does it mean for teacher education programmes? Artistry too is a kind of alliance between intervening in situations and letting things be. But it is hardly ad hoc, nor can it be smothered by the word ‘balance’. Artistic resolution is not some comfy ‘it depends’. It does depend, preciously so, but sometimes the situation calls one to take risks so extreme they fall outside even the boundaries we thought defined the tension. Other times not. What guides how even this educational tension –between doing and letting be– comes together, and how to know if we have been led astray? What guides an artist? What guides a teacher?
Teacher educators might begin by telling student teachers about the complexity and need for artistry. I think this is not likely to be effective (for several reasons). Nor would simply ‘modelling’ artistry in one’s own practice suffice (also for several reasons, starting with it not being clear whether ‘modelling artistry’ is an oxymoron: to model it well, must forget we are modelling?). Both telling and modelling may be necessary, but neither are sufficient. They do not cut to the heart of the matter.
I suggest attending to the heart of educational tensions is deeply interconnected with attending to one’s heart, and that this is where teacher educators should start. The perception of an educational tension is felt as a tension in one’s body. Sitting in a problematic situation means sitting in uncomfortable feelings. Conversely, perceiving and attending to the problems that call us connect us to what we care about. Our educational tensions are not generic, and they find us.
The relationship between an educational tension we perceive and the corresponding tension we feel is the context for the possibility of artistry in teaching, but also why artistry is too often evaded. It sometimes hurts to be so called, but it is the kind of gratifying pain that draws the artist back to her easel or fretboard.
We sometimes settle on a solution that addresses the tension arising in our body rather than the situation our heart resonated with and called us to attend. We forget the cord. We deny the invitation. Sometimes this means we flee entirely, but often it means we decide some course of action is “good enough” and release ourselves from the burden of its presence. Exhaustion and fear (of uncertainty, failure, embarassment, etc) can also drive teachers (and the education system generally) towards premature resolutions. Competing pressures on time and a culture that does not value deep attention co-conspire with this drive towards goodenoughism. “Good enough” is sometimes good enough, especially when responding to tensions we face from tasks imposed but meaningless. But goodenoughism can be bad faith, a sleight of hand trick we concoct to lose contact, with our selves and with the other in a single puff of smoke, without seeing clearly that we have done so.
The kind of attitude one has towards what one works with contours the space of possibilities for engaging with it. For example, being fearful contorts how we are able to face and engage with uncertainty, whether we are willing to change opinions, ‘stick to our guns’, or be open to otherness, not to mention our stamina in holding genuine and ongoing concern for where it is all going. Unlike fear, care is an emotion/attitude that orients towards tensions differently. If we care about something, we will not settle on a solution that is simply good enough to calm us into not worrying about it. An artist that cares about a piece may rework a painting for hours and days even if they had thought it was ‘almost finished’. Artists do not aim for ‘good enough’ in what matters to them. They are guided by tensions in what they work with, and will not settle on shortcuts that anaesthetise their engagement too early. They keep themselves connected, and com-passion orients their endeavours. (This does not imply ‘perfectionism,’ which itself denies artfully encountering the tension discussed earlier, between intervening and letting things be.) The attitude artists manifest immerses good teachers too.
But why care, especially if it can lead to sleeplessness? Or if a ‘perfect’ outcome is not possible anyway? For those who fear caring, care seems like putting oneself in an unnecessarily vulnerable position. It seems like precarious sacrifice. It certainly doesn’t seem relaxing. But those who have devoted themselves to caring know the kind of beauty that can arise when participating in the ecology of the heart: that sacred feedback loop between more deeply encountering and responding to otherness, and more deeply encountering and responding our own selves. We grow as people, into new distinctions, nuances, pains and delights, as we grow more perceptive and engaged in the needs and possibilities of another. Care holds us back from overdetermining or underdetermining a situation. It has us revisit and recalibrate as our ongoing perception of the situation reforms itself.
Maybe teacher education should acknowledge and theorise such matters. More importantly, it needs to make space for student teachers to experience caring through educational tensions. For example, educational tensions arise naturally during placements. Picking up on the tension new teachers feel, mentors and others quickly try to provide solutions. If we believe care matters, then caring for a new teacher’s cares also matters. This raises its own educational tensions for the teacher educator, and along with it the possibility of heartfelt artistry.
I don’t think it is arbitrary that philosophy comes back, again and again to certain kinds of concepts. As I posted earlier, a philosophical experience can be seen as the disorienting severance from structures of meaning and action that we unreflectively partake in. But not all concepts are equal. The disruption of our unreflected upon use of certain implicit premises is more disorienting than others. Some such structures are relatively ‘higher up’, meaning less is disruptive when called into question. But other notions hold mountains above them, so when they are challenged, the level of possible disorientation that ensues is much more profound.
