Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change 3031458346, 9783031458347

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EDUCATIONAL FUTURES

Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change

Mark Fettes · Sean Blenkinsop

Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures Series Editor

jan jagodzinski Department of Secondary Education University of Alberta Edmonton, AB, Canada

The series Educational Futures would be a call on all aspects of education, not only specific subject specialists, but policy makers, religious education leaders, curriculum theorists, and those involved in shaping the educational imagination through its foundations and both psychoanalytical and psychological investments with youth to address this extraordinary precarity and anxiety that is continually rising as things do not get better but worsen. A global de-territorialization is taking place, and new voices and visions need to be seen and heard. The series would address the following questions and concerns. The three key signifiers of the book series title address this state of risk and emergency: 1. The Anthropocene: The ‘human world,’ the world-for-us is drifting toward a global situation where human extinction is not out of the question due to economic industrialization and overdevelopment, as well as the exponential growth of global population. How to we address this ecologically and educationally to still make a difference? 2. Ecology: What might be ways of re-thinking our relationships with the non-human forms of existence and in-human forms of artificial intelligence that have emerged? Are there possibilities to rework the ecological imagination educationally from its over-romanticized view of Nature, as many have argued: Nature and culture are no longer tenable separate signifiers. Can teachers and professors address the ideas that surround differentiated subjectivity where agency is no long attributed to the ‘human’ alone? 3. Aesthetic Imaginaries: What are the creative responses that can fabulate aesthetic imaginaries that are viable in specific contexts where the emergent ideas, which are able to gather heterogeneous elements together to present projects that address the two former descriptors: the Anthropocene and the every changing modulating ecologies. Can educators drawn on these aesthetic imaginaries to offer exploratory hope for what is a changing globe that is in constant crisis? The series Educational Futures: Anthropocene, Ecology, and Aesthetic Imaginaries attempts to secure manuscripts that are aware of the precarity that reverberates throughout all life, and attempts to explore and experiment to develop an educational imagination which, at the very least, makes conscious what is a dire situation.

Mark Fettes • Sean Blenkinsop

Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-­ Cultural Change

Mark Fettes Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

Sean Blenkinsop Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures ISBN 978-3-031-45833-0    ISBN 978-3-031-45834-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Marcus Harrison - abstract / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface: On the Origins of This Book

The origin of this book was a research project conducted in 2020–2021 with the support of a Knowledge Synthesis grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our project was one of 27 across the country focused on the “future challenge” of “living within the Earth’s carrying capacity,” and the only one from the field of education.1 From the outset, we saw this inquiry as necessarily addressing fundamental social change. In the report we wrote for SSHRC, we listed the following premises as the starting point for our work: • that the ecological crisis (i.e., the overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity by modern civilization) is the consequence of entrenched attitudes, discourses, and behaviors in human societies worldwide; • that modern educational traditions, processes, and institutions have played a key role in fostering and reinforcing these cultural traits; • that these same structures and processes are implicated in myriad forms of social inequity and injustice, and thus education for living within the Earth’s carrying capacity is necessarily also education for more equitable and just societies; • therefore, learning to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity implies far-reaching, systemic educational transformation. 1  For more information on the Imagining Canada’s Future initiative, see https://www. sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/society-societe/community-communite/Imagining_Canadas_Future-­ Imaginer_l_avenir_du_Canada-­eng.aspx. A link from this page provides access to “evidence briefs” on several “future challenges,” including the one our work addressed.

v

vi 

PREFACE: ON THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK

We were interested in both the philosophical and the practical dimensions of this challenge. Accordingly, we put together a diverse team of researchers whose backgrounds and skills complemented our own. They included: • David Chang (then a doctoral candidate in the SFU Faculty of Education, with a focus on teacher education, contemplative inquiry, and ecological virtues); • Lindsay Cole (then a doctoral candidate in the UBC Department of Educational Studies and the manager of the Solutions Lab for the City of Vancouver, focused on systemic change and public policy innovation); • Chloe Humphreys (a PhD graduate from the SFU Faculty of Education with a focus on philosophy, early childhood education, and nature-based education); • Skylar Sage (a doctoral candidate in the SFU program for Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies, focused on community psychology and anti-oppressive positive psychology). To this mix we brought our own wide-ranging backgrounds as educators and SFU researchers. Sean has a deep background of practice in outdoor, experiential, and nature-based education; his writing challenges the philosophical assumptions of much environmental education and foregrounds innovative and transformative approaches to working with the more-than-human world as co-teacher. Mark has spent much of his life working in cross-cultural contexts, especially with Indigenous educators and organizations and in the global Esperanto movement; his written work focuses on the connections between imagination, language, land, and community, and he serves as Director of the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education at SFU.  We have worked together closely on a number of projects, including the Maple Ridge Environmental School, a public, nature-based “school without walls” that we helped establish in a Lower Mainland school district on the outskirts of Metro Vancouver. We received the grant at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our ways of working together reflected that. Team meetings, interviews, reflective projects, and activities took place online each week for the best part of a year, with occasional breaks. The approach was highly collaborative and intuitive, as we felt our way into what this kind of research work might look like if it aligned with some of the educational principles of social innovation

  PREFACE: ON THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK 

vii

labs and if we really wanted to include an eco-diversity of voices in this work. Team members nominated and interviewed participants with expertise relevant to the project with a particular focus on educational and community-based projects, innovative social change organizations and projects, and Indigenous innovators and educators. The team actively discussed these interviews, shared readings around specific research questions as they arose, built out a bibliography, took part in oral and written discussions, and contributed to various writing projects modeled on work done in social innovation labs including, for example, a speculative fiction workshop connected to Afro- and Indigenous futurisms. Emerging ideas and organizing concepts and principles were co-­constructed and returned to in a semistructured, free-flowing, and iterative fashion. One of the great pleasures of the work was the capacity it had to surprise us. This also posed challenges in terms of our final report for SSHRC: we found it easier to write the various sections somewhat independently of one another, despite our awareness of the underlying unity of the research process and the insights that arose from it. One of our goals for this book, then, has been to make that unity more apparent. We have re-organized and reworked the sequence and content of the chapters in a way that we hope is more inviting and supportive to our intended readers—educators in formal and non-formal settings, activists for social change, researchers from education and other disciplines. While remaining conscious of our own situatedness in the political and geographical contexts of Canada and British Columbia, we have also tried to ensure that the book speaks to those living in other parts of the world as well. As a tentative and sometimes sketchy map of education as “the practice of eco-social-cultural change,” this book is undoubtedly full of gaps and partial glimpses. Our main aspiration is that it be a generative text, giving a sense of the scope of the educational transformation that the ecological crisis demands and inspiring others to situate their work within this larger landscape. We are convinced that a much wider range of practices and educational ideas are relevant to this work than those explicitly addressed here. On the other hand, few educational institutions have come anywhere near to acknowledging the magnitude of the challenge we are facing, and education remains largely absent from discourses and disciplines focused on large-scale social change. Altering this picture is a task for us all. Burnaby, BC, Canada 

Mark Fettes Sean Blenkinsop

Contents

1 Transforming  Education for Eco-Social-­Cultural Change  1 Transformation, Emergence, and Resurgence   3 Resilience in the Context of Educational Change   4 Designing for (Eco-)Social Transformation   7 A Multi-Level Perspective on Educational Change  12 References  17 2 Designing  Education for Eco-Social-Cultural Change 21 Wildness as an Organizing Concept  22 Sacredness as a Property of the Wild  24 Justice as Intrinsic to the Wild and Sacred  26 Educators as Designers for Eco-­Social-Cultural Change  29 Design Prompt 1: All Our Relations  31 Design Prompt 2: Abundant Time  34 Design Prompt 3: Mystery/Unknowability  37 Design Prompt 4: Embeddedness/Integration  41 Design Prompt 5: Ancient Futures  44 Design Prompt 6: (Re)creative Dissonance  47 References  51 3 Reframing  Education for Eco-Social-Cultural Change 57 The Ologies (A): Epistemology (Knowing; Making; and Sharing Meaning)  59 The Ologies (B): Ontology (Being and Becoming)  66 ix

x 

Contents

The Ologies (C): Axiology (Values and Ethics)  71 The Ologies (D): Cosmology (Storying Our Origins)  76 The Ologies (E): Psychology (Understanding Ourselves and Our Development)  81 References  86 4 The  4Cs: Practicing Education for Eco-­Social-­Cultural Change 93 Competencies, Capacities, Capabilities  94 Introducing the Four Stances/Positionalities  97 East: Critical Educator 100 South: Community Educator 104 West: Change Educator 109 North: Coeur/Care Educator 113 References 117 Index121

CHAPTER 1

Transforming Education for Eco-Social-­Cultural Change

For more than a quarter of a century (and in some cases far longer), researchers have recognized the systemic nature of the ecological crisis, and hence the need to bring the global human order into some kind of balance with the Earth through “radical, systemic shifts in deeply held values and beliefs, patterns of social behavior, and multi-level governance and management regimes” (Westley et al. 2011, 762). The problem, of course, is that such shifts are easier to describe than to bring about. Cultures and institutions are prone to “lock-in” effects involving sunk costs, built-in assumptions and incentives, self-reinforcing ideologies, the conservative forces of habit and conformity, and what has been called “the ingenuity gap”—our simple inability to grasp all the relevant aspects of a complex situation and see a way to transform it. Despite the immensity of the challenge, many researchers, practitioners, and activists are working on the problem of radical change. Economics and technology are typically front and center in such efforts. Oddly, however, education is rarely mentioned. It doesn’t seem to have crossed most people’s minds that the concepts, structures, and processes underpinning modern education systems might be among those features of human societies that most need to change. Or to put it another way—the way we’ve been educating our children and young people for the last 150 years or so is directly (co-)responsible for the predicament we are in.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fettes, S. Blenkinsop, Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7_1

1

2 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

“Education” of course comprises much more than just formal schooling, and throughout this book we will be arguing for a broad understanding of what kinds of activities should be considered “educational.” That being said, the problem of “lock-in” that we just referred to is exemplified in modern school systems, which together with modern health systems account for a huge proportion of public spending in most countries. (Education spending is typically 5–8% of GDP, health care 6–12%, out of total government spending ranging from 20 to 40% of GDP.) Not only do schools absorb vast amounts of money and labor, they also account for a large share of children’s waking hours. That is, modern societies are heavily invested in schools, and have become more and more so over time. And yet fundamental questions about what schools are for and how they seek to achieve those purposes are very seldom asked—and if asked, are seldom answered in ways that take account of the depth of our current crisis. According to the American teacher and educational critic John Taylor Gatto (2010), schools operate as “weapons of mass instruction” whose underlying purpose is to bring about a sort of endlessly prolonged adolescence—childish adults whose values and desires can be shaped by the institutions of social hierarchy and mass consumerism. Our concern is a related one: that schools institutionalize a kind of cultural stupidification that stems from our progressive estrangement from wild nature. We are indebted to the work of environmental philosopher Paul Shepard, notably in Nature and Madness (1982), for the account of human development that underpins this argument. When human communities ceased to live in close and reciprocal kinship with a wide variety of wild beings, according to Shepard, their capacities of attention, thought, imagination, and relationship slowly shifted toward simplified, binary, control-oriented cultural forms—a kind of self-domestication, depicted in somewhat similar terms by biologist John Livingston in Rogue Primate (1994). Seen through this lens, it appears to us no accident that schools (and even most schoolyards) are overwhelmingly human-centered places, swept clean of biodiversity; nor that the global spread of compulsory public schooling has coincided with the emergence of the climate and ecological crises. In this book, we take this problematization of modern education as our starting point. In the second half we take up a variety of philosophical and practical critiques and alternatives to the forms and processes of education we are all familiar with. In the first half, we are concerned with a different kind of question: Is systemic change in education actually possible, and what ways of thinking about systemic change could be helpful in bringing

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

3

it about? The literature on processes of innovation and change is vast, and includes many different ways of thinking about and facilitating change. We begin by describing how we chose to narrow our focus to certain sections of the literature, before taking up some particularly promising frameworks and approaches in greater detail.

Transformation, Emergence, and Resurgence If our foundational premise is correct—that modern schooling is implicated in the psychological and cultural roots of the ecological crisis—then incremental change or adaptation of our educational systems seems inadequate to the challenge. While such gradualist approaches have tended to dominate responses to the climate and ecological crises to date (as well as the educational change literature), we think they are shaped more by institutional and political inertia than by a sober assessment of what is needed; the inertia is one more aspect of the present reality that needs to be changed. Against such incrementalism, various researchers have offered various ways of conceiving of more fundamental social change (e.g., Scharmer 2016; Laloux 2014; Lichtenstein 2014). We see such proposals as falling into three main categories—two drawing on systems thinking (Meadows and Wright 2009), while the third has emerged from the struggle of Indigenous peoples for decolonization. Our first category, transformation, refers to a significant shift in people, structures, processes, and systems. Some sources refer to it as second-­ order change: “First-order change, amelioration, creates change within a system, while second-order change, transformation, strives to change the system and its assumptions” (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010). Transformation is often triggered by a growing problem, challenge, or crisis within a system that is “stuck” in a particular state; it involves shifting or dislodging key assumptions or habits (Sharpe et al. 2016), while retaining recognizable features of the organization or institution. Because of this, the process is generally taken to be “path dependent,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is determined by previous states of the system; hence, despite the significant shifts involved, some fundamental parameters remain the same. We think that this describes most practical work on social change; at the same time, we harbor doubts about whether such change is radical enough in the face of our current challenges. In emergence, a more wholesale shift in parameters takes place (Laloux 2014; Lichtenstein 2014). This is essentially a new system, one that has

4 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

broken free of previous constraints and entered into a new field of possibilities. The literature suggests that the crisis of the existing system is rarely sufficient to generate emergence; a crucial role is played by aspiration, the “becoming” of a vision for a new or resurgent opportunity that was not there, or perhaps not seen before. In the process of creatively imagining and generating possible futures, emergence harnesses intuition, emotion, and spirit; it tends to significantly expand the potential, capacity, and capability of people, organizations, and systems to work on the challenges that they face (Scharmer 2016). Finally, resurgence, a more politically charged term, refers to emergence catalyzed by efforts to recover and revitalize possibilities of being and relationship that have been suppressed and marginalized by the dominant system. As Indigenous scholar Jeff Corntassel observes, “processes of resurgence are often contentious and reflect the spiritual, cultural, economic, social and political scope of the struggle” (2012, 88). In the context of this book, Indigenous resurgence is especially relevant because of its strong focus on restoring relationships to land (Corntassel and Hardbarger 2019), sometimes theorized as “grounded normativity” (Simpson 2017). At the same time, there are tensions between the focus of resurgence on restoring well-being for particular people, places, and communities and the challenges of healing systems within the broader society (Asch et al. 2018). All of these terms point to what is coming to be; they leave unstated what must be abandoned or destroyed. Educationally, these are of equal significance. For people who have been granted comforts and privileges by the system that is being replaced, the un/relearning process can be “disruptive to the sense of self, meaning, security, certainty, futurity, and even reality that has been cultivated” within familiar educational and cultural frameworks (Stein et al. 2020). The fact that change means loss for many of those involved is something that mustn’t be overlooked or downplayed in re-imagining education as the practice of change. We will take this up in the context of the “four Cs” of eco-social-cultural change in the final chapter of this book.