This is one reason why philosophy returns to questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics, ie to being, knowing, and doing. All trace back to basic categorical orientations of how we conceive and participate in the world, and which underlie language. Questioning ‘being’ is asking things about the nature of what we call nouns, questioning ‘doing’ asks about the nature of what we call verbs. Such questions operate at a fundamental level because they engage the different basic categorical ways in which we encounter ourselves and the world. “Basic categorical ways” means that, while particular nouns and verbs may be disrupted (and disruptive), by disrupting noun and verb themselves, we also disrupts all of the terms within them. ‘Knowing’ is a bit different. It is not represented in any basic grammatical category. However, it is also basic and underlies language because the utterance of any sentence implies an unquestioned cognisance of some sort. To say anything indicates an epistemological attitude towards what has been expressed, that we believe it, think it is true, for example. For example, the sentence “I am not sure” implies some certainty that I am not sure, an epistemological attitude underlying its formation and independent of its particular claim. (There is no getting around this. As soon as I say “I am not sure even if I am not sure” it is then that claim which holds some authority). The basic point is that something like knowing is unreflectively present and widespread, just as are things like doing and being.
The particular philosophical attitude that each of these fundamental and pervasive aspects call upon in us is itself a reflection of the differences between them in daily experience. For example, doing is an activity, and when “I” am doing something, there is a feeling that I am involved in the world, can direct myself, and that my doing has effects. It is because the unreflected subjective experience of doing has these dimensions that it generates ethical questions. Doing in non-subjective experiences may lack certain of these feelings, and attenuate others. For example, a rock falling off a cliff may not seem directed, and its effects are instead foregrounded. So doing in some circumstances can also lead to philosophical disorientation about the nature of causality. Both in turn are very different from the kinds of questions that arise when we think what it means for something to ‘be’. The particular philosophical experiences that arise from questioning what ‘noun’ is, in turn depends on what entity we are considering ‘to be’. Again, for example, whether that entity is a subject or not leads to different philosophical experiences with different attitudes for exploration. The reader will detect an obvious side effect. Philosophical experiences foregrounds how words such as being and doing, seem to have coherent and pragmatically understood meanings in unreflected upon daily life, but actually harbour very different and conflicting phenomena under their umbrella. This realisation is itself disorienting, itself a philosophical experience.
Aesthetics is another big basic area in philosophy, and it is probably not far off to suggest that it has something to do with exploring what it means to live in a world where there are qualities in phenomena, which we call adjectives and adverbs.
There are other perennial philosophical topics, such as what is: thinking, mind, time, consciousness, understanding, truth, explanation, goodness, purpose, nature, and so on. Time (and space) are interesting in a similar way to knowing. Rather than being an instance of a basic grammatical category, or an aspect that arises through questioning such categories, time and space also appear as underlying the possibility of utterance in the first place. Kant called them forms of intuition, and distinguishes them from categories. (He also thought that time was connected to the kind of knowing that broadly underlies awareness and language, above, in the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’). The kind of philosophy that engages time and space is thus expected to have a style different from the rest in this list. The others terms seem to develop from distinctions, approaches, and questions that arise within the base categories. For example, although understanding is different from knowing, it can be thought of as a distinction within epistemology. (Obviously, I am not using the word category in the same way as Kant’s first critique, which consisted of discriminations of categories within knowing. It is closer to the kind of categorisation that led Kant to separate books on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics.)
As far as educational implications, I am not going to suggest some simplistic scaffolding story. It cannot be the case that those uncomfortable with the disorienting feeling of philosophical experiences can slowly be inducted into it in a straightfoward way, such as starting with what I have called ‘higher level’ experiences and moving gradually towards the bottomless depths. Whether or not a disorientation is uncomfortable and avoided is much more personal than that. Some people may be comfortable with the abstract musings of reconstructing basic premises because doing so is ‘armchair’ enough to not have significance in their ‘real worlds’. Or the other way around. Some topics (such as death, which is a philosophical atomic bomb) are philosophical experiences (related perhaps to time and nouns and other things) that can hit harder even if they are at a higher level. The important idea is that it is crucial for educators to at least be aware of the layeredness of philosophical experiences, and to explore and experiment with individual students to see what trajectory towards more profound philosophical experiences is possible.
There is also implications for learning for sustainability, but here I will list just one. If it is the case that most of our unreflected upon behaviour is also destructive, then philosophy can play a role in calling such patterns into question. We might even say that philosophy can disrupt disruptive habits, relationships, and ways of understanding, and in so doing, make space for alternative ways of recoordinating with ourselves, people and the planet. In this way, among others, philosophising education plays a role in the broader project of ecologising education.
I am interested in bringing philosophy into teaching, and believe it plays an important role in all educational activities. There is a field called “philosophy of education,” but this is primarily interested in generating philosophical questions about education. In philosophy of education classes, students philosophise about educational issues. This tends to place emphasis on the role philosophy can play in conceiving (and practicing) pedagogy.
But outside of philosophy of education, students can profit from philosophising topics of any course. Philosophical issues are implicit, explicit or nascent in particular topics within a subject, but are also present in the relationship between subjects, and in the relationship between what is taught and how it is taught (ie curriculum and pedagogy). To bring philosophising into education in this way connects with certain philosophical premises about the purposes and nature of education. For example, philosophising tends to leave students with more questions than answers, and against a view which sees education as the commitment to replace ‘ignorance’ with ‘knowledge.’ Because my main interests are ecological education and biology education, I am always finding philosophical questions to bring out in these areas. While I think there is a place for ‘understanding’ ecological and biological phenomena, I think the artistry of education involves navigating an ongoing situation which involves making and breaking questions and answers. When to linger on one or the other, or to rupture them, is the process I aspire to improve in my pedagogy.
I think academic philosophy is becoming increasingly unphilosophical, so my bringing philosophy into education is not an attempt to get people acting like professional philosophers. My main concern with professional philosophy is that the ‘philosophical experience’ is very often absent or buried, because of the tendency to focus on quality and validity of method, which for philosophers is mainly the development of arguments. The focus on developing better arguments may have its own pedagogical value, but on its own I consider this to be the field of logic, not philosophy. I suggest that bad philosophical positions can be investigated and defended with highly rigorous arguments, while important philosophical positions can be developed through poor ones. While an important philosophical position argued well is perhaps the best outcome, given the choice between the two options in the previous sentence, I would often opt for the good philosophical idea over the good argument. The fact that Plato continues to be read, even though first year undergraduates can rather easily punch holes in his arguments, suggests that this intuition is still held by others, and that despite appearances the philosophical spirit has not yet been destroyed by logicians. His ideas are defended with new arguments, or tweaked and then supported, suggesting method is subservient to vision. Why else do some ideas get resuscitated perpetually, while others are left to fall away?
A master logician might see errors in arguments so quickly that they prevent themselves from ‘experiencing’ the idea being argued for. Also note that a computer could in principle identify errors and develop logical arguments extremely effectively, but is unlikely to be considered a philosophical machine. Perhaps pedagogically, an argument sometimes only needs to be as good as is necessary for a student to take the idea seriously, and imagine what the world is like through that lens. Perhaps it only needs to be good enough for a student to care enough to enter into that world, explore it, and spontaneously develop their own reasons, consequences and connections, –but also feelings– within it. To ‘experience’ the world philosophically.
I used the word ‘philosophical experience’ and ‘philosophical question,’ and claim that these are importance, not only for retaining the philosophical spirit, but also pedagogically. What what is a philosophical question, and what is it like to experience such questions?
A philosophical experience can be characterised in several ways. Here are two preliminary intuitions:
1) A philosophical experience occurs when something one unreflectively assumes, and which forms the basis of daily life, is suddenly the focus of consciousness and our assumed attitude cast in doubt. Such an experience renders to that thing a sense that it is both better known and less well known than it was previously. It appears as ‘better known’ in the sense that our previously unreflected-upon engagement with that idea now appears somewhat dreamlike and superficial. But for this same reason the thing also appears less well known, and mysterious. Such experience is similar to how a word appears odd when we dissociate it from its use by saying it many times. As such, a philosophical experience needs no argument at all. It can even be experienced without words, as gestalt switch, an insight, a possibility, a doubt or a contradiction.
2) Often a kind of jamais-vue, philosophical experience is inherently an emotional experience. It can be exciting, terrifying, lonely, eery, beautiful, confusing, loving, or a combination of all. There is something uncanny and disruptive about philosophical experiences. They are discoordinating and disorienting because such experiences open and then sustain questions which shake basic foundational assumptions we rely on in our lives, and put at risk any sense of firm footing in the world. A philosophical experience feels like an adventure. It can feel dangerous, and people may not be equally open to it, or need different kinds of scaffolding or preparation for it.
One reason philosophical experience / questions is backgrounded in courses (including philosophy courses) is because it seems more difficult to standardise a way of evaluating its quality. I believe I can sense when someone is experiencing a philosophical problem, but it is harder to pinpoint on rubric sheets just what a marker would be looking for compared with, say, the validity of the argument. This leads to another version of Biesta’s (2009) observation that in assessment, we tend to value what we can measure rather than measuring what we value. (We could call this ‘the assessment fallacy’, recognising its resonance with Dewey’s ‘philosophical fallacy’). Another reason it is backgrounded is because students and teachers may have unquestioned assumptions about the purpose of education at odds with cultivating philosophical experiences.
Of course, the development of arguments and the development of ideas cannot be as easily parsed as is suggested here. The act of working out an argument is sometimes a clarification of its consequences, scope, conditions, and connections with other ideas, and so developing arguments can itself be the act of dwelling in a philosophical experience. But even here, I am not so sure the quality of the argument always matters. Sometimes, the arguments provide qualitative depth and texture to the philosophical idea. Other times, I feel it is the time spent reading or thinking up the arguments that sustains the philosophical experience, and that the minimal condition is that such arguments are simply ‘believable enough’ to hold this imaginative space. In any case, argument is subservient to the ideas it develops.