Resilience in the Context of Educational Change In addition to the three approaches we have just listed, our search for fruitful ways of thinking about fundamental social change led us to the literature on resilience, which over the past 20 years has become one of the

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

5

major theoretical frameworks for understanding the ways in which social-­ ecological-­ cultural systems respond to disturbance (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Allen et al. 2014). Originating in the study of ecological systems impacted by humans (Folke 2006), the concept of resilience is now common in studies on social development and adaptation, where it is typically defined as “the ability of people, households, communities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth” (Carr 2019), or “the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation” (Carr 2020). Such definitions might suggest that resilience is useful only for thinking about the ability of social systems to preserve themselves. As Carr points out, however (2019, 71), this emphasis on stability is based on a selective reading of the resilience literature: Discussions about what constitutes resilience have evolved considerably since Holling’s foundational work. No longer do researchers uncritically privilege stability and persistence. Instead, the field has broadly adopted Folke’s argument that “resilience is not only about being persistent or robust to disturbance. It is also about the opportunities that disturbance opens up in terms of recombination of evolved structures and processes, renewal of the system and emergence of new trajectories” (Folke 2006). Second, a growing body of critique has focused on the relatively shallow theorization of the social in discussions of socio-ecological resilience … Béné and his co-authors (2014, 606) define this challenge in stark terms, arguing that current framings of socio-ecological resilience are marked by an “inability to appropriately capture and reflect social dynamics in general and issues of agency and power in particular.” Relatively little work has answered these explicit and implicit calls for a more robust theorization of the social in resilience (cf. Cote and Nightingale 2012).

It is this more complex and dynamic understanding of resilience, oriented toward the possibility of transformation, emergence, and resurgence, that offers promise for thinking about education for eco-social-cultural change. Interestingly, it also resonates with calls from within the psychological (Kirmayer et al. 2011) and educational (ahmed Shafi et al. 2020) literature for more “dynamic, systemic, ecological” conceptions of resilience as

6 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

manifested in the lives of individuals. The possibilities of cross-fertilization are exciting: insights from Indigenous land-based education, for example, might contribute to radical revisioning of the potential interactions of people, cultures, landscapes, and ecosystems within resilience theory; while the latter, suitably expanded, might guide the integration of educational change initiatives involving individuals, schools, and communities with the restoration and stewardship of local landscapes and ecosystems. Yet this is more of a program for future work than a description of what the field has to offer right now, relying as it does on models drawn from ecological systems—in part precisely because they allow the avoidance of normative (i.e., political) questions (Cote and Nightingale 2012). There is another important limitation to the resilience literature: it is not designed to answer the question of how to bring about transformative systemic change. For the most part, the focus has been on how ecological-­ social systems respond to exogenous shocks—shocks that have pushed a system out of equilibrium—whereas the situation we face in education is that of a system that is stuck. For tackling this kind of problem, we found more promise in the literature on social innovation (Hassan 2014; Westley and McGowan 2017). This is a fairly new, inter- and trans-disciplinary field which serves as a broad tent for a wide range of approaches to purposeful, value-driven social change. Indeed, the field is so broad that it is difficult to make general claims about it. However, our impression is that, for the most part, the ecological and climate crises have not been the focus of attention for people who work on “social innovation”; as in so many other fields, here too the emphasis has been on issues of justice and equity in which human values and human needs are the only ones on the table. This is borne out by a broad review of the field by Olsson et al. (2017), in which they argue for three “strategic imperatives” to address “change implied by the concept of the Anthropocene”: • expand our analysis of social innovations to include consideration of the dynamic nature of social-ecological system interactions […]; • ensure proposed innovations in the Anthropocene actively break from the path-dependence of the system […]; • integrate the concept of time more meaningfully into social innovation theory. (Olsson et al. 2017, 3)

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

7

In other words: the field of social innovation needs to start thinking more expansively, beyond social change or even social-cultural change, toward eco-social-cultural change. Until it takes on that challenge, it can’t significantly contribute to the main task at hand: putting the brakes on the long-term damage our current civilization is inflicting on the planet. Despite the somewhat tenuous relationship of most social innovation to this questions we are exploring in this book, we did identify one particular branch of the field with a deeper educational resonance. A clue was offered by one of the early works to build a bridge between social innovation and the resilience literature, Lichtenstein’s Generative Emergence (2014), an ambitious application of systems thinking to “organization, entrepreneurial and social innovation.” Although the book is largely focused on case studies of emergence in firms and organizations, the final chapter suggests directing the same processes, knowledge, and skills toward “the proactive creation of new social ecosystems”: It is possible that human foresight and proactive design might be able to channel [the adaptive] cycle toward greater resilience and sustainability. It may be possible, working collaboratively across and within networks, to catalyze systemwide shifts and emergences. (Lichtenstein 2014, Chap. 18)

Although it may not immediately be obvious, “design” is an educationally significant word here. When design takes place “collaboratively” and is directed toward changing the conditions of people’s daily lives, it takes on at least some of the traits of popular education (Braster et al. 2013) and social mobilization (Sussman et al. 2016). We uncovered several strands of the design literature that have been moving in this direction, even though they rarely frame their work in educational terms. And despite the fact that such “designerly” approaches to social innovation remain largely human-­ centered, we see great potential for adapting them to more inclusive notions of who the stakeholders and participants are—that is, for including the more-than-human as co-designer and co-citizen.

Designing for (Eco-)Social Transformation Overall, as one would expect, the field of design has tended to reinscribe the assumptions of extraction, exploitation, and human superiority that are built into our current systems of industrial production and consumption. Yet the activity of design—what Buchanan calls “conceiving,

8 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

planning and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes” (2001, 9)—is not necessarily restricted to capitalist and consumerist ends. One account of the way the field of creative design has expanded and evolved in recent decades frames it in terms of successive domains or stages or generations, each more expansive and inclusive than its predecessor (Jones 2014). From an early focus on “symbols and things” (the defining concerns of graphic and industrial design), designers progressed to thinking about “experiences or activities or services” and “environments and systems” (Buchanan 2001, 10–12)—organizational contexts that entail new levels of systemic complexity and involve greater numbers and diversity of participants. One influential formulation summarizes this hierarchy of domains as follows (Jones 2014): 1.0: Traditional Design—design as making, artifacts and communications; 2.0 Product/Service Design—design for value creation, as integrating; products and services; 3.0 Organizational Transformation Design—change oriented, design for work practices, strategies, organizational structures; and 4.0 Social Transformation Design—design for complex societal situations, social systems, policy-making, community design.

In the context of our own project, we were struck by the fact that, by stages 3.0 and 4.0, design is clearly becoming, among other things, an educational process. Organizational and social transformation engages employees (3.0) and stakeholders/citizens/community members (4.0) in learning new ideas, participating in new kinds of creative group work, and thinking together about their values, purposes, and needs. Where in stages 1.0 and 2.0 the designer is still clearly in the driver’s seat, in 3.0 and 4.0 there is more likely to be a design team working in a facilitator role (Jones 2014). As we explored further, it became clear that the design community is more diverse than the above scheme suggests. One route into “design for societal transformation” leads through the field of service design, where an earlier focus on services as “design objects” has gradually shifted toward “design for services” and from there into conceiving of services “as means for supporting the emergence of a more collaborative, sustainable and creative society and economy” (Sangiorgi 2011, 30). Yet this has also brought designers to the limits of their expertise: “an understanding of

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

9

appropriate methodologies and an articulation of key design principles are still missing,” and “the quality and effectiveness of such interventions are hard to evaluate in the short term and within traditional design parameters” (2011, 31). Sangiorgi suggests that “transformation design” needs to address questions of agency—having recipients of services play an active role in their design—and scale—“community” being an especially key organizational level. Relationship- and capacity-building, the redistribution of power, the creation of equitable organizational structures and platforms, the cultivation of imagination and hope or “collective efficacy,” and the reflexive assessment of long-term impacts are the other “transformational principles” she sees as shaping this approach to service design. So far, so human-centered. Irwin (2015), however, positions such work on a continuum, stretching from projects that operate on relatively short time scales and within existing power structures (according to her, this is still the mainstream of service design) to “design for social innovation… where projects are usually situated within social and community contexts, engagements are ideally longer, and solutions begin to challenge existing socioeconomic and political paradigms” (p. 231). From there, she wishes to stretch the continuum still farther, toward what she terms “transition design” leading to “radical, positive social and environmental change.” Here, then, the field of design is genuinely starting to engage with the concerns of our project. According to Irwin, transition design approaches “have their origins in long-term thinking, are lifestyle-oriented and place-­ based, and always acknowledge the natural world as the greater context for all design solutions” (Irwin 2015, 231–232). A somewhat independent set of ideas has emerged within the “systemic design” tradition developed by Jones (2014) and others (see, e.g., Jones and Kijima 2018). Although various strands of systems thinking have influenced service design, primarily through the organizational change literature (Sangiorgi 2011), Jones goes further in calling for “a broad crossover of principles between systems and design theory” in order to “enable new forms of design, planning, and deliberative conversation for coordinated action” (2014, 104). He suggests that, by drawing on “known design competencies—form and process reasoning, social and generative research methods, and sketching and visualization practices,” systemic design can guide practical responses to intersecting wicked problems: Typical systemic design problems are complex service systems, socially organized, large-scale, multi-organizational, with significant emergent ­properties,

10 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

rendering it impossible to make design or management decisions based on sufficient individual knowledge. These include services and systems such as healthcare systems and disease management, mega-city urban planning and management, natural resource governance and allocation, and large enterprise strategy and operations. None of these are isolated “domains,” as each of these are affected by unknowable dynamics in population and regional demographics, climate and natural ecology effects, political and regulatory influences, and technology impacts. (Jones 2014, 94)

This seems to us a good characterization of formal education systems as well, especially if they are to become more responsive to the communities and ecosystems in which they are located. Jones suggests that “the most efficacious courses of action” in such circumstances “are not determined analytically, or by consensus of a group, but through the interactive co-­ creation and assessment of proposals that synthesize a whole intervention or actionable strategy” (p. 98)—this is what a systemic design process sets out to achieve. He identifies the following “systemic design principles” as a robust set of prompts to guide this process through the overlapping phases of Strategy, Discover, Design, Develop, and Deploy: Idealization; Appreciating complexity; Purpose finding; Boundary framing; Requisite variety; Feedback coordination; System ordering; Generative emergence; Continuous adaptation; and Self-organizing. (Jones 2014, 106)

One more set of ideas from the design literature struck us as particularly relevant to our concerns—those rooted in anti-capitalist and anti-colonial perspectives. These are especially helpful as a counterweight to what Sangiorgi (2011, 37) describes as “a highly positive rhetoric on the role and impact of design in society.” Given the embeddedness of design in “neoliberal capitalist, colonial structures,” some design critics have called for “a more nuanced understanding of power dynamics—the complexities, tensions and pluralities of power that underlie design practices and that may reproduce systemic oppression” (Goodwill et  al. 2021, 46).

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

11

Locating the main challenge in designers’ inability “to recognize the ways in which power and privilege are distributed within design processes,” this analysis leads to a call for “building power literacy in service design”—that is, a commitment to informed critical reflexivity in all that designers do. This has obvious parallels in the education literature. Other critiques go beyond these concerns, however, to target more macro-level inequalities. Some, for instance, have warned of the potential entrenchment of “a design culture of nowhere and nobody” that marginalizes and supplants “what design means and how it’s practiced in and by ‘peripheral’ locations, cultures and people” (Akama et al. 2019, 62–64). As one recent manifesto states: “It is not sufficient for design institutions to simply include a greater diversity of actors or perspectives. …[T]here is little point to diversifying institutions, practices and processes that ultimately sustain colonial imperatives” (Abdulla et al. 2019). In response to such concerns, Escobar (2015) formulates a call for “pluriversal ontological design… aimed at enabling the ecological, social, and technological conditions where multiple worlds and knowledges, involving humans and non-humans, can flourish in mutually enhancing ways” (p.  15). And designers such as Barcham (2021) respond to Escobar with proposals for “radically inclusive design… that centre indigenous knowledge systems and ways of being” as a corrective to the neo-colonial or imperial character of mainstream design traditions. Transition design, systemic design, radically inclusive design—all of these seem to us to offer potentially helpful insights, frameworks, and practices when contemplating the mammoth challenge of reorienting formal education systems toward eco-social-cultural change. At the same time, it is noteworthy that education is rarely included as a topic of concern (or as prospective partner) in such design discourses. This confirms our sense that a larger conversation has yet to begin on the practical necessity of radical educational reform in response to the climate and ecological crises. The “educational change” literature, as such, takes many aspects of the status quo for granted, including the anthropocentric bias of education as a modern institution. Meanwhile, the scattering of designers and “social innovation labs” contemplating systemic responses to the Anthropocene (Olsson et  al. 2017) have yet to tackle the problem of schooling. This brings us to one further aspect of the challenge: the problem of scale. Colonialism in its various guises has been astonishingly successful at spreading the industrial model of schooling to every corner of the planet.

12 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Still more impressively, that very model remains at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations as a shared set of aspirations and commitments by its member states. The kinds of innovation and design processes we have been exploring tend to be community- or organization-centered in their focus—necessarily so, given the requirement to involve a wide range of participants in the change process and ensure that it is genuinely responsive to local conditions and needs. But this leaves the question unanswered: Can particular initiatives of this kind ever lead to global systemic change, and if so, how? Does the need to scale up tell us anything about how to think about or engage in the practice of eco-social-cultural change?

A Multi-Level Perspective on Educational Change Scale has long been of interest in the social innovation field, where theorists are now using concepts and frameworks developed to study the spread of technological innovation to consider “sustainability transitions”—how major systems within a society (such as energy, transport, construction, agriculture) can be induced to undergo substantive, permanent change in some of their key processes. Geels, one of the foremost proponents of the Multi-Level Perspective, sums up the challenges succinctly (2011, 25): …sustainability transitions are necessarily about interactions between technology, policy/power/politics, economics/business/markets, and culture/discourse/public opinion. Researchers therefore need theoretical approaches that address, firstly, the multi-dimensional nature of sustainability transitions, and, secondly, the dynamics of structural change. With regard to structural change the problem is that many existing (unsustainable) systems are stabilized through various lock-in mechanisms, such as scale economies, sunk investments in machines, infrastructures and competencies. Also institutional commitments, shared beliefs and discourses, power relations, and political lobbying by incumbents stabilize existing systems. Additionally, consumer lifestyles and preferences may have become adjusted to existing technical systems. These lock-in mechanisms create path dependence and make it difficult to dislodge existing systems. So, the core analytical puzzle is to understand how environmental innovations emerge and how these can replace, transform or reconfigure existing systems.