The assumption that it would be otherwise is grounded in the premise that our beliefs are founded and develop primarily through reason, evidence and justification. But we often have a feeling that something is plausible or true, and then work out why we think this is the case. If the philosophical experience is important in education, then the cultivation of plausible possibilities becomes paramount. In addition to reasoning, this requires an engagement with the full dimension of what underlies a person’s openness to novel ideas. This means philosophising education has psychological dimensions too, a rhetorical aspect including context setting, mood, responsiveness, narrative, silence, and much else besides.
The difference between how the world appears in direct experience and how it appears through investigation generates philosophical problems. This is one reason why it is impossible to separate science education from philosophy: even if a scientific theory is not itself ‘philosophical’ (which I question, but for another time), the chasm that theory opens up when juxtaposed against taken-for-granted experience is filled with question marks. Consider, for example, the difference between the mechanical cause-and-effect explanations commonplace in molecular biology and the feeling of what it is like to be alive at ‘our’ level of the world.
One quality that obviously characterises living organisms, be it trees or birds or people, is that they are organic. This means that while there may be regularities in their structure or behaviour, they are not predictable. In animal just as in plant, life feels wild and free, each according to its kind. With the rise of mechanistic explanations, we are posed with a problem. Between wildness and mechanism, what is appearance and what is reality? This is a philosophical question, and it gives rise to philosophical hypotheses: Animals are ‘really’ just giant, complex molecules, and their wildness is just an illusion. Or, the world is everywhere wild and the causal necessity we see in biochemistry tells us more about how we look at the world when we investigate it than how it ‘really’ is. Or perhaps some hypothesis about how order evolves freedom, and so on. A similar chain of questions arise when we consider how these biochemicals are assumed to be lacking sentience whereas our experience of life is that it is filled with feeling. How did molecules become feeling? How could we know? How do we know molecules are insensate?
If we do not confront the chasm, there are pedagogical dangers. If we do, there are exciting rewards. If students are continuously taught that varied aspects of life are all explained by underlying mechanism, they may begin importing such schemes into how they template encounters with life in their daily world. I often see people explain the activity of an animal they see as ‘just instinct’, which is an effective way of shutting out any further interest into the creature. There are implications for Learning for Sustainability here, because constrained ways of seeing creatures lead to constrained ways of interacting with them, further a dislocation of humans and the rest of the living world. Alternatively, many students may simply not see the significance of these countless mechanical details, which feel disconnected from their real worlds. The may get bored and tune out, concluding that even though they thought they were passionate about the living world, biology is not for them. I worry often a combination occurs, where students abandon the subject feeling that life is a complex, tedious machine without vitality, a repetitive reorganising of particles without freshness, an intimidating scribble of acronyms and arrows without inspiration.
We might avoid turning students off by confronting the chasm head on. The contradictions between our models and the world we so clearly see and breathe gives rise to questions, and it is in these questions that students can connect the meaning of what they study to their lives. Is life just a complex molecule? If so, then why do living things seem so free? How can molecules become free and still obey their laws? If molecules have wildness in them too, then why do they succumb to our chemical theories? Is it possible to come up with an explanation that does not reduce phenomena to cause and effect mechanism? What does the answer to this question mean about human knowing and/or the world?
Exploring the chasm is the flip side of cultivating knowledge. An enriching experience more deeply encountering the world arises through engaging with the interplay between answers and questions. Science curricula will not effectively engage the imagination of many students when subject teaching is conceived primarily as the developing and deepening of knowledge alone. It will exclude those who vaguely feel the contradictions I’ve been discussing, feelings unacknowledged as the contradictions go unarticulated and the course units march on. For those teaching in countries where assessment is still geared towards establishing how many facts have been filled into the head, working the chasm will likely be a few minutes here and there, every so often. But we must judge our educational impact based on the amount of time we spend on a subject. A careful and well-timed question may take 20 seconds to pose, a further 10 seconds to linger on in silence, but have far more reaching consequences for a young person that a dozen hours spent on mandatory course specifications.
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?
Pure science is an erotic pursuit. Unlike applied research, which merely aims to create and control, the pure scientist’s quest is a reaching towards mystery. It is an attraction to what is glimpsed but hidden, felt but veiled, possibly elusive, and possibly untouchable. It is filled with risk and uncertainty and yearning. And like any erotic dynamic, its success is often deflationary. When first uncovered, scientific insights are earth-quaking— but quickly become quotidian. Who marvels much anymore that the earth revolves around the sun, or that humans are the product of evolution? Can you imagine how stunning these discoveries must have been when they first arose? The great insights science sometimes achieves are revolutionary moments of human communion with nature, moments of synchronicity— when our way of understanding meets the world. They ought to be lingered upon and revered, not shuffled into the minds of children as mere fact. What happens when schools or societies merely present the world without its startling or hidden aspects, without its fathomless depth? What ought we do to retain and enrich the erotic potential of existence?