With only minimal adaptations, this entire passage can be applied to the problem of educational change as well. Consider, for example, the system

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

13

of compulsory public schooling. For “technology,” think of the built environment, rules, routines, curriculum, and other material and symbolic resources that structure schools. Consider the sunk costs, the institutional commitments, the fact that nearly every voter and taxpayer has spent thousands of hours of their formative years in school, and the hold of those experiences on their imagination. Such a complex self-reinforcing system is an example of what, in the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) championed by Geels, is termed a “regime.” Regimes are the primary focus of interest in the MLP, in terms of understanding their relative stability and resistance to change, and for insights into gaps, tensions, and contradictions that may allow opportunities for innovations to spread and catalyze a shift to a new regime. There are two potential driving forces in such change. At the larger scale, a regime exists within a broader socio-technical “landscape” that normally changes relatively slowly; it includes “not only the technical and material backdrop that sustains society, but also… demographic trends, political ideologies, societal values, and macro-economic patterns” (Geels 2011, 28). In this era of accelerating shifts in climate patterns, food production, the spread of infectious diseases, and so on, the landscape may no longer provide the stable backdrop from which the school system derives much of its legitimacy. At the same time, coexisting with the dominant regime are “niches” where innovations are generated; some of these may generate system-wide shifts if they propose a new, more appealing, or satisfying means of fulfilling the regime’s core functions, or perhaps even altering what those functions are conceived to be (Geels 2019). It is the combination of these two drivers—disruption to the overall systemic regime, coupled with a radical revaluation of what education is trying to achieve—that seems to offer the most hopeful route to eco-­ social-­cultural change on a global scale. Let’s take them in turn. One way of characterizing the current socio-technical landscape is as the Capitalocene (Moore 2017). Conceptually, this is a response to the more widely used term “Anthropocene,” meaning an era, relatively new, when human activity has become a dominant force in global geological processes. The term “Capitalocene” draws attention to the fact that not all human activity has such planet-altering consequences; rather, a specific, capitalist system of wealth creation and accumulation is the driver of those industrial processes (fossil fuel extraction and combustion, deforestation, intensive agriculture, fisheries, and mining) that are having global impacts. Inherent in this system are both a dichotomous understanding of “nature”

14 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

and “culture” (or “society”) and an unremittingly instrumentalist view of that alienated “nature.” Value in a capitalist metric is produced by the conversion of nature into culture, the “stuff” of the world into raw materials and thence into economic goods. In order to generate profit, this pathway has to run uphill, from low value to high. As Moore (2017) makes clear, this has consequences for human-human relations as well: the alienation of nature is closely tied to the alienation of labor and the offloading of many of the risks, burdens, and harms of capitalist production and consumption to the sites and processes of extraction and disposal, and the people who work and live there. Our educational systems reflect these values. Our schools and classrooms are human-centered places, swept clean of biodiversity; our curricula are framed around students’ imagined progress toward full integration in an economy where everything, including their labor, is awarded a dollar value that has little or nothing to do with any sense of personal meaning or fulfillment, let alone their responsibility or belonging to particular places and communities or to the Earth as a whole. Without the Capitalocene as backdrop, little about schools would make sense. Yet when one takes the Capitalocene to be simply the way the world is, “the landscape” in Geels’ sense, then something like the schools we have comes to seem inevitable, from the industrial metaphors that continue to shape administration and assessment practices (Davis et al. 2020) to the routinized and dumbed-down “transmission” pedagogies that dominate schooling for the poor and the marginalized worldwide (Thompson 2019; Reyes 2020). This is education that wages perpetual war on the possibility of imagining the world differently, as David Jardine says—“parallel, ecologically, to a desire to protect ourselves from and finally fully tame ‘the wild’” (2012, 5). The Multi-Level Perspective tells us to pay attention to the tectonic shifts in the landscape sustaining this regime. Moore’s analysis of the Capitalocene points to the need for “a politics that links the crisis of the biosphere and the crisis of productive and reproductive work… a radical vision that takes as its premise the organic whole of life and biosphere” (2018, 270). Other writers have made similar arguments (Klein 2015) or reached analogous conclusions on the basis of physical and ecological science (Rees 2020). Although under-emphasized, it is clear that such analyses imply a radical shift in educational priorities, for example, “humans [must] learn to thrive on the biocapacity represented by 1.7 global average productive hectares per capita (compared to the eight gha/capita required

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

15

by contemporary North America)” (Rees 2020, 7); this involves “a shift in worldview, a transformation from ‘gig and dig’ to an ethos of care and repair” (Klein 2020, 107). The accepted purposes of public education are dependent on a shared understanding of what the future holds; as it becomes clearer and clearer that the Capitalocene’s days are numbered, alternative narratives are bound to arise. This brings us to the second driver of regime change: “experimentation and trial-and-error learning with radical niche-innovations” (Geels 2019, 190). This is an extended and contested process with no guarantee of success, but at least in the MLP account it cannot be avoided. It entails both innovations in practice, initially in the form of projects and then as more established niche-specific “dominant designs,” and in cultural discourse that legitimizes and popularizes such alternatives: The societal appeal of niche and regime storylines vary during transitions, depending on framing struggles and how they score on various salience dimensions: empirical fit (how storylines fit with perceived facts about the world), experiential commensurability (how storylines resonate with the lived experience of its audience), macro-cultural resonance (how storylines fit with broader cultural repertoires), actor credibility (perceived knowledgeability and trustworthiness of actors promoting a storyline). (Geels 2019, 193)

In our reading, an undertheorized but important implication of the Multi-­ Level Perspective is that these niche-legitimizing narratives will be more disruptive to the dominant regime if they deliberately challenge and undermine its core assumptions. That is, the language and concepts used to develop and advocate for particular niche-innovations should be linked to the kind of macro-analysis we have cited in relation to the Capitalocene. For example, since the latter is premised on the Society-Nature divide (Moore 2017), education aimed at moving us out of the Capitalocene as swiftly as possible should seek to dissolve this dichotomy and emphasize, as Moore says, “the organic whole of life and biosphere” (2018, 270). This is also important for breaking with the “path-dependence” that is a defining feature of all regimes. The all-encompassing nature of the Capitalocene means that such limiting assumptions and forms of path-­ dependence are all around us; rather than expecting that any given innovation will break fully with Capitalocene norms, we should be alert to the

16 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

ways that it does not, and be open to a continuing process of reflexive critique, re-evaluation, and ongoing radical experimentation. In the research project that laid the foundations for this book (see Preface), we reached a point, after several months of literature searches, interviews, and discussions, where we concluded that our imagining of possible futures might still be overly constrained and conventional. Although we had not yet developed the analysis presented in this chapter, we felt the need to loosen up our minds and language. This led to an intriguing and unexpected arts-based research practice inspired by Afroand Indigenous futurisms (Brown and Imarisha 2013). Independently, team members wrote short works of speculative fiction inspired by our work to date and our hopes and fears for the future. We then read each other’s pieces and worked together to identify common principles that could be used to frame and bring to the surface latent transformative themes across the range of readings and interviews. Out of the dozen or so such principles we first identified, we came to focus on a set of six that seemed most generative, not only in light of our research conversations but in the context of our own diverse encounters and relationships with the more-than-human world. Accordingly, we have made those six principles the focus of the next chapter. The six are all my relations, abundant time, mystery/unknowability, embeddedness/integration, ancient futures, and (re)creative dissonance. Through our efforts to identify promising approaches to systemic change, we have come to think of these principles as “transformative design prompts”—reminders of particular kinds of questions to ask in our efforts to extend educational thinking and practice beyond the constraints of the Capitalocene. These six are illustrative rather than exhaustive; that said, we have tried to show how they reflect an underlying organic wholeness such as one might encounter in a healthy, mature ecosystem. As we see it, a commitment to eco-social-cultural change means refusing to settle for anything less than such wholeness. In positioning educators as designers, we are suggesting they take seriously the insights of the social innovation and transformative design literature and start to think in terms of larger systems and communities of participants, including the more-than-human. How can a wider range of interests and perspectives and ways of knowing be brought to bear on the design of an educational initiative, program, or school? How can such systemic design principles as generative emergence, continuous adaptation, and self-organizing be realized in educational settings? What are the

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

17

implications of the distinctive emphasis of transition design on “everyday life… as a potentially powerful, transformative space” (Irwin et al. 2022) for the roles of non-formal and informal education in eco-social-cultural change? The point is not to look for definitive answers to such questions, but rather to approach design as an open-ended endeavor grounded in particular places and communities and guided by a vision of reintegrating human lifeways with the life of the Earth.

References Abdulla, D., A. Ansari, E. Canli, M. Keshavarz, M. Kiem, P. Oliveira, L. Prado, and T. Schultz. 2019. A Manifesto for Decolonising Design. Journal of Futures Studies March 2019, 23 (3): 129–132. ahmed Shafi, A., T.  Middleton, R.  Millican, and S.  Templeton, eds. 2020. Reconsidering Resilience in Education: An Exploration Using the Dynamic Interactive Model of Resilience. Springer. Akama, Y., P. Hagen, and D. Whaanga-Schollum. 2019. Problematizing Replicable Design to Practice Respectful, Reciprocal, and Relational Co-Designing with Indigenous People. Design and Culture 11 (1): 59–84. Allen, C.R., D.G. Angeler, A.S. Garmestani, L.H. Gunderson, and C.S. Holling. 2014. Panarchy: Theory and Application. Ecosystems 17 (4): 578–589. Asch, M., J.  Borrows, and J.  Tully, eds. 2018. Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings. University of Toronto Press. Barcham, M. 2021. Towards a Radically Inclusive Design: Indigenous Story-­ Telling as Codesign Methodology. CoDesign 0 (0): 1–13. Béné, C., A.  Newsham, M.  Davies, M.  Ulrichs, and R.  Godfrey-Wood. 2014. Resilience, Poverty and Development. Journal of International Development 26 (5): 598–623. Braster, S., F. Simon, and I. Grosvenor, eds. 2013. A History of Popular Education: Educating the People of the World. Routledge. Brown, a.m., and W. Imarisha. 2013. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. AK Press. Buchanan, R. 2001. Design Research and the New Learning. Design Issues 17 (4): 3–23. Carr, E.R. 2019. Properties and Projects: Reconciling Resilience and Transformation for Adaptation and Development. World Development 122: 70–84. ———. 2020. Resilient Livelihoods in an Era of Global Transformation. Global Environmental Change 64: 102–155. Corntassel, J. 2012. Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1).,: 86–101.

18 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Corntassel, J., and T.  Hardbarger. 2019. Educate to Perpetuate: Land-Based Pedagogies and Community Resurgence. International Review of Education 65 (1): 87–116. Cote, M., and A.J. Nightingale. 2012. Resilience Thinking Meets Social Theory. Progress in Human Geography 36 (4): 475–489. Davis, R.A., J.C. Conroy, and J. Clague. 2020. Schools as Factories: The Limits of a Metaphor. Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (5): 1471–1488. Escobar, A. 2015. Transiciones: A Space for Research and Design for Transitions to the Pluriverse. Design Philosophy Papers 13 (1): 13–23. Folke, C. 2006. Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses. Global Environmental Change 16 (3): 253–267. Gatto, J.T. 2010. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers. Geels, F.W. 2011. The Multi-Level Perspective on Sustainability Transitions: Responses to Seven Criticisms. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (1): 24–40. ———. 2019. Socio-Technical Transitions to Sustainability: A Review of Criticisms and Elaborations of the Multi-Level Perspective. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 39: 187–201. Goodwill, M., M. van der Bijl-Brouwer, and R. Bendor. 2021. Beyond Good Intentions: Towards a Power Literacy Framework for Service Designers. International Journal of Design 15 (3): 45–59. Gunderson, L.H., and C.S.  Holling. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press. Hassan, Z. 2014. The Social Labs Revolution. Berrett-Koehler. Irwin, T. 2015. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture 7 (2): 229–246. Irwin, T., C. Tonkinwise, and G. Kossoff. 2022. Transition Design: An Educational Framework for Advancing the Study and Design of Sustainable Transitions. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación. Ensayos (105), 31–72. Jardine, D.W. 2012. Pedagogy Left in Peace: Cultivating Free Spaces in Teaching and Learning. Bloomsbury. Jones, P.H. 2014. Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. In Social Systems and Design, Translational Systems Sciences, ed. G.S. Metcalf, vol. 1, 91–128. Springer Japan. Jones, P., and K.  Kijima, eds. 2018. Systemic Design: Theory, Methods, and Practice. Springer. Kirmayer, L.J., S.  Dandeneau, E.  Marshall, M.K.  Phillips, and K.J.  Williamson. 2011. Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56 (2): 84–91.

1  TRANSFORMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

19

Klein, N. 2015. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Vintage Canada. ———. 2020. Care and Repair: Left Politics in the Age of Climate Change. Dissent 67 (1): 97–108. Laloux, F. 2014. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Nelson Parker. Lichtenstein, B. 2014. Generative Emergence: A New Discipline of Organizational. Entrepreneurial and Social Innovation: Oxford University Press. Livingston, J.A. 1994. Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. Key Porter Books. Meadows, D.H., and D. Wright. 2009. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Earthscan. Moore, J.W. 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (3): 594–630. ———. 2018. The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (2): 237–279. Nelson, G., and I. Prilleltensky, eds. 2010. Community Psychology: In Pursuit of Liberation and Well-Being. 3rd ed. Palgrave Macmillan. Olsson, P., M.L. Moore, F.R. Westley, and D.D. McCarthy. 2017. The Concept of the Anthropocene as a Game-Changer: A New Context for Social Innovation and Transformations to Sustainability. Ecology and Society 22 (2): 31. Rees, W.E. 2020. Ecological Economics for Humanity’s Plague Phase. Ecological Economics 169: 106519. Reyes, G.T. 2020. Pedagogy of and Towards Decoloniality. In Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, ed. M.A. Peters, vol. 1. Springer Singapore. Sangiorgi, D. 2011. Transformative Services and Transformation Design. International Journal of Design 5 (2): 29–40. Scharmer, C.O. 2016. Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges: The Social Technology of Presencing. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Sharpe, B., A.  Hodgson, G.  Leicester, A.  Lyon, and I.  Fazey. 2016. Three Horizons: A Pathways Practice for Transformation. Ecology and Society 21 (2): 47. Shepard, P. 1982. Nature and Madness. University of Georgia Press. Simpson, L.B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Stein, S., V.  Andreotti, R.  Suša, C.  Ahenakew, and T. Č ajková. 2020. From ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ to ‘Education for the End of the World as We Know It’. Educational Philosophy and Theory 54 (3): 1–14. Sussman, R., R.  Gifford, and W.  Abrahamse. 2016. Social Mobilization: How to Encourage Action on Climate Change. Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

20 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Thompson, R. 2019. Education, Inequality and Social Class: Expansion and Stratification in Educational Opportunity. Routledge. Westley, F. and McGowan, K. (Eds.) 2017. The Evolution of Social Innovation: Building Resilience Through Transitions. Edward Elgar. Westley, F., P. Olsson, C. Folke, T. Homer-Dixon, H. Vredenburg, D. Loorbach, J.  Thompson, M.  Nilsson, E.  Lambin, J.  Sendzimir, and B.  Banerjee. 2011. Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation. Ambio 40: 762–780.

CHAPTER 2

Designing Education for Eco-Social-Cultural Change

What does it mean, “to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity”? That was a question we faced in the research project that gave rise to this book, and that we wanted to answer as educators rather than physicists or ecologists. “Carrying capacity of the Earth” is not a property that can be directly experienced, or that indeed would have had any particular relevance to humans for 99.9% of our existence as a species (Reyes 2020). It is a term and a predicament born of the last 200 years—although, in retrospect, we can place the origins of the Capitalocene further back, in fifteenth-century Europe and its subsequent colonization of much of the world (Moore 2017). Encountering the question in our present circumstances, it evokes more of an absence than a presence. Once upon a time, we humans lived within the Earth’s carrying capacity; now we no longer do. Something has been lost, and this loss goes beyond the mere assurance of ongoing human survival. In Chap. 1 of this book, we argued for the importance of directly refuting and undermining the core tenets of the Capitalocene. One way of approaching this, then, is to ask what was lost from human cultures as they were colonized by Capitalocene norms. Many answers suggest themselves, but we are especially drawn to words, images, and organizing concepts that evoke wholeness, self-shaping, spontaneous interaction, long-term entwinement, and mutual flourishing—qualities we associate with ecosystems and communities that have been able to grow and adapt in and to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fettes, S. Blenkinsop, Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7_2

21

22 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

particular places, largely undisturbed over long periods of time and in fulfillment of all their basic needs. In essence, this brings the notion of “living within the carrying capacity of the Earth” into the realm of human experience; it becomes something we can imagine and relate to. As we saw in the previous chapter, this quality is of central importance in the process of design. There are echoes here of the resilience conversation we examined earlier. But “resilience” on its own has something of the anodyne quality of “sustainability”—it can be used to smuggle in a rebranded version of the status quo. Instead, we looked for words that could challenge and undermine complacency. We came, in the end, to focus on three, which we saw as complementary perspectives on a complex whole: the wild, the sacred, and the just.

Wildness as an Organizing Concept We begin with “the wild.” As American poet and essayist Gary Snyder (1990) observes in his classic work on the topic, it is easier to describe the wild in terms of what it is not that what it is; this in itself is a telling indication of epistemic hegemony. Patiently, however, Snyder teases out some of its manifestations, in everyday understandings of “the wild” that persist even now (1990, 9–10): Of animals—free agents, each with its own endowments, living within natural systems. Of plants—self-propagating, self-maintaining, flourishing in accord with innate qualities. Of land—a place where the original and potential vegetation and fauna are intact and in full interaction and the landforms are entirely the result of nonhuman forces. Pristine. Of foodcrops—food supplies made available and sustainable by the natural excess and exuberance of wild plants in their growth and in the production of quantities of fruit or seeds. Of societies—societies whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation. Primary cultures, which consider themselves the original and eternal inhabitants of their territory. Societies which resist economic and political ­domination by civilization. Societies whose economic system is in a close and sustainable relation to the local eco­system.

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

23

Of individuals—following local custom, style, and etiquette without concern for the standards of the metropolis or nearest trading post. Unintimidated, self-reliant, independent. “Proud and free.” Of behavior—fiercely resisting any oppression, confinement, or exploitation. Far-out, outrageous, “bad,” admirable. Of behavior—artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned. Expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic.

Importantly, then, this large and multifaceted notion of the wild does not rely on some kind of binary distinction between humans and the more-­ than-­human. As we have seen, such a distinction is foundational to the Capitalocene; in contrast, the wild encompasses the entire life of the Earth, human, and more-than-human, as defined by a capacity for dynamic, reciprocally relational self-renewal. Born of the wild, humans retain their membership in it, insofar as they form part of this larger self-­renewing system: The wild is self-creating, self-maintaining, self-propagating, self-reliant, self-­ actualising, and it has no ‘self’. It is perhaps the same as what East Asian philosophers call the Dao. The human mind, imagination, and even natural human language can also thus be called wild. The human body itself with its circulation, respiration and digestion is wild. In these senses ‘wild’ is a word for the intrinsic, non-theistic, forever-changing natural order. (Snyder 2006)

In Capitalocene discourse, “wild” is often counterpoised to “civilized,” and thus positioned as something essentially alien, or at least marginal, to social order. We prefer, however, to contrast “wild” with “colonized.” The wild is not uncivilized or disordered, if these words are taken to imply a lack of self-restraint, propriety, dignity, care. On the contrary, the wild offers an image of how patterns and beauty can emerge from the actions and interactions of free wild beings. This applies to humans as it does to all their kin. As Canadian poet and scholar Robert Bringhurst (2008) comments in his own essay on wildness, “at their best, human civilizations actually start to resemble the forest. They start to attain—and to sense and respond to—the forest’s supple and self-reinforcing order” (p. 276). To live within the Earth’s carrying capacity is to live within a civilization of this kind: that is the idea we want to pursue here. This conception of the wild stands in explicit opposition to colonization and other systems of oppression and repression within human societies, as well as to the ways humans continue to colonize and oppress the more-than-human world. Wildness implies freedom, not just for particular privileged individuals or

24 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

groups, but for all beings; and not the “freedom” of selfish individuals acting out of narrow self-interest, but freedom enjoyed in the context of mutually beneficial flourishing relationships of all kinds. (For an Indigenous perspective on this, see Simpson 2017; for an eco-educational take, see The Crex Crex Collective 2018). From wildness flow what are commonly referred to as the four “Rs” of Indigenous education: respect, reciprocity, relevance, and responsibility (Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991), the principles according to which free beings associate and interact meaningfully and productively with one another. As Ellis and Perry (2020) state in the context of “anticolonial pathways for Indigenous sacred site protection,” the four Rs “guide human, physical, and spiritual world interactions.” In our terms, they illuminate the kind of teachings the wild offers, if one attends to it steadily and humbly over a long period of time. Given the extraordinary damage human activity can inflict, whether on other humans or on our more-than-human kin, the heart of eco-social cultural change lies in our learning, as individuals, cultures, and societies, to acknowledge the intrinsic worth of all beings and of their co-existence in mutual flourishing. Only such a shift in perceptions, values, and actions will ensure that what is human is responsive to and shaped by Earth, rather than to its own self-referential fantasies and desires (Kimmerer 2013; Moran 2016).

Sacredness as a Property of the Wild The mention of sacredness brings us to a second organizing concept or principle: that human cultures in close contact with the wild experience as sacred the self-maintenance and self-renewal of land and the wider cosmos. This is not to say, of course, that all individual members of such cultures hold such an understanding at all times; rather we want to point to a sense of sacredness, both embodied and encultured, as a distinctively human way of recognizing the intrinsic and irreducible value of more-than-human others, beyond their utility to human creatures or to the individual self. Regarded this way, the Earth comprises myriad different forms of intelligence, neither limited to animals nor bound within the limits of a single organism or entity. It is in this sense that anthropologist Eduardo Kohn refers to the tropical rainforest as “an ecology of selves” (Kohn 2013, 75). A self is a kind of whole—what Kohn calls “an open whole,” a semi-­ permeable being, because it depends for its continued existence on living, dynamic relationships with other selves. Another, etymologically related,

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

25

term for this wholeness is haleness, which in turn is related to the notion of health and also to holy and hallow. The wholeness of selves is a fractal phenomenon, involving interrelated and resonant patterns of wholes at multiple scales—shapes and patterns that reverberate from the scale of a cell, to an individual being, to the universe (Meyer 2013; Brown 2017). A sense of sacredness, then, is a kind of recognition of what is free, self-­ willed, and healthy or hale. Similarly, the work of “hallowing”—of fostering and elevating the health and wholeness of a being or place—is a way of participating in such open wholes and thus inhabiting, at least for a short space, the freedom and belonging inherent in the wild. Such experiences can be life-changing (Vakoch and Castrillón 2014). Spirituality and sacredness are therefore, we believe, concepts that must be included in any rethinking and reworking of the relationship of humans with the more-than-human world. Yet they are also contentious in many educational settings, as diverse religious traditions claim a privileged understanding of the spiritual and the sacred. We have no easy answers to this issue. We are not claiming that this conception of spirituality or the sacred includes everything people use those words to refer to; yet no synthesis of the relevant work in our field would be complete without it. Education for living within the Earth’s carrying capacity is clearly education for a kind of haleness, and we need to embrace all the diverse cultural means we have for perceiving, fostering, and participating in such haleness.1 This takes us onto the terrain of sacred practices. We address questions of practice in a later chapter, but here we want to suggest that many sacred practices function educationally as practices of attunement. For individuals, this might involve orienting to the more-than-human, or their own complex inner selfhood, or their relational responses to particular contexts, places, and moments; for a group gathered together, it might involve invoking a shared purpose, the renewal of tradition, and participation in larger patterns of meaning. That is, sacred practices are designed to foster our ability to learn from the immanent holiness, or haleness, or wholeness, of the individual-, place- or group-in-relation. Juxtaposing the wild and the sacred in this way may help bring emotional and imaginative depth to what the Capitalocene has sought to erase: an understanding of humans as joyful and humble participants in the 1  Such means include many kinds of artistic practice, implying that education oriented to the wild and the sacred must include art as fundamental; exploring this in depth would require another project, however.

26 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

world and recipients of its bounty. Such an understanding brings a concomitant sense of responsibility, and in this way we arrive at the third of our organizing concepts: justice.

Justice as Intrinsic to the Wild and Sacred A vast literature attests to the fact that the social systems driving the ecological and climate disasters are also responsible for massive social inequities within and between nations, cultures, peoples, and communities, including differing degrees of exposure to the consequences of environmental collapse (Sant et  al. 2021; Liboiron 2021). Educating for living within the Earth’s carrying capacity therefore implies educating for a more equal distribution of costs and vulnerabilities, or, to put it in more positive terms, educating for a world in which all people are enabled to live within flourishing socio-ecological systems. Such a goal is widely accepted, for example within the “education for sustainable development” paradigm promoted by the United Nations and UNESCO (Rieckman 2017; Shulla et al. 2020). Such human-centered conceptions of justice are essential; human societies cannot possibly live in harmony with the Earth if they include populations made desperate by want or furious by oppression. Yet care must be taken to draw the circle of justice larger than around humans alone. Consider, for example, conflicting demands for water from a particular aquifer or watershed. Justice from a sustainable development perspective asks us to consider the access to water of Indigenous communities, rural communities, racialized urban communities, and so on, and also the ethical and environmental practices of agriculture, mining, hydropower, and other large-scale water users. Yet there is a risk that, in seeking more equitable solutions for the people involved, we will be tempted to overlook or downplay the interests of the fish and birds and plants and insects—or, for that matter, the lakes and rivers themselves (O’Donnell and Macpherson 2019). Justice that includes the more-than-human goes well beyond what is commonly understood as implied by sustainable development; it might, for instance, mean an overall reduction of human presence in a particular landscape, in order that the remaining communities might co-flourish in greater wildness and wholeness. We are all implicated in struggles for justice in particular contexts. For the two of us, an especially salient Canadian struggle unfolding over recent decades has been the reassessment and reconfiguration of the place of

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

27

Indigenous peoples in the country’s history, present and future. In the last few years, we have written on the potentially transformative impact of Indigenous land acknowledgments (Blenkinsop and Fettes 2020) and on the radical challenge posed by a Haudenosaunee conception of imagination as rooted in land (Fettes and Blenkinsop 2023), and contributed to developing a research methodology (ecoportraiture) that calls researchers to be accountable to both land and Indigenous relationships with land (Blenkinsop et al. 2022). Underlying this work is our conviction, shared with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that the “reconciliation” of Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada is a more-than-human matter; it “requires our collective reconciliation with the Earth” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015, 18; Borrows 2018). And the converse is also true, as expressed by legal scholar James Tully: This great project of our time [learning to live sustainably on the Earth] cannot be done justly or intelligently without the ongoing consent and cooperation of Indigenous people who have co-evolved with and learned from their ecosystems: the very ecosystems from which non-Indigenous people now want to learn how life sustains life in order to save themselves from the anthropogenic crisis they have created by ignoring both teachers. (Tully 2018, 86–87)

Educating for ecological justice thus goes hand in hand with education for Indigenous justice. This is a burgeoning field of scholarship that we can’t address here in its full extent. We want to highlight, however, that in many Indigenous traditions, both across North America and more widely, the land is seen as the ultimate source of law (Black 2011). Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows has outlined “how Indigenous peoples’ own legal systems and lifeways” facilitate “understanding and working within our environment’s inherent limits” (2018, 50). For Wildcat et al. (2014), this entails “a regeneration of Indigenous cultural, spiritual and political practices” grounded in land, in preparation for “an outward, disciplined confrontation with settler society” (III–IV). In fact, such confrontations are already leading to changes in national legal systems. Reviewing recent progress in “Nature and earth jurisprudence,” O’Donnell et al. observe that “the most transformative cases of rights of Nature have been consistently influenced, and often actually led, by Indigenous peoples” (2020, 405). The challenge to Capitalocene norms posed by Indigenous

28 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

resurgence movements around the world, while small-scale in its impact so far, is far-reaching in its implications (McGregor et al. 2020). Intersecting with Indigenous-led approaches to ecological justice is the recent elaboration of conceptions of multi-species justice (Celermajer et al. 2020, 2021; Tschakert et al. 2021). In the words of Celermajer and her colleagues, “Multispecies justice redesigns justice away from the fiction of individualist primacy, toward an ecological reality where humans actually exist: in a larger set of material relationships” (Celermajer et al. 2021, 127). While Indigenous philosophies and political initiatives are one source of inspiration for this work, its proponents also draw on animal rights discourse, environmental justice and political ecology, and various strands of posthumanism, especially feminist efforts “to acknowledge, resist, prevent and respond to violence enacted against all kinds of beings” (2021, 124). In the multispecies justice paradigm, “human and nonhuman animals, species, microbiomes, ecosystems, oceans, and rivers—and the relations among and across them—are all subjects of justice” (Celermajer et  al. 2021, 127). This raises a host of difficult questions, among them the limitations of human-centered legal concepts such as “personhood,” reliance on human interpretations of the interests of more-than-human subjects, the accommodation of ecologically necessary forms of killing, consumption and harm, and the unequal voice and representation of different groups of humans in such deliberations. To these concerns, we would add the need for a dialogue between conceptions of the just and conceptions of the sacred. If the latter are related to perceptions of wholeness and wildness as intrinsically worthy of protection, then adequate practices of justice will need to distinguish what is whole and what is damaged, what is wild and what is colonized, and seek to tip the scales toward the former. For a host of reasons, education that engages directly and respectfully with Indigenous sovereignty and understandings of land, and that expands notions of rights-holders to include many different kinds of beings, will be “unsettling” for most of us raised in the Capitalocene. “Unsettling” here is intended in the sense described by Paulette Regan in the context of Canadian efforts toward reconciliation: “settlers cannot just theorize about decolonizing and liberatory struggle: we must experience it, beginning with ourselves as individuals, and then morally and ethically responsible socio-political actors in Canadian society” (Regan 2010, 24–25). The same is true everywhere: we are all implicated in Capitalocene structures and logics that hamper more expansive and inclusive practices of

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

29

justice. So education that honors the wild, the sacred, and the just has to be centrally concerned with creating “free spaces of teaching and learning,” as David Jardine terms them (2012), where people are supported to extend and expand their self-understanding, ways of knowing, relationships with Others and with place, and images of the future.