I ask these questions as I consider the work of plant scientists investigating the secret lives of the vegetal world. On the one hand, I am enthralled by such research and excited by where it may take us. I see it as a key of hope that might unlock the modern, anaesthetised mind to the wonder of the plant world. The plethora of books on plant intelligence, communication and behaviour certainly suggests a contemporary appetite for such insight. But I am also concerned this might be a deal with the devil. At what point have we gathered enough suggestions that the plant world is more than it appears to be? Does science need to rush in and bring every dark underside into the glare of its explicit light? Of course, plant explorations may be endless, in which case we need never worry about all these sacred question marks getting flipped on their heads. Each answer would always reveal new questions, and the erotic would be forever intact. Yes, perhaps everything in the universe has infinite sides to it— an insurance against the sloppy greed of reaching hands. It would be a gift we hardly deserve.
But perhaps not.
There was only one Copernican revolution. From that point on, progress has been about filling in details. Consider the discovery that Jupiter has moons. Fascinating to be sure, but not earth-shattering. That the sun itself spirals around the Milky Way, while still cool, does not have the same mind-bending significance as earth’s original displacement. It is a variation on a theme, as is the finding that the Milky Way is itself spinning around some even greater celestial centre. So, too, there was only one Einsteinian revolution, and one Darwinian revolution— even though people continue to discuss how spacetime works and evolution occurs. So, perhaps one day there will be no more revolutions left to be had. Perhaps after discovering plant learning and plant communication, we will continue to debate all the bits and pieces of how it happens, but in a sense, it will all be the equivalent of finding more moons orbiting Jupiter.
I suppose I am beginning to wonder heretical things. Has the time come to ask if slowing down, or even stopping scientific research into plants might be needed? We have enough empirical data to meditate upon for decades to come. Perhaps we need to work out what kind of relationships are being asked of us given the insights gained, given the silences we can still feel, and to do more listening than quarrying. But we seem hellbent on pushing past what we have tasted rather than dwelling on it and allowing it into our minds and hearts. I have often argued that pure science is important, and been critical of what seems instrumentalising and corrupt about applied science. But would it really be all that bad if capitalism continued to claw away at pure science and succeeded in reducing all inquiry to technological research and development? If, in desecrating our capacity to uncover the glory, the churning economy accidentally protects it? I suppose the eros that drives me to pure science is the same eros that hesitates before it.
One might counter: what you say about scientific progress might be generally true, but scientific facts that point towards and make more plausible the possibility of sentience in another creature are an exception. For hundreds of years, Western science has fixated on explaining the world through identifying underlying mechanisms and regularities. As a consequence of this way of thinking filtering down into society, many people see plants as no more than very complex molecules. Beautiful perhaps, but certainly not as having any inner life. One could see the explosion of interest in plant intelligence as an attempt to culturally recover from the grip of this worldview. The surprising complexity and responsiveness that science reveals makes it again conceivable to ask questions such as: ‘What is it like to be a plant?’ In this way, science may be saving plants from the effects of former science, of lifting itself out of its own limitations. By opening up the possibility of sentience in another, science is thereby birthing an unknowability into the universe it presumes to know. Further scientific insight into plants would become more beguiling the more we catch glimpses of the previously unknown because the sentience of another
can only be inferred but not experienced directly. So, at least in this instance, science might be bringing the mist back to the mountaintops.
But is this the antidote we need? I tend to think this gain is temporary and full of risk. It seems to me that intelligence, decision-making, communication, or behaviour revealed in plants by science invariably appears under the vice of mechanical explanations. Science cannot do otherwise. Its entire strategy is to create explanations that are reliably and physically observable. Even our brains, conscious if anything is, appear as but a dizzying network of chemistry and physics when looked at closely enough by science. Even if the organisation of the material world causes consciousness to emerge, no model of the brain leads intuitively from stuff to subjectivity. It is not clear whether neuroscience, let alone plant science, would be able to free anyone from the totalising clutch of scientific mechanism. The only reason we are able to defer this perspective in plant science or in neuroscience is because we have not yet discovered all the mechanisms. Here, remaining question marks provide a promissory note, a space where the objective and the subjective might paradoxically co-exist. But as long as science is the principle means of discovery, only objects will be pulled from that ever-diminishing pool of space.
In any case, knowledge is too cheap in our era. We google it for a quick fix. The erotic is fragile, the mist on the mountain burned away by the sun. We run to the light in the glee of revelation, and the erotic becomes an ever more endangered experience. We must do what we can to nurture it. I suppose what I am suggesting is that human knowing should slow down and re-join the rest of the human spirit, get back into intercourse with the ecology in which it exists— which includes the heart, the body, and the world. I suppose I am suggesting we sit back and spend some time quietly with the plant world, rather than reading about it on the backs of their fallen ancestors. The meaning of recent insights needs to circle back into direct experience, so new intimacies and new questions can arise in encounter with the plant world around us.