Educators as Designers for Eco-­Social-Cultural Change At the start of this chapter, we termed the three organizing concepts of the wild, the sacred, and the just “complementary perspectives on a complex whole.” Before going on, let’s pause and recall what we have been aiming to accomplish by elaborating those three concepts. Whereas the Capitalocene relies on a fundamental dichotomy between society and nature, a dichotomy that permeates the institutions of formal education (Fettes and Blenkinsop 2023), the whole we are trying to evoke here has at its heart humans’ profound embeddedness and participation in the more-than-human, an understanding of us as both dependent on and utterly intertwined with all Earthly being. Assuming that the discussion so far has helped bring greater clarity and specificity to this notion and its implications, we are now in a position to ask: How can transformative design help align education so that it prepares current and future generations to be responsible citizens of such a whole? Such an education needs itself to embody qualities of wildness, sacredness, and justice. Which is to say (as would be expected in light of our discussion, in the previous chapter, of transformative design) that it cannot follow the industrial pattern of a single template imposed over and over again on top of local diversity. Rather, it must consist of a galaxy of “niche-innovations,” local experiments and systems of practice loosely linked by a handful of shared principles, and an overarching commitment to reciprocal communication and support and mutual flourishing. This is turn demands a different way of imagining the work of educators. We are used to the model of what Basil Bernstein (1975) called “invisible pedagogy,” in which individual teachers work with groups of students behind the closed doors of their classrooms, following the guidance of standardized curriculum and textbooks but with relatively little interaction with other teachers. There are exception to this model, of course, but it is still the prevalent one, all the way from kindergarten to

30 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

post-secondary. Even in the non-formal sector of adult and community education, a lot of educational offerings take roughly this form. In education as transformative design, it makes no sense to isolate teachers in this way. Recall, for example, Irwin’s description of transition design as consisting of projects that “have their origins in long-term thinking, are lifestyle-oriented and place-based, and always acknowledge the natural world as the greater context for all design solutions” (2015, 231–232). Such projects cannot plausibly be sustained by individual educators working on their own, nor by collections of teachers, each of whom is doing their own thing. They must be held and fostered in community. Indeed, to some extent transformative design positions everyone as a designer-educator, including children, elders, and—for our purposes especially—the more-than-human world. Those of us who identify as “educators,” meaning we see the facilitating and support of learning as a core responsibility and practice (a calling, a commitment), must simultaneously understand ourselves as learners as well. Part of our practice is to become expert learners—to spot the gifts and teachings others have to offer, and invest the time and attention and patience required to learn from them and to find ways of making those gifts and teachings accessible to others. The latter is the “designerly” role of teachers that we want to develop further in the rest of this chapter. Whereas teachers in the Capitalocene are often positioned as the holders of sanctioned or authoritative knowledge, teachers oriented to the wild, the sacred and the just work to develop understanding “convivially,” in a “community of conversation” (Jardine 2012)—“no one can become experierenced on someone else’s behalf… each of us has an irreplaceable part in this convivial whole” (2012, 127). To some extent, such convivial learning is an emergent process that evades control or certainty. However, we think it can be shaped and supported in intentional and artful ways. In Chap. 4 of this book we discuss the “4 Cs” that define particular stances and sets of capacities involved in this work. Here, we turn our attention to a set of six “principles for eco-social-­ cultural change,” arrived at through a sustained and convivial process described in the previous chapter, that we have come to think of as design prompts. The principles were inspired in part by images of flourishing ecosystems, such as an old-growth forest, and in this way they are intimately connected to our understanding and use of the wild as an organizing concept. Prompts are used in both design and education to focus attention and imagination in desired ways. This set of six emerged through our efforts

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

31

to push our thinking beyond the familiar contours of the Capitalocene, and that is how we envision them being used by educators for eco-social-­ cultural change—that is, to help them let go of inherited assumptions and practices and see new and unfamiliar possibilities for convivial learning. The prompts are deliberately multi-layered and open-ended, as well as interconnected and overlapping, and we do not see ourselves as having exhausted their possibilities here. Indeed, in the way we have come to think about transformative design, such prompts should be inexhaustible, because they need to lend themselves to different interpretations and realizations depending on the context. Thus, the discussion here is intended more to provoke curiosity and inspire experimentation that to offer any definitive account of what the prompts mean or how they can be used.

Design Prompt 1: All Our Relations The phrase “all my relations” or “all our relations” originated with Plains Indigenous cultures (Lakota, Cree, Métis), and has become widely used— by both Indigenous and settler people—as an expression of humans’ interconnectedness with one another and with the rest of the living world. In her influential book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Robin Wall Kimmerer shares an elegant image drawn from basket weaving to explain this teaching: The first two rows of the basket are the hardest. … But then there’s the third row—my favorite. At this point, the tension of over is balanced by the tension of under, and the opposing forces start to come into balance. The give and take—reciprocity—begins to take hold and the parts begin to become a whole. The weaving becomes easy as splints fall snugly into place. Order and stability emerge out of chaos. In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Without them, there is no basket of plenty. Only if that first circle is in place can we weave the second. The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built upon ecology. But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in danger of pulling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. … I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row (Kimmerer 2013, 152–153).

32 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

“All our relations” can thus be seen as a recognition of wholeness, in the sense earlier evoked in our discussion of the sacred, and as an ethical maxim grounded in the expanded understanding of justice that the wild and the sacred entail. Taken in an ontological direction, it points toward a way of being, and being human, in the world that doesn’t draw a firm boundary at the skin. “All our relations” posits a way of being where the self can’t be abstracted from community without doing violence to both. Furthermore, even when skin/fur/scale/bark boundaries are drawn, there is a recognition of equity across difference, of vitality, agency, and rights for whatever “selves” are present and active and intertwined in any given moment. The educational questions then include: What and who are knowledge and knowers here? How are we already in relation to what we are seeking to understand? How are we listening to and learning with them? What can be understood only in relation (i.e., what cannot be known in isolation)? What are the ethical and vital implications embedded in these relations and how are they, both the relationships and the beings we are in relation with, already engaged in teaching? And how might shifting or deepening these relationships reshape and change our understandings and responsibilities therein? Relational pedagogies and approaches to education are currently being explored by both Indigenous (Wilson 2008; Davidson and Davidson 2018; Carpena-Méndez et  al. 2022) and Western educators (Noddings 2013; Blenkinsop and Ford 2018; Kitchen and Ragoonaden 2019; Walsh et al. 2020), sometimes in alliance (Brown et al. 2020; Schnellert et al. 2022). We want to draw out the radical potential of this work for overcoming fragmented and individualized notions of what knowledge is, along with alienated, individualized, and superior notions of humans (and particular kinds of humans) as privileged knowers. As Cree scholar Shawn Wilson observes, in a relational paradigm “[k]nowledge cannot be owned or discovered but is merely a set of relationships that may be given a visible form” (2008, 127). For the educator-as-transformative-designer, then, activities need to be shaped, engaged with, and even assessed in consideration of the relationships that already exist in any learning environment— not only in their present form, but with an eye to their potential growth and development. It is the relationships that hold the knowledge and keep it lively. For example, if learning is taking place in spaces where some are marginalized or excluded, then this must become a topic open to exploration

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

33

and change; the implicit and under-revealed relationships of any space are as much in need of attention as the explicit. “All our relations” tells us that excluding and silencing particular voices impoverishes everyone’s learning. Conversely, if teachers work to build an inclusive space where community, in all its difference, can be present, then every topic taken up by that community will be understood more richly, will reveal more of its depths. This of course calls into question the ideas of ownership and rights to know that permeate public schooling in the West. Whose knowledge is it? Who gets credit for the knowing? Where does any particular understanding come from? Is this knowledge “mine” or “ours”? How was this knowledge acquired and to the benefit of whom? Paradoxically, a more humble understanding of knowledge as shared and partial can simultaneously build confidence that everyone participates in knowing something of worth. Designing for reciprocity and the “ethics” of being in relation also calls for practices of gratitude—for if learning is arising from, embedded in and shared by community, then it behooves human teachers and learners to hear those voices and honor those gifts. This idea is embodied in countless Indigenous traditions, for example some Nations’ practice of offering of tobacco to the plant, animal, and other beings with whom they are in relation and upon whom they depend for our survival and well-being. “All of our flourishing is mutual,” Robin Wall Kimmerer says (2013, 132). “Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.” Here, then, are some thoughts on how educators might work with “all my relations” in designerly ways: • By putting equity and decolonization right at the center of educational practice, from beginning to end. This goes beyond simply involving diverse actors and perspectives; it means engaging all participants in considering how intersectionality, positionality, and privilege shape their actions, choices, perspectives, and imaginings (including nature as an object of colonization: Blenkinsop et  al. 2017), and building a culture of thinking and choosing otherwise (e.g., Saad 2020; Menakem 2017). • By seeking to co-design everything with the more-than-human. This includes understanding all-our-relations to be participants, decision-­ makers, stakeholders, and co-teachers in whatever learning is sought,

34 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

and to take time to listen to what they have to say (Blenkinsop and Beeman 2010; Jickling et al. 2019). • By cultivating supportive networks of experimentation and learning, rooting the work in gratitude, reciprocity, community, and communities of practice. This gives sustenance to all involved and nourishment to the transformative nature of much of this learning work, while undermining the capitalistic assumptions of education and the transactional nature of encounters with the Other. Design here goes beyond educational practice itself: it implies that relationships, collaborations, and gifting networks need to be shaping our lifeways as educators. • By engaging in “self-in-the-system” reflective practices (Scharmer 2018; see also https://www.u-­school.org/) and asking questions like: Who am I? What is my work? What am I being called to contribute? What are the gifts I am offering and receiving? This challenges us as educators to see ourselves as part of a larger whole, as having something (but not everything) to contribute and receive within larger networks of relationship.

Design Prompt 2: Abundant Time It is common, in the context of the ecological and climate crises, to insist that time is short. This sense of the scarcity of time and the need to “get things done,” or sometimes to “get things covered,” likewise haunts the cultures of work, parenting, leisure, and formal schooling (Jardine et al. 2006; Jardine 2012; Southerton 2020). What teacher, for example, is not familiar with the experience of trying to cram ever increasing amounts of curricular “stuff” into an ever-shrinking amount of classroom time, while at the same time having to turn away from rich learning moments or stop free exploration before it commences? These are essentially colonial and modern conceptions and practices of time (Beynon-Jones and Grabham 2018; Nanni 2017; Ogle 2015), with deep implications for what is prioritized, who is heard, and what is allowed to be known. The prompt “abundant time” asks educators to embrace a different understanding of temporality: to place greater value on slowing down and diving deep. In our work with nature-based learning, it has proven important for students to spend more time immersed in a particular project or in the company of more-than-human teachers, to consider themselves and the world around them in more abundant ways. This is a practice, or

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

35

experience, similar to Gadamer’s notion of Verweilen, rendered variously in English as “tarrying” (Ross 2006) or “whiling” (Jardine 2012)—a deepening of understanding during which the normal flow of time is suspended. Both art and play can offer this kind of experience (Ross 2006; Van Manen 2018), which might be taken as exemplary of how the world as a whole can be encountered as vital, meaningful, and abundant (Jardine et al. 2006; Jardine 2012). For teachers-as-curricular-designers, “abundant time” can mean dropping the quantitative amount of content being considered, making space (because space and time are in relationship) for tuning/turning into relationships and learning moments, considering the slower/deeper learnings that can get lost in the hustle of the immediate, re-prioritizing what is important/necessary, and fiercely resisting the colonizing pressures and practices of scarcity driven education. More challenging still, “abundant time” invites teachers to consider how the curricular choices they are making, on behalf of students or in conversation with them, are opening and foreclosing particular threads of connection. Might our assumptions about the extent and limits of a given offering be a kind of enclosure of abundance? Are we giving due weight to the long arc of learning, situating our decisions on this day and that day within an understanding of their accumulation over time? Indigenous cultures have various means of asking this question. Anishinaabe elder Michael Dahl poses it this way: “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?” (Hausdoerffer et al. 2021). We appreciate how this question makes it personal, so that once again we are invited into questioning how intersectionality, positionality, and privilege pattern our actions and choices, not only with respect to “all our relations” in the here and now, but “all our relations” as they will come into being in the future. Catriona Sandilands, a noted theorist of queer ecology, offers a striking image of this process as the creation of humus: a complex stratum of decomposition and transformation that will, over a long stretch of time, provide a good environment for new life to grow in unforeseeable and wild ways (2021, 180–181). Humus is a good image for abundant time, slow in its workings, complex, and subtle in its composition, the dynamic unfolding of an awe-inspiring diversity of organisms and processes. For Sandilands, it also helpfully interrupts our tendency to think of ancestry in terms of direct biological reproduction, suggesting instead the continuing regeneration of “flourishing, complex communities” with many diverse

36 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

ancestors. We love the way this echoes the conviviality evoked by the previous prompt. The Good Ancestor is also the title of a book by philosopher Roman Krznaric, who argues that modern civilization is “colonizing the future” by treating it as a dumping ground for its toxic waste. Living well on the Earth requires us to become, in his terms, “time rebels.” Since this is closely aligned with how we understand the implications of “abundant time,” here we adapt his own list of six prompts for “thinking long” to the work of educators-as-transformative-designers: • Deep-time humility, which invites us to let go of the presumption that anything worth doing can be done quickly, or indeed that we know what needs to be done in the long run. Instead, we might allow questions to float un/under-answered in their complexity and avoid a rush to resolution. This suggests rethinking what we understand as “activity” and “outcome” and allowing room for spontaneity and emergence, as well as for “nothing” to happen for what may seem like long periods of time. • Cathedral thinking, which encourages us to think of the gradual building of complexity over long time spans, beyond anything we can realize personally. This suggests deliberately seeking “time depth” in whatever topic or project is being explored. How has knowledge or capacity been built over centuries? How can we carry that legacy forward in the short span of our own lives, in our memories, and our actions? How will our descendants encounter and build on it? • Taking that legacy mindset further, we might hold back from activities that simply reproduce what is easy and predictable. What we want are structures and practices deeply rooted in the local and particular. That suggests engaging in ongoing iterative cycles of paying attention, gathering information, reflecting and wondering, and designing and making (Ingold 2021). Such processes are intrinsic to the convivial holding of knowledge in the world in ways that respond to changing circumstances and nourish further knowledge building over time. • Intergenerational justice asks that we pay attention to those futures being invoked in what we do in the present. This invites us to make a practice of regularly pausing and asking ourselves what kind of community is being built in our work together, who it welcomes,

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

37

who it excludes. Are there additional practices of inclusion and equity that we can make part of our ways of being together and thus something we pass on to our successors? What gaps can we identify in our tacit imaginings of the future? • Picking up on this last point, holistic forecasting asks us to think in terms of multiple pathways to the future. As designers, this means resisting early closure: whenever one story, one truth, one way of doing or understanding things becomes dominant to the point of excluding alternatives, we might deliberately seek out and amplify other possibilities. Who else’s futures need to be considered? What counterstories can be uncovered or imagined? What new niche-­ innovations can be fostered? • Finally, such long-term work relies on shared transcendent goals, a sense of contributing to a greater and enduring whole—to the well-­ being of our place and community, and ultimately to that of the Earth itself. Educational design needs to include the ongoing renewal of this commitment, not only at the level of discourse, but through repeated, ongoing experiences of the wild’s self-willed abundance. Such encounters offer the most vivid reminder that there is more at stake here than merely human needs and desires, or human experiences of time.