February is ending, 56 degrees latitude, east side island, eastside Atlantic. The world is still shivery but from sky to sky it is blossoming, and my inwardliness is also unfolding outward. The crocuses are sending orange and violet flames from the grass, but this time of growth does not belong to the plants. This blossom is of the Sun and the swift elemental energies it circulates into expression. An aggressive vigour develops the air, hurtles windy momentum, and light breaks new angles between buildings, new geometries cast almost daily now onto the city’s granite floor. My eyes can feel it even if my skin is attuned to a different spring, one that will only appear once lakes and oceans embrace these energies and contribute to them in turn.
Days have been getting longer with the northern tilt’s accelerating plummet toward the fire orb. The stretching of daylight is at first undetectable to my eyes and nose. Measured in seconds added to the day, the solstice holds winter in what seems a catatonic lull, ambiguous in its beginning and end -until one day it isn’t. The shift is felt in ways I live but do not always acknowledge. The alleyway I pass on my morning walk now glitters in light rather than shadow. The difference is felt but not cognised, the stroll feels brighter even if I do not pinpoint why.
The first climax of light will come this year on March 20th at 9:58 pm, but this climax like all celestial transitions, comes with its paradoxes.
Between March 10th and March 26th, days will be getting longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. Between winter solstice and this time, days were getting longer more and more quickly, after march, days will be getting longer more slowly. We are now rushing towards this peak in vim, after which will be its ageing and senescence. The official first day of birth is the first day of death. Ostara is an inflection point.
Growing up, our summer break always seem to coincide with my father grumbling that autumn had arrived: the days were now getting shorter (his unsolicited astronomical realism never seemed to raise its head during winter solstice). But as I contemplate the hurtling unfolding before me, it seems summer solstice is already the second autumn of the year (my father might be proud of this pessimistic observation). The rate at which days get longer begins to slow in March, decelerating to a standstill in June.
In other words, we are observing changes, and we are also observing changes to the rate of changes. The latter is what mathematicians call “first derivatives” of differential equations. The first derivative of velocity is acceleration. Let’s follow the seasons with an eye on such rates of change. From June until September, death will gain increasingly in vitality, days not only getting shorter but getting shorter increasingly quickly (and like the initial hiddenness of January’s Spring, this death is hidden for awhile by the slow transition and the lagging heat). When the heat begins to catch up a bit, the loss of light is in free fall and Mabon lurks. His first Spring a hidden bloom: beneath the autumnal gloom, with everything about us is withering back into the ground, the accelerating darknesses pivots and pulls away.
But does it end there?
The cos x curve depicts the rates of change of the sin x curve
If changes in daylight hours etch a sine curve into the galaxy, high school mathematics tells us that changes to these changes is a cosine curve. This is represented as f’(x)sin x = cos x. But the rate of change of the cosine graph is an inverse sine curve (-sin x). There is a technical term for this. The rate of change of acceleration is called “jerk” -a term which is almost certain to confuse any intuitive sense we have of what is going on in the passage of the seasons. Because all derivatives of the sin curve are oscillate with the same amplitude and frequency as the original curve, the only difference we should expect is phasic. But can we experience this?
I think we can. In fact, I have already alluded to it above. Between March 10th and March 26th, days get longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. This approximation hid the fact that the rate of change at which days were getting longer was itself changing extremely slowly. Days are getting longer more quickly, but longer more quickly more slowly. Compare this to the difference between December 23rd and 24th last year. On December 23rd there was 9 seconds more light than the 22nd. On December 24th, there was 17 seconds more light than on the 23rd. The rate of change in March is almost constant even though it is dramatic. The rate of change is in rapid flux in December even though it is imperceptible. There is a lull at the equinoxes too, but unlike the lull during the solstices, it is a lull where we stop feeling the days accelerating. For a week or so, they just seem to be in an almost steady acceleration.
I believe this is the end of what can be perceived (and this only with some difficulty). Who knows what if further derivatives are picked up on and responded to by other creatures? But the mathematics suggest that the extent to which life and death are intertwined in the seasons goes well beyond what has so far been suggested. The derivative of -sin x is -cos x, and the derivative of -cos x is sin x. After four derivatives, we return full circle. Although this cannot be felt or witnessed, it suggests something very powerful and subtle. Superficially, it evokes the four seasons that are themselves also indications of cyclicity. But the more luminous point is that with sin curves there are an infinite number of rates of rates of change, each an oscillating wave. There is no end in sight. In March, the rate in which the rate of change in daylight is changing, is itself changing too, this rate too is changing, and so on ad infinitum. Wrapped into the dynamics of the sine curve is an infinitely intricate conjoinment of slowing downs and speeding ups. Every inflection point is a turning point governed by a new inflection point.
The fourth derivative of sin x is sin x
The solstices and the equinoxes are all moments where solar expansion and withdrawal switch hands, one birthing process now dying, but within that dying another birth. This reveals in the most acute way a concrete and infinite dialectical contradiction.
It is for each teacher to figure out what kind of teacher they are.