Design Prompt 3: Mystery/Unknowability An obsession with clarity, distinctness, and knowability is one of the defining characteristics of Western epistemology—an “active, structuring demand made upon the world,” as David Jardine puts it (2012, 61). The colonizing force of this ideal has been one of the drivers of the Capitalocene. So our third prompt draws attention to the ways in which reality resists being fully known, or known from only one angle. Rather than framing this as a problem, it suggests taking it as an insight into what reality—wild reality, at least—really is, and designing with that in mind. At the heart of this is our experience of otherness—“alterity,” as it is often termed in the literature (Levinas 1996; Brown and Toadvine 2012). Western phenomenology has been largely focused on human others; yet its deep interest in alterity is readily extended “to open up and make manifest the veiled and increasingly buried features of the interplay between ‘nature out there’ and the ‘nature in here’. …There is in the smell, taste, and feel of the wild, an uncanny otherness. This indelible and radical

38 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

alterity acts as the mainspring for much of the vitality and vibrancy that we experience when immersed in the wild” (Vakoch and Castrillon 2014, 3). This is what our principle of “mystery/unknowability” gestures toward, the way that vitality is bound up with the irreducible selfhood of beings-in-relation. Of course, “mystery/unknowability” applies to human others as well, along with their experiences and accounts of reality. This principle, too, is a challenge to the nature/society divide foundational to the Capitalocene (Moore 2017), which distinguishes between the objective knowability of the natural world by Western science (a single reality, mononature) and the subjective multiplicity of folk accounts of that world (multiculturalism) (Law 2015). As part of the Western scientific project, anthropology set out to catalogue and analyze such ethnocultural worlds as locally circumscribed and contingent; the impact of this epistemic colonialism is still felt today by Indigenous peoples and the societies of the Global South. In place of this impulse to reify cultures and worldviews as self-contained and internally consistent systems, this third design prompt suggests encountering them (including our own) as the diverse, conflicting, and shifting sets of ideas and practices they really are (Graeber 2015). “There is nothing outside practice. We are embedded in practices all the way down” (Law 2015, 130). Educationally, this prompt cuts two ways. On the one hand, it enjoins humility and caution. The notion of humans gathering knowledge whatever the cost and in whatever way they deem appropriate becomes problematic, because the alterity of the other affords them the right not to be known, or known primarily in ways that enact respect and reciprocity. This means that extractive forms of knowledge, like those often seen in the sciences, or the more seemingly mundane scene of small children running around a wooded area turning over every stone and stick in search of insects and wiggly beings, must be re-considered. For does Pine want to be known in terms of board feet? Or Fox Glove as heart medicine? Or now homeless and scared Newt as fun encounter for hordes of grasping human hands? Or, for that matter, as Pine, Fox Glove, and Newt, generalized representatives of their supposed species? Indigenous teachings tend to emphasize such caution and humility, not only regarding relations among humans and across cultures but beyond as well. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes of the “nationhood” of other species, which have “power, agency, and influence… language, thought, and spirit—intellect” that are different from those of human nations and

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

39

that call for “consent, reciprocity, respect and empathy” in all dealings with them (2017, 61). In place of the Western hunger for knowledge allied to a project of control and exploitation, we find knowledge practices such as those of traditional hunters or medicine gatherers, grounded in long and attentive observation and imaginative/spiritual resonance. One earns the right to know the Other by allowing oneself to be taught by them. And this brings us to the other educational corollary of “mystery/ unknowability”—the multiplication of potential teachers and teachings. In return for greater humility, we find ourselves in a world of endless wealth. Robin Wall Kimmerer evokes the possibilities: Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world. We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. … Imagine how much less lonely the world would be. (Kimmerer 2013, 58)

It is not simply that these other beings, or nations, or worlds, have their own systems of knowledge and ways of educating that might support our human work. It is that such gifts are inexhaustible. “I am no more familiar with any one thing than if I had never encountered it,” says Maori philosopher Carl Mika. “Indeed, I experience an aspect of the worlded thing and its mystery when I meet the limits of my ability to say much about it, or when I realise that I cannot fully know it” (Mika 2017, 5). This is because things exist for us only provisionally and contingently, as it were; they show us only one facet of their being, while in truth they co-arise with the whole of the world in which they are embedded—a world that we can never know as they know it, because we are differently worlded. Thus, they never stop speaking to us of what lies just beyond our ken. This challenges many of our assumptions about pedagogy and curriculum, while opening up vast possibilities. We might ask ourselves, how does Rose teach Hummingbird? What pedagogy does River use with Granite? What is the necessary knowing that Moose offers her young? And how do these nations teach and learn from one another? We may find ourselves reimagining what human education can be in the light of such learning. Certainly the illusions of complete or definitive knowledge, of progress toward an authoritative “single story” on any topic, will tend to give way

40 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

to something more multivocal, contingent, and self-aware. Law’s remark on it being “practices all the way down” points to an alternative educational ideal in which diverse, ongoing, wonder-filled encounters with the Other, both human and more-than-human, shape a self that is characterized by more fully alive, aware, skilled, and reciprocal—in short, more wild, less colonized—ways of inhabiting and moving through that world (Ahenakew 2016, 2017). Evidently this means decentering the human teacher as expert, as the sole designer and evaluator of what should be, can be, and is known. The pedagogical challenge is to cultivate a space where a diversity of voices, ideas, questionings, knowings can appear, be acknowledged and confirmed, and cared for, and a curriculum that encourages the emergence and deepening of wonder and imagination (Egan et al. 2014; Fettes 2013; Fettes and Blenkinsop 2023; Sheridan and Longboat 2006). It also implies that the educator will be learning alongside all the other participants, honing their own skills of attention and empathy, letting themselves be challenged and surprised by what emerges, and accepting the limits of their knowing. The familiar notion of “learning outcomes” needs, at the very least, to be radically rethought—for what if one valued learning outcome is to recognize one’s profound ignorance, or the inappropriateness of seeking further knowledge in the absence of a fundamental shift in relationship? Here are some thoughts on how educators might work with “mystery/ unknowability” in designerly ways: • By asking open-ended and well-framed questions that deliberately exclude the notion of learning experiences having to be efficient, cost-effective, measurable, or conforming in other ways to our expectations of education in the Capitalocene. Instead, the goal would be to stretch individual and collective thinking into wilder, less linear, more systemic, creative possibilities. • By approaching program and activity design through cycles of small experiments involving prototypes. Designers use this approach to test, learn, and iterate their way into something that they couldn’t imagine or think of before beginning. For educators, this suggests developing new practices through many tiny steps (and honored mis-steps), treating each program offering as a step in a journey toward eco-social-cultural transformation—a step that is reflected upon, reworked, and moved beyond.

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

41

• By modeling comfort with and in these spaces of incomplete knowing and mystery and by making those spaces available, important, and interesting for learners. While novices and others new to a particular space may feel they have little to contribute, in fact their spontaneous responses and fresh eyes on a problem can be sources of innovation and transformative learning. Equally, instructors can be frank about the limitations of their understanding, not just as individuals but as participants in a culture and a worldview.

Design Prompt 4: Embeddedness/Integration Earlier we noted the close association of wholeness and the sacred, and how our thinking about education that undoes the assumptions of the Capitalocene has been shaped by our understanding of ecosystems—complex wholes that emerge from and are sustained by the interactions of free wild beings. Our fourth prompt invites us to think about the educational implications of this—of how all our knowledge of ourselves and others is embedded in and contributes to such larger wholes. This is a challenge, not only because of the limitations of ordinary human perception, but also because of the fragmentation of knowledge and experience in the Capitalocene. Depictions of wild nature in television and other media position us as spectators rather than participants, while the language and concepts of systems science and other efforts to grasp these larger wholes we are embedded in remain too abstract for most people’s ways of knowing. There is, in fact, a vast gap between our lives as individuals and the life of the Earth as a whole. Most of us in Western culture encounter “the Earth” as a concept, a set of images (maps of the globe, a photo taken from space), a topic in “Earth science” (volcanoes, earthquakes, the water cycle), and in poetic/rhetorical references—but we don’t experience the Earth. Of course, the fact that humans have spread across the Earth’s surface and are affecting processes such as climate on a global scale is something we need to reckon with collectively. But such developments unfold on too vast a scale for us to perceive them directly, and so we remain dependent on these various modes of interpretation and representation for flawed and partial images of our relationship to the whole. But perhaps this is not really the main difficulty. Perhaps the more salient problem lies closer to home, in our failure to grasp our embeddedness and integration in local ecosystems—in the intricate dance of soil and

42 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

water and air, of plants and animals and insects and fungi, right here, right now. Our daily lives unfold within landscapes large enough to demonstrate the self-sustaining, self-renewing capacities of the wild, but small enough to invite intimacy, connection, and stewardship. What is more, within those landscapes, special places and sacred sites can be found and cared for that possess, to an unusual degree, a sense of wholeness. These are the scales at which the Indigenous conception of “land as first teacher” can most readily be experienced. Land in this sense teaches us, not simply by offering a place to live, or the food and material resources necessary for survival, but more fundamentally by showing us and letting us experience, continually and in myriad ways, what living relationships look like and feel like and how they weave together to make greater, more complex, self-­ sustaining, and adaptive wholes. In Indigenous creation stories, humans are typically the late arrivals, the youngest member of the family, the last to be created, arriving on a scene where action and intelligence are already in full swing, and where our main task is to learn by observing and participating in the webs of relationship that carry both doing and thinking (Styres 2011, 2017; Simpson 2014). This is where embeddedness and integration can be properly learned. Education that honors this principle takes children onto and into the land from an early age. It also de-centers the human teacher in such a way that the natural world and its denizens and particularities can become actual co-teachers in the students’ learning (Blenkinsop and Beeman 2010; Jickling et al. 2019). And it carries implications for the kinds of stories one chooses to listen to and to tell, as Sandra Styres notes: For those who want to live in deeply sacred and intimate relationship to Land must understand that it first and foremost requires a respectful and consistent acknowledgment of whose traditional lands we are on, a commitment to journeying—a seeking out and coming to an understanding of the stories and knowledges embedded in those lands, a conscious choosing to live in intimate, sacred, and storied relationships with those lands and not the least of which is an acknowledgment of the ways one is implicated in the networks and relations of power that comprise the tangled colonial history of the lands one is upon. (Styres 2018, 29)

“Land as first teacher” thus offers guidance both in the languages of the more-than-human world and in the stories that mirror and transmute our relationships with that world in the medium of human language. Stories of

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

43

both kinds are to be encountered and experienced as wholes, and this implies the development of skills of listening quietly and carefully to the same or similar stories told over and over again. In her influential book Indigenous Storywork (2008), Jo-ann Archibald describes the process of becoming “story-ready,” which she sees as embodying the seven principles of “respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, inter-relatedness, and synergy.” Archibald has specifically human stories in mind, but it is easy to see how these same principles might apply to listening directly to what the land has to say. If land- and story-based pedagogies establish the foundation for an understanding of embeddedness and integration, countless other curricular questions arise. What happens to the notion of separate “subjects” when it is their relation to and interconnection with each other that sheds light on a greater whole? If learners have come to experience the world as integrated and themselves as a part of it, what questions and expectations do they bring to, say, the learning of math, or of a second language, or of geography? How is their new learning to be assessed in the light of what they already know? And what is the role of the human teacher in this mix of relations, stories, and teachers? What does the human teacher become if they are not the “expert” in anything—not in the content to be learned, not in the integration of that content with what has been learned before, not in the ways knowledge is held convivially far beyond the classroom? Who or what, exactly, is doing the teaching? Here are some thoughts on how educators might work with “embeddedness/integration” in designerly ways: • By building in expectations that students will regularly spend time with the more-than-human world—in “sit spots” or microsites or through other practices of attentive presence. This is a practice of listening to land that has no particular goal other than to hear what it has to say, week in week out, through the seasons, and over time to experience oneself as part of this slow and convivial unfolding. • By recognizing that stories can be teachers of wholeness, communities, and relationships, and thus choosing stories to listen to and to tell that are informed by land as teacher and gifter. While some of these stories may arise from a microsite practice, they may also stem from being engaged with the land directly in other ways, or by listening to other human voices in dialogue with the land. All this implies

44 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

developing and teaching the skills of listening for connection, of hearing relationship. • By seeking out and coming to an understanding of local Indigenous stories and knowledges of this land we are on. This is not a simple undertaking; it depends both on the willingness of the contemporary keepers of these knowledges and stories to make them available, and on the development of some sophisticated skills of listening and interpretation. Marker (2018), for example, notes how often non-­ Indigenous ethnographers have missed the point of stories aimed at evoking a land-based experience. But such skills and relationships can grow over time. • By developing and sharing stories that embed our individual or local experiences and challenges within the broader systems of the Capitalocene— cities, food, families, money, classrooms, cars, and so on. Such systems thinking can be fostered through pedagogies developed in the field of social innovation and design (e.g., Omidyar Group 2017). A guiding premise is that the stuck or the generative patterns within a student may be replicated at the scale of teacher, classroom, school, and society—they are never just individual happenstance. As the patterns become clearer, they may inspire interventions that catalyze transformation at one or more levels (Brown 2017). • By actively remapping and restorying the systems in which we work and teach. This is an educational movement in two parts. First, it involves critiquing and deconstructing narratives that sustain and further the Capitalocene, especially as they shape our local lives and access to resources and power. Second, it means coming up with new maps and stories that allow for, or are even centered on, the shapes and voices of the communities (human and more-than-human) that we want to connect with, preserve or restore.