At one point, I was very attracted to student-centred teaching, especially those models that broke down the teacher-student relationship in favour of a community of co-learners. I developed a school where the attempt to do this was itself a large part of the curriculum. I was attracted to Freire’s critique of banking education, and of the project-oriented Deweyan student. These approaches made sense. They seemed right, and not just in terms of my learning style. I also felt that such pedagogies were attempting to enact an attractive democratic vision that I’d like to see come alive writ large.
But I found very few, if any, situations where they seemed to ‘work’. Most often, students would complain about lack of structure, about excessive focus on process, and about not feeling like their errors were being corrected (students often have a healthy suspicion of the platitude ‘there are no right or wrong answers’). I confess to feeling that the aimless atmosphere evoked in these attempts often led me to lose confidence in my learning and in my educators’ capacity to facilitate such learning. The student centred teacher might be delighted to hear that their authority was being questioned. But I don’t think it was being questioned in the way they might hope. (They might be delighted in that too, but again for the wrong reasons).
I felt there was something missing but my conviction that such pedagogies must be right led me to fast and easy excuses: growing up in a system that so favours authoritarian approaches, I’d ask myself, is it any wonder that there is some bumbling about on the part of teachers and students in recreating democratic pedagogies? I was reminded of how I would analogously defend those rudderless moments in my community activism work. In that work, I often witnessed an abundant need for people to debate microdetails. I saw that being suddenly able to have strong agency in a collaborative process meant we now needed to learn that responsible agency is partly knowing when not to exercise agency. In both the classroom and the community, certain types of engagement with democracy can quickly lead people to yearn for the vision of the ‘benevolent dictator’ that provides a goal and context that people can work within. I am still unsure to what extent time and experience might render such process-oriented approaches more effective and satisfying.
As time passes, I become less convinced that my students’ need for a teacher to explain things, correct errors, reveal interests and passions, and guide the classroom is merely a matter of students being unable to “understand their own rights because they are so ideologized into rejecting their own freedom, their own critical development, thanks to the traditional curriculum” (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 21). In this same chapter, these authors discuss the aesthetics and artistry of being an educator. A key idea, but they seem to miss an essential point. Students want to experience an aesthetic phenomenon. This means an experience where there is a discernable integrity between the whole and the parts. They want to experience something crafted with mastery. Fraying ad hoc tangents, inexplicable eddies, a convoluted narrative arc that leads nowhere -there are many ways that an overly passive teacher can disrupt the relationship between the parts of the class. This forfeiture of responsibility is felt – it does not make sense rhythmically or melodically- and it reduce the student’s trust in the learning experience not because students need an authority but because they yearn to experience an author.
This is truer than ever in the dialogic student-centred classroom. I suspect that students will themselves be keen to collaborate in co-authoring the art of a developing classroom if they see their educator take up the challenge. In asking students to engage authentically in democratic and dialogical classrooms, we are asking them to make themselves vulnerable. If the educator hides their own vulnerability behind the opaque role of ‘facilitator,’ students will hardly feel free to open themselves up. By way of invitation, provocation, solidarity, and good faith, a teacher can show how and why their heart, and everyone else’s, matters. Their own fumbles can then be seen as parts of a whole they are trying to work on, the whole being of course their own integrity as people and as educators. The aesthetic nature of the classroom will come out in the relationship between the ways teachers present themselves as a whole and what they do to move towards this vision of themselves in their particular actions. Devoid of this part/whole relationship, the student is left without the content/context interplay that is so key to developing meaningful understanding of what is happening (this leads to hermeneutic analogies).
We can invite students into their hearts by showing our own in many different ways. When looking back at the various teachers that have made an impact on me, few ‘approaches’ are common to them. Some were strict, some playful. Some experimented pedagogically while others took traditional didactic styles. One especially exciting teacher was fiercely didactic. When Zev Friedman would stand at the podium, clutching both sides of it, his crooked reading glasses poised on his nose, my heart would thrum and shiver at the beautifully serious struggle, the momentous spiritual stakes at hand in details usually depicted as boring or souless concerns of canonical 17th and 18th Century philosophers. This was no academic brain game. A quiet profundity pervaded Dr. Friedman’s world and allowed him to reach into and draw out those same depths in the thinkers we studied. He dared to share it and I fell back in love with philosophy at a time when other course made it seem like egoistic head trips. What seemed to make a difference had nothing to do with some pedagogical principle he was applying. It was instead all about the extent to which I sensed his emotional engagement with his subject. It was an empathic response.
I remember being equally drawn to moments where a teacher would reveal excitement, fear, even despair.
Teacher educators often talk of ‘modeling reflective practice’. How might we model emotional response? How can this be anything but a contradiction? Might emotions be the very things that slip past our attempts to model, -glints and pulses of life breathing through the machine?