Design Prompt 5: Ancient Futures The dynamic, self-renewing quality of ecosystems is one of their defining characteristics: new beings are constantly joining the community, differing subtly from their predecessors; old beings are constantly passing, ceding space and resources to the next generation. This is the familiar encounter of human education as well: “the often harrowing, deeply dependent and interdependent work of confronting the mortality of the world that must be set right anew in concert and solidarity with the young” (Jardine 2012,

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

45

4). Fear of the “wildness” of the young, suspicion that they will not value the things their elders do or be capable of preserving what their elders struggled for, is one of the pitfalls that always lurks in education: Living with children means living in the belly of a paradox wherein a genuine life together is made possible only in the context of an ongoing conversation which never ends, yet must be sustained for life together to go on at all. Homes, classrooms, schools wherein the people in charge cannot lay themselves open to the new life in their midst, always exist in a state of war. (Smith 1999, 139)

Yet such mistrust of the young can be matched or surpassed by modern culture’s disdain for the old. As the pace of social and economic change has accelerated, faith in the accumulated experience and wisdom of elders has tended to diminish; they are often deprived of any meaningful role in the education and in society at large. Educational spaces have become age-­ segregated to remarkable degrees. The “ongoing conversation” between generations has become more sporadic, less wide-ranging, less rich than it was; less relationally and ecologically diverse, we might say. And of course, this is also true of the conversation with the more-than-human, with land as ancient, patient, and enduring—not only “first teacher” but “first elder.” What Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017, 23) and other Indigenous scholars have theorized as “grounded normativity” is based in this ongoing dialogue between natality and mortality, both human and more-than-­ human, a dialogue that is part and parcel of wildness itself. And so education that undoes the premises of the Capitalocene needs to revitalize the relationships between young and old and between the ancient past and the unfolding future. This is how we understand the design prompt of “ancient futures”—it calls for unweaving the modern Western discourse on time, including the ways it positions tradition and modernity as antithetical or mutually exclusive, assumes that all people have a shared experience of the present, draws a sharp line between “beliefs” and “facts” about time, and insists on the linear temporality of history (Rifkin 2017). As with the previous prompts, Indigenous scholars offer helpful images and metaphors to reorient our thinking. “Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013, 206–207). Or, in Simpson’s words, “Indigenous thought doesn’t dissect time into past,

46 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

present and future. The future is here in the form of the practices of the present, in which the past is also here influencing” (2017, 213). There are clear resonances here with our earlier prompt of “abundant time” and the notion of “being a good ancestor” discussed there. Yet “ancient futures” foregrounds a somewhat different set of responsibilities and teachings. In undermining the modern assumption of progress, that “new” is generally “better” and the solution to today’s problems is a radically new future, it encourages a slower and more thoughtful dialogue with the past. Much of the plausibility of the modern notion of progress is derived from Western science and technology, which have propelled social and cultural change at an ever-increasing rate over the past few centuries. Yet in terms of accomplishing a lot with local, renewable resources, or of building things that are both beautiful and durable, or of cultivating vibrant traditions of oral storytelling or communal ceremony, it seems obvious that older cultures have much to teach. We understand this prompt as encouraging us to “think long” not only ahead but also behind; to seek to be good descendants as well as good ancestors. There are elements of this mindset in the Western tradition of nature conservation and other preservationist movements, but Indigenous and other critiques have also shown how deeply these traditions have been influenced by colonialism (Bluwstein 2021; Eichler and Baumeister 2021). In order to really learn from ancient ecologies, greater humility and patience is needed than that typically cultivated by the Capitalocene (see our earlier discussion of becoming “story-ready”). Pragmatically, this means opening the classroom, that site of the young and the new, to conversations in which the old and the outmoded and the perishing are imaginatively present and welcomed as honored teachers—and thus, also, helping learners to build the skills and orientations that make this kind of thinking and caring possible. Imagination and creativity are different when they are shaped within “a series of complex, interconnected cycling processes that make up a non-linear, overlapping emergent and responsive network of relationships of deep reciprocity, intimate and global interconnection and interdependence, that spirals across time and space” (Simpson 2017, 24). Returning to the image of humus evoked by “abundant time,” we can see how the resilience and longevity and diversity of an old-growth ecosystem is sustained by exactly this constant complexity-conserving transformation of the old and dying. Here are some thoughts on how educators might work with “ancient futures” in designerly ways:

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

47

• By placing elder wisdom (both human and more-than-human) at the center of our teaching. Writerly accounts of the lives and teachings of individual Elders can be valuable sources of insight and inspiration, whether ethnographic (Cruikshank 2007), essayistic (Lopez 2001; Gumbs 2020), or autobiographical (Paul et al. 2014). Indeed, the seeking out of such elder wisdom might become a kind of designerly and environmental educational practice (e.g., Akama et  al. 2019). The emerging methodology of ecoportraiture is also relevant here (Blenkinsop et al. 2022). • By building empathy, understanding, and rich descriptions of the experiences of the “users”/learners who come new to these ancient teachings. This can be called different things in design language— user research, action research, thick data collection, ethnographic research—but it’s about getting to a place where the learners are welcomed and engaged in all of their complexity and diversity, and the educational process is responsive to their emerging understanding of and relationship with the world and its myriad beings, in a dialogue with older/Other ways of knowing. • By deliberately engaging in “enviro-futuristic” visioning—actively imagining other possibilities, for ourselves and the future, that draw on imaginaries and worldviews outside the assumptions of the Capitalocene. In particular, the aim would be to disrupt our habitual, linear conceptions of time to highlight the intermingling of processes that are continuous, cyclical, intermittent, and emergent. In this way, present experiences and dilemmas can be reimagined in a vaster temporal context, as part of a much longer history of being and belonging and becoming that resists enclosure and foreclosure. In this way, the possibilities of ecological justice can be located not in a distant time but in present shared encounters and visions that are concrete, instructive, hopeful, and possibly transformational.

Design Prompt 6: (Re)creative Dissonance At the heart of the ecological concept of resilience, discussed in Chap. 1, are the self-preserving tendencies of ecosystems. As has now been documented in a wide variety of biogeographic zones, even quite dramatic disturbances to a well-established ecology may not undo the underlying network of relationships, which over time will return the system to its dynamic equilibrium (Gunderson et al. 2012). Yet to put things this way

48 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

is itself a choice of perspective; from another point of view, “disturbance is always in the middle of things: the term does not refer us to a harmonious state before disturbance. Disturbances follow other disturbances. Thus, all landscapes are disturbed; disturbance is ordinary” (Tsing 2015, 160). As educators, we also work with disturbance. Education in the Capitalocene has been, and indeed was designed as, a hugely disruptive cultural force transforming highly diverse and relatively stable cultural mosaics, often with considerable degrees of local autonomy, into mobile and homogeneous labor pools and national citizenries (among other things). The alienation and disempowerment experienced by many children and youth in schools is a corollary of this basic function of disturbance. The task facing education for eco-social-cultural change is, in a way, exactly the reverse: to undo the premises of this planet-wide, ecology-­ destroying disturbance so that a new swirl of dynamic practices and systems, more diverse and responsive to local conditions and possibilities, can emerge. We might think of it as a project of counter-disturbance. Let’s revisit those organizing concepts outlined at the start of this chapter: the wild, the sacred, and the just. We have tended here to emphasize their more reassuring aspects, the ways they embody relationality, wholeness, and mutual flourishing and thereby offer the prospect of a world where life is more harmonious and joyful. That is not a misleading picture, but it is not the whole picture. The teachings of the wild tell us to accept the certainty of upheaval, to prepare for and step into change and disruption, to recognize reality’s lack of deference to good intentions or to any desires we may have for certainty or comfort. The sacred can also be terrible; justice implacable. To align education with these principles is not to promise the ease that relies on control, nor a life from which fear is absent. What it rests on is the conviction that it is better to belong fully to the wild world and learn from its teachings, strict though they may be, than to attempt to tame it and thereby divorce ourselves from it. Intriguingly, in spite of the flood of studies, reports, and observations telling us of the depth of the predicament we find ourselves in, much Indigenous scholarship and teaching—sources that we cite abundantly and with gratitude in this book—tends toward optimism regarding the future. We might summarize them as claiming that, by attending to what the Earth can teach us, humanity can rejoin (and perhaps even help restore) the complex systems that will return the planet to a dynamic equilibrium, though the time scale of this may be measured in millennia rather than decades. Yet there are other powerful voices that posit harsher lessons:

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

49

My claim is that because black people have been excluded from the category human, we have a particular epistemic and ontological mobility. Unburdened by investments in belonging to a system created to exclude us in the first place, we develop marvelous modes of being in and perceiving the universe. I am claiming that there is real power to be found in such an untethered state - the power to destabilize the very idea of human supremacy and allow for entirely new ways to relate to each other and to the postapocalyptic ecologies, both organic and inorganic, in which we are enmeshed. I argue that those of us who are dislocated on the planet are perfectly positioned to break open the stubborn epistemological logics of human domination. To imagine as best we can outside these epistemological and ontological circumscriptions does not mean we save the human race, at least not that race as we know it. Salvage may not be possible at this point, although this is not necessarily a catastrophe. The untethered state does allow for the possibility of real change on a vast inhuman scale. (Brown 2021, 7)

We do not know the future. There is the risk that a focus on any particular aim of eco-social cultural change may become self-limiting; that any definite educational goal carries within it the seeds of its own failure. Instead, we suggest that education needs to be open to ongoing disruptive learning, to be guided by ecosystemic ways that will always make room for the Trickster—the sower of disaster and possibility, the bringer of dissonance, the spirit for whom creation and destruction are inextricably linked. As Lewis Hyde observes, introducing his intricate exploration of trickster myths and trickster figures: The arts of hunting, the arts of cooking meat — such things belong to the beginning of time, when trickster was first involved in shaping this world. But he has not left the scene. Trickster the culture hero is always present; his seemingly asocial actions continue to keep our world lively and give it the flexibility to endure. … [T]he origins, liveliness and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function it is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on. (Hyde 2010, 9)

The ecological crisis is a sign of an educational culture in desperate need of being rendered more expansive, more inclusive, and more lively. Difference, contradiction, paradox, disturbance, dissonance: making room for these qualities may be necessary in the interests of expanded resilience, richer diversity, and fuller inclusion. Rather than insisting on control, stasis, and resolution, it is better that we recognize our limitations, biases,

50 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

weaknesses and let ourselves be moved by what lies beyond our expectations, understanding, and control. For teachers this means becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and even, at times, with confusion and conflict. It also means building out the skills needed to hold space for this kind of work to happen both at the individual level of each learner and at the community level of the classroom and the surrounding/supporting/ sustaining environment. Here are some thoughts on how educators might work with “(re)creative dissonance” in designerly ways: • By incorporating practices of dissonance in the way we hold space for learning and being together. To invite in and make intentional room for ambiguity, for not-knowing, for the incomplete and unresolved, the messy, disorienting, and disruptive takes confidence, trust in the process and learners, and a bit of Trickster energy. It also includes making careful “micro-moves” to prevent premature closure, to create space and time for steeping and ripening, to encourage and acknowledge discomfort and uncertainty as necessary, important, and fertile zones of transformation. • By cultivating the capacity for welcoming in and sitting with dissonance and discomfort, allowing this to enter not only the cognitive space but also the emotional and physical. For educators of all kinds, this likely means continuing to take risks, both in their own learning and growth and in the ways learners are worked with, drawing on embodied, mindful, even therapeutic practices to open and hold good and healthy space for dissonance. This is truly about the art of teaching as a practice on the edge of what one knows how to do. It is also about pushing back against the myth of progress and the search for answers, for resolution, that has long been part of modern teleology and that still drives much thinking about the problems of the Capitalocene. • By drawing on facilitation traditions like deep democracy, which actively foster highly contentious and fraught spaces where perhaps the only thing that people agree on is that something needs to change. This is education that involves working with conflict and tension as creative forces, peeling back the layers of why we think about something the way that we do, or act the ways that we do, and finding ways to move together toward something else. Tools such as “voice dialogues” from Zen Buddhism can help with the work of

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

51

naming different perspectives, experiences, and feelings, for example, “what is the voice of fear saying?” and “what is the voice of confidence saying?” Outdoor and environmental educators, too, have some very significant skills to offer as part of this work (Blenkinsop et al. 2017).

References Ahenakew, C. 2016. Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination. International Review of Qualitative Research 9 (3): 323–340. ———. 2017. Mapping and Complication Conversations About Indigenous Education. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 11 (2): 80–91. Akama, Y., P. Hagen, and D. Whaanga-Schollum. 2019. Problematizing Replicable Design to Practice Respectful, Reciprocal, and Relational Co-Designing with Indigenous People. Design and Culture 11 (1): 59–84. Archibald, J.A. 2008. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. UBC Press. Bernstein, B. 1975. Class and Pedagogies: Visible and Invisible. Educational Studies 1 (1): 23–41. Beynon-Jones, S., and E. Grabham, eds. 2018. Law and Time. Routledge. Black, C. 2011. The Land Is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence. Routledge. Blenkinsop, S., R. Affifi, L. Piersol, and M. de Danaan Sitka Spruce. 2017. Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the ‘Natural World’. Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (3): 349–365. Blenkinsop, S., and C.  Beeman. 2010. The World as Co-Teacher: Learning to Work with a Peerless Colleague. The Trumpeter 26 (3): 27–39. Blenkinsop, S., and M.  Fettes. 2020. Land, Language, and Listening: The Transformations that Can Flow from Acknowledging Indigenous Land. Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (4): 1033–1046. Blenkinsop, S., M.  Fettes, and L.  Piersol, eds. 2022. Ecoportraiture: The Art of Research Where Nature Matters, [Re]thinking Environmental Education. Vol. 16. Peter Lang. Blenkinsop, S., and D. Ford. 2018. The Relational, the Critical, and the Existential: Three Stands and Accompanying Challenges for Extending the Theory of Environmental Education. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 21 (3): 319–330. Bluwstein, J. 2021. Colonizing Landscapes/Landscaping Colonies: From a Global History of Landscapism to the Contemporary Landscape Approach in Nature Conservation. Journal of Political Ecology 28 (1): 900–923.

52 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Borrows, J. 2018. Earth-Bound: Indigenous Resurgence and Environmental Reconciliation. In Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings, ed. M. Asch, J. Borrows, and J. Tully, 49–81. University of Toronto Press. Bringhurst, R. 2008. Wild Language. In The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, 257–276. Counterpoint. Brown, A. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change. Changing Worlds: AK Press. Brown, J. 2021. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Duke University Press. Brown, J., K. Connell, J. Firth, and T. Hilton. 2020. The History of the Land: A Relational and Place-Based Approach for Teaching (More) Radical Food Geographies. Human Geography 13 (3): 242–252. Brown, C., and T.  Toadvine. 2012. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. SUNY Press. Carpena-Méndez, F., P.K.  Virtanen, and K.J.  Williamson. 2022. Indigenous Pedagogies in a Global World and Sustainable Futures. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 53 (4): 308–320. Celermajer, D., S.  Chatterjee, A.  Cochrane, et  al. 2020. Justice Through a Multispecies Lens. Contemporary Political Theory 19 (1): 475–512. Celermajer, D., D.  Schlosberg, L.  Rickards, M.  Stewart-Harawira, M.  Thaler, P.  Tschakert, B.  Verlie, and C.  Winter. 2021. Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics. Environmental Politics 30 (1–2): 119–140. Cruikshank, J. 2007. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. UBC Press. Davidson, S.F., and R. Davidson. 2018. Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning Through Ceremony. Portage & Main Press. Egan, K., A.  Cant, and G.  Judson, eds. 2014. Wonder-Full Education: The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum. Routledge. Eichler, L., and D. Baumeister. 2021. Settler Colonialism and the US Conservation Movement: Contesting Histories, Indigenizing Futures. Ethics, Policy & Environment 24 (3): 209–234. Ellis, R., and D.  Perry. 2020. A Confluence of Anticolonial Pathways for Indigenous Sacred Site Protection. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education 169 (1): 8–26. Fettes, M. 2013. Imagination and Experience: An Integrative Framework. Democracy and Education 21: 1–11. Fettes, M., and S.  Blenkinsop. 2023. Rewilding Imagination: Reorienting Eco-­ Leadership in Education. In Imagination and Educational Leadership: Research, Practice and Possibility, ed. G.  Judson and M.  Dougherty. Teachers College Press.