An educator might slip unconsciously from honestly exposing themselves to their students one year to expressing the same idea in a formulaic way the next. I have found myself often tempted by this and have occasionally succumbed. I treat my moments of authentic engagement as having given rise to tools that can now be applied to generate authenticity. I have occasionally done this in full awareness that it is impossible and contradictory, knowing full well that authentic engagement is not about applying the past to the present but about showing up to what the current situation has to offer. I have even done this (ah, the absurdities of the human soul!) in describing this very problem itself.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Occasionally such stories can play a role because stories do have a life of their own, because experience is cyclical, because the present is often not so unique as to constantly require a radically new response. Sometimes I can respond to the current situation through how I tell the story, allowing it to be in reciprocal relation with what is around me (like replaying a piece on the piano in fresh awareness of it in all its immediacy). But the more times I tell it, the better I get at telling it, the more I sense it lose colour. Raw emotional expression is vulnerable to the same technocratic thinking that pervades all ‘what works’ approaches, mechanising itself to the purpose of mechanised relations.
The mask is fake… but the mask is also real. Looking back on times I have exposed some aspect of my inner horror or guilt about the ecological crisis, I find there to be something tentative in its first expression. In some way, it is was ridiculously honest and unfiltered. It had not been turned into a story or style or approach (yet). But it was still a performance. I knew I was being listened to, in some cases by two dozen or more people. I felt acutely the radial concentration of consciousness in the room, with me as the hub of the wheel. Such an experience sometimes draws out and magnifies the emotion I was am to convey, like a concave glass concentrating the rays of the sun. In a sense, I became even ‘truer’ than I am normally capable of. It became a piece of music that I was inside of. Per-form. “Per” means through, thoroughly, very, utterly, all around – how I can be so utterly formed through those all around me!
Such is the fate of ‘masks.’ Sometimes our performance brings out something authentic, indeed it develops our range of experiences and self-understanding. Other times it robs us of ourselves. Each performance has its fate, sizzling out of truth or groping towards it, sometimes hiding from it entirely.
How often a scholar’s ‘expertise’ lies precisely in the topic they seem to lack in skill and grace! An expert in care pedagogy fails to make eye contact with me when we meet. An advocate of interspecies interactions tramps loud and thoughtless in the forest. A theorist developing a concept of authentic student-teacher relations lectures behind a thick authoritative facade. Why is that? I believe it evokes a purity of heart long corrupted. Initially, we read and write because we yearn to grow. Oftentimes we are passionate about things we recognise are important but are not very good at. We write because we want to improve, knowing that in putting our strengths towards developing our sacred weaknesses, our heart’s ‘deep gladness meets the world’s deep need’ (as Parker Palmer would put it). But somewhere along the line, we confuse our expertise in writing and theorising about the topic with expertise in the topic itself! Piles and piles of “know that” fill the space still empty of “know how.” In this circuitous way, passion suffocates itself. A culture of academic posturing makes this slip into hidden inauthenticity all the easier.
I think we need to recognise and resist this transformation. As people, as teachers, as researchers, we need to recognise that vulnerability is our asset. We must even guard against becoming ‘experts’ in vulnerability. It is not a turf or territory to be defended, but an attitude to cultivate. It is an attitude that dissolves itself at high altitudes.
Immersed in such questions, I raised them in an exploration with a student, rich peaceful pauses. At one point in the conversation, she mentioned that she has some traits that she “prefers” in herself (one was kindness), and that she consciously reminds herself throughout the day to potentiate these dimensions of herself. It struck me how her list was different from mine (I find myself constantly wanting to work towards humility, astonishment, gratitude). Why were our lists different? Why was I attracted to certain types of experiences and enactments? At this moment, the glow of my desk light illuminating the room more prominently with the sun now set, I realised how pervasive the dialectics of the soul are at work. I know the power and beauty of humility because I have experienced it, but I have experienced its awesome power because I am not always a humble person. Someone who is often or always humble is immersed in the state, so it is nearly invisible in the accustomed background of their being. We contain within us the shadow side (this was her term, perhaps invoking Jung) of each of our most inspiring characteristics, a shadow which tortures but also teaches us the meaning of what we are capable of and the importance of striving for it. Chiaruscuro. I asked her about her kindness and she said she felt that she was sometimes kinder and sometimes much less kind than most people around her.
It often seems I have access to the feeling that life is an astonishing and wondrous event, as utterly beautiful as it is contingent and fleeting, and indeed this sense guides me in my pedagogy and my research. I am lucky that for me there is no choice but to let this feeling, both delicate and powerful, guide me into my best teaching and writing moments. But the excitement of these moments is contrasted by my passages through mazes of ungrateful doubt and self-deprecation. This darkness is exacerbated because I can still know the powerful lightness that suffuses everything, I remember it and can conceptualise it as a statement of fact all through my interminable journey into the night. But such knowing is not enough to pull me out.
We lean towards our vocation through acknowledging and being open to the generative tension between our poles, embracing the drawn string that we can pluck and strum to bring our tunes to the world, the gifts we’ve been given to give, modulating as music often must, between the minor and major key. I can teach this truth by struggling towards unification in front of my students, inviting them to assist, and supporting them (if and when they are ready) to identify and integrate the poles of their own soul. De-ossifying dualisms back into dialectics.