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

53

Graeber, D. 2015. Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying ‘Reality’: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41. Gumbs, A.P. 2020. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press. Gunderson, L., C. Allen, and C.S. Holling, eds. 2012. Foundations of Ecological Resilience. Island Press. Hausdoerffer, J., B.P. Hecht, M.K. Nelson, and K.K. Cummings, eds. 2021. What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? University of Chicago: Press. Hyde, L. 2010. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Ingold, T. 2021. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge. Jardine, D.W. 2012. Pedagogy Left in Peace: Cultivating Free Spaces in Teaching and Learning. Bloomsbury. Jardine, D., S.  Friesen, and P.  Clifford. 2006. Curriculum in Abundance. Psychology Press. Jickling, B., S. Blenkinsop, N. Timmerman, and M. De Danaan Sitka-Sage, eds. 2019. Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Kimmerer, R.W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.. Milkweed Editions. Kirkness, V., and R. Barnhardt. 1991. First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R’s  — Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility. Journal of American Indian Education 30 (3): 1–15. Kitchen, J., and K. Ragoonaden. 2019. Mindfulness and Relational Approaches to Social Justice, Equity, and Diversity in Teacher Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press. Law, J. 2015 What’s Wrong with a One-World World? Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16 (1): 126–139. Levinas, E. 1996. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Indiana University Press. Liboiron, M. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press. Lopez, B. 2001. Arctic Dreams. Vintage. Marker, M. 2018. There Is No “Place of Nature”; There Is Only the “Nature of Place”: Animate Landscapes as Methodology for Inquiry in the Coast Salish Territory. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31 (6): 453–464.

54 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

McGregor, D., S. Whitaker, and M. Sritharan. 2020. Indigenous Environmental Justice and Sustainability. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 43: 35–40. Menakem, R. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press. Meyer, M. 2013. The Context Within: My Journey into Research. In Indigenous Pathways into Social Research: Voices of a New Generation, ed. D.  Mertens, F. Cram, and B. Chilisa, 249–260. Left Coast Press. Mika, C. 2017. Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. Routledge. Moore, J.W. 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44 (3): 594–630. Moran, E.F. 2016. People and Nature: An Introduction to Human Ecological Relations. 2nd ed. Wilry. Nanni, G. 2017. The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine, and Resistance in the British Empire. Manchester University Press. Noddings, N. 2013. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. 2nd ed. University of California Press. O’Donnell, E., and E. Macpherson. 2019. Voice, Power and Legitimacy: The Role of the Legal Person in River Management in New Zealand, Chile and Australia. Australian Journal of Water Resources 23 (1): 35–44. Ogle, V. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950. Harvard University Press. Omidyar Group, The. 2017. Systems Practice. Workbook published by The Omidyar Group under Creative Common Licence BY-SA. Accessed at http:// social-labs.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Systems-Mapping-OmidyarWorkbook-012617.pdf Paul, E., P. Raibmon, and H. Johnson. 2014. Written As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂɘms taɁaw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder. UBC Press. Regan, P. 2010. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press. Reyes, G.T. 2020. Pedagogy of and Towards Decoloniality. In Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, ed. M.A. Peters, vol. 1. Springer Singapore. Rieckmann, M. 2017. Education for Sustainable Development Goals. UNESCO. Rifkin, M. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­ Determination. Duke University Press. Ross, S. 2006. The Temporality of Tarrying in Gadamer. Theory, Culture & Society 23 (1): 101–123. Saad, L. 2020. Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. Sourcebooks. Sant, L., R.  Milligan, and S.  Mollett. 2021. Political Ecologies of Race: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada. Antipode 53 (3): 629–642.

2  DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

55

Scharmer, O. 2018. The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Schnellert, L., S.F.  Davidson, and B.L.  Donovan. 2022. Working Towards Relational Accountability in Education Change Networks Through Local Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being. Cogent Education 9 (1): 2098614. Sheridan, J., and D.R. Longboat. 2006. The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred. Space and Culture 9 (4): 365–381. Shulla, K., W.  Leal Filho, S.  Lardjane, J.  Sommer, and C.  Borgemeister. 2020. Sustainable Development Education in the Context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology 27 (5): 458–468. Simpson, L. 2014. Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1–25. Simpson, L.B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Smith, D. 1999. Children and the Gods of War. In Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human Sciences, Pedagogy, and Culture, 137–142. Peter Lang. Snyder, G. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press. ———. 2006. December. Writers and the War Against Nature. Resurgence 239. https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article291-­w riters-­a nd-­t he-­w ar-­ against-­nature.html. Southerton, D. 2020. Time, Consumption and the Coordination of Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan. Styres, S. 2011. Land as First Teacher: A Philosophical Journeying. Reflective Practice 12 (6): 717–731. ———. 2017. Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of lethni’nihstenha Ohwentsia’kekha (Land). University of Toronto Press. ———. 2018. Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying, and Literature. In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, ed. L. Smith, E. Tuck, and W. Yang. Routledge. van Manen, M. 2018. Serendipitous Insights and Kairos Playfulness. Qualitative Inquiry 24 (9): 672–680. The Crex Crex Collective. 2018. On Wilderness. In Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene, ed. B.  Jickling, S.  Blenkinsop, N.  Timmerman, and M.  De Danaan Sitka-Sage, 23–50. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures: Palgrave Macmillan. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

56 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Tschakert, P., D. Schlosberg, D. Celermajer, L. Rickards, C. Winter, M. Thaler, M. Stewart-Harawira, and B. Verlie. 2021. Multispecies Justice: Climate-Just Futures with, for and Beyond Humans. WIREs Climate Change 12 (2): 1–10. Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. Tully, J. 2018. Reconciliation Here on Earth. In Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings, ed. M. Asch, J. Borrows, and J. Tully, 83–129. University of Toronto Press. Vakoch, D., and F.  Castrillon, eds. 2014. Ecopsychology, Phenomenology, and the Environment. Springer. Walsh, Z., J.  Böhme, B.D.  Lavelle, and C.  Wamsler. 2020. Transformative Education: Towards a Relational, Justice-Oriented Approach to Sustainability. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 21 (7): 1587–1606. Wildcat, M., M. McDonald, S. Irlbacher-Fox, and G. Coulthard. 2014. Learning from the Land: Indigenous Land Based Pedagogy and Decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): I–XV. Wilson, S. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood.

CHAPTER 3

Reframing Education for Eco-Social-Cultural Change

In the previous chapters, we presented education for eco-social-cultural change as a practice of transformative design. We wanted to give a sense of how local niche-innovations in educational practice, thoughtfully shaped and cultivated in many different settings, might contribute to a shift in the overall “regime” of education in the Capitalocene by deliberately undermining the latter’s key premises such as the Society/Nature divide. This chapter takes a closer look at the kinds of macro-conversations and philosophical decisions that need to accompany such efforts. We think of it as being about capacity building at the level of educational theory. Working in the familiar, change-resistant environments of schools and other educational institutions, and confronted by countless practical decisions that need to be made moment-by-moment and day-by-day, many educators may not be aware of the deeper metaphysical assumptions and cultural habits in which their work is embedded. We can be sure, however, that such “tacit theories” of education will be manifested in pushback against the kinds of radical changes we believe to be necessary. What’s more, we are all influenced by these patterns of discourse and practice and likely reproducing them in unconscious ways all the time. The kind of theoretical/philosophical work we lay out in this chapter may help us catch ourselves when this is happening and consciously question or alter what we do.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fettes, S. Blenkinsop, Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7_3

57

58 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

To put it plainly, in order to make the kinds of changes that will be necessary to actually live within the earth’s carrying capacity, many of the basic assumptions, the root metaphors (Bowers 2008), of modern Western culture will have to be transformed over time as we unravel colonial conditioning. The challenge for us, given this premise that problematic coloniality is baked into the structure of modernist public education all the way down, is how to avoid furthering that process even when we are striving not to. What are our blind spots, imaginative limitations even, that get in the way of meaningful change? How do we identify them? And with what do we replace them (if we are replacing)? Our experience tells us that it isn’t enough to just name and attempt to “not do” what is troublesome (though this can be a step in the right direction). In fact, to “not do” a particular practice is still a “doing” of educational theory—there is no neutral, non-implicated position in the act of teaching. With respect to eco-social-cultural change, the humanistic (i.e., human-centered) tendencies of educational theory are a particular challenge. This is a field that tends to ask big questions—what is knowledge? What does it mean to be, and to be human? What are the ethics and values necessary for a given culture, community or society to prosper? Yet built­in assumptions lead to the questions being asked in ways that lead us to a restricted/troublesome/incomplete range of answers. If educational theory assumes a scientistic/humanistic/modernistic/rationalistic/individualistic stance toward “the study of” knowledge, being, or values, then the answers are going to be unecological, culturally limiting, and unjust. So what happens if we start naming and questioning those assumptions? And asking questions in wilder ways, thus opening the eco-space to wilder answers?1 There are three standard categories that philosophers of education tend to go to when doing this kind of work: epistemology (questions about knowledge), ontology (questions about being), and axiology (questions about value). To these we have added two further categories, cosmology and psychology, which ask questions about our foundational stories and our theories of human development. As we move through this lovely group of ologies, we will follow descriptions and discussions with a series of further questions and “reckonings” for educational practice. These provocations are not easily answered; we see them as demanding 1  See our discussion of the organizing concepts of the wild, the sacred, and the just in Chap. 2.

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

59

thoughtful, intentional work and ongoing attention. In any eco-socially just community, asking questions such as whose cultures, whose histories, and whose voices are included, and how they are included will be a never-­ ending process. Why use the term “reckonings”? Well, to reckon is to bring a set of numbers or ideas into some kind of summary or tally; but it also carries the association of a bill to be paid, a settling of debts—even one’s spiritual debts, as in “the day of reckoning.” In a sense this whole book is about such a reckoning for education. We follow Kierkegaard in seeing such debts as not being limited to those personally incurred, but including those stemming from “the sins of the fathers,” the choices and actions of past generations. This seems an apt description for what we educators have inherited from the Capitalocene. For all the talk of “truth and reconciliation” and “decolonization,” here in Canada and elsewhere around the world, such a reckoning is still in its earliest stages; we will be at it for generations to come. In that light, it feels important to acknowledge that, in spite of our best efforts, the five categories used to organize this chapter are framed through a Western philosophical lens and as such deserve to be regarded with suspicion. It is illustrative of our own limitations that we could not come up with a framework better suited to our project. Approach this discussion with humility and trepidation, is our best advice. Gather that which is helpful, and be open to questions we haven’t thought of. As Foucault famously remarked, it’s “not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous,” and therefore “we always have something to do. So my position leads to a hyper- and pessimistic activism” (1983, 231–232).

The Ologies (A): Epistemology (Knowing; Making; and Sharing Meaning) Central to education is the process of learning things that one didn’t previously know, or know how to do: expanding one’s repertoire of facts, concepts, stories, connections, procedures, skills, capacities, and so on. For this reason, questions of what knowledge is, how learning happens, how meaning is made, how knowledge is recognized and assessed, and so on have played a big role in the philosophy of education. This is the domain of epistemology.

60 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

In recent decades, a number of Western researchers and thinkers, along with non-Western and Indigenous scholars, have concluded that modern Western epistemology is dualistic, reductive, and intrusive (Bai 2009; Beery and Wolf-Watz 2014; Hung 2008; Bonnett 2003a; Kurth-Schai 1992; Clarke and McPhie 2014; Gonzales-Guardiano 2001; Bamford 1999; Luke 2001; Kimmerer 2013; Donald 2009; Smith 2018). Some have pointed the finger at modern science, arguing that it embodies a mechanistic and dominating worldview (Bamford 1999) that separates humans from nature (Gonzales-Guardiano 2001), and that this epistemological stance now permeates education in the form of “scientism” (Gasparatou 2017). Others have identified the more fundamental dynamic as that of colonialism and imperialism. John Willinsky, for example, writes: The educational qualities of Western imperialism began with the amateur naturalists gathering specimens and artifacts while recording the lay of the land.… The themes of discovery, conquest, possession, and dominion are about ways of knowing the world, of surveying, mapping and classifying it in endless theorizing of identity and difference.… Over the last five centuries, the spectacles of empire were harnessed through what might be termed an exhibitionary pedagogy. The West came to see the world as a lesson in its own achievement. (Willinsky 1998, 17)

There is now a growing call among scholars of the Global South that social justice has to include the search for cognitive justice. According to this way of thinking, colonialism not only created a “global political order” but “also gave rise to a global epistemological order” (Zemblylas 2017, 403). Undoing that order is, by its very nature, a pluralistic enterprise: there is not just one alternative “decolonizing” epistemology but many, “grounded in particular, although similar, genealogies of thoughts and experiences,” as Walter Mignolo asserts: If all of us are concerned and working toward a just and nonimperial world order (Ecuadorian quichua “sumak kawsay,” to live in plenitude, living in harmony; Mandarin’s “Ho” peace, harmony, union; or Western languages’ “democracy”) we do it in different ways because—due to the modern/colonial world order we are all living in—we share the same goals but have different ways to march toward them: Some are imperial, religious, or secular; others, national; others, decolonial. And that is the simple “fact” that requires geopolitics and body-politics of knowing, understanding, and being, to avoid modernity/rationality… in its variegated forms: the imperial

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

61

Right, the modern liberating secular Left (Marxism), and the modern theology of liberation. … Decolonizing epistemology means, in the long run, liberating thinking from sacralized texts, whether religious or secular. (Mignolo 2011, 25–26)

For our project, we are particularly concerned with how the separation of humans and nature is bound up with an understanding of knowledge as being the sole purview of humans (Beery and Wolf-Watz 2014; Bai 2009; Bonnett 2003a; Clarke and McPhie 2014). Nearly all of the “knowledge industries” of modernity—the natural and social sciences, philosophy and psychology, together with intellectual movements such as deconstructionism and postmodernism—are fundamentally motivated by a focus on human welfare and the assumption of human superiority (Stables and Scott 1999). This implicit anthropocentrism in our theorizing and, as such, in our educational practices has scarcely been examined in the literature (Humphreys and Blenkinsop 2017). Thus, across the range of projects to decolonize epistemology, we want to ask how our understanding of knowledge and knowing subjects can be extended beyond the human. One step toward this is to push back on the notion of human knowing as a right, no matter the extractive cost. Cree scholar Dwayne Donald (2009), for example, believes that one of the main issues with Western education and modern scientific epistemologies is their lack of reciprocity. Bent on wringing the “T”ruth from nature no matter what, Western science often only takes. It takes samples from the land to be analyzed in a lab without asking; it takes and dissects the multispecies world without understanding the cultural, spiritual, social, and ecological significance of each species as rooted in place, thereby reducing it down to its properties as an isolated bundle of genes, structures, and behaviors, stripping it of its original power, depersonalizing it, objectifying, analyzing, and shelving and silencing it. In parallel to many colonial conversations, this denies the natural world the right to choose to not be known, or to be known in its own chosen ways, to have the right to position itself. (One example is the use of radio collars, which are not only intrusive but also tend to adversely affect the wearer and take little account of the desires and needs of Caribou, Whale, or Swan.) Such a stance can easily have “becoming educated” slide into an extractive process where human learners are the priority no matter the cost (think frog dissection in first year biology). Indigenous knowledges, in contrast, often involve visiting the place, engaging with the full

62 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

community, thanking the creator, asking for blessing for the generations to come, respecting the sources that are offering teachings, not wasting, and remembering the ways in which their lives were deeply connected to the vitality of all other beings (Donald 2009, 15). This points to ways that epistemology can be rooted in reciprocity, ethics, love, and relationality. We see this illustrated in multiple ways by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, who makes it clear that this is connected to a view of plants and animals as animate and knowing: Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask. I smile when I hear my colleagues say “I discovered X.” That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings. (Kimmerer 2013, 158)

Notice how Kimmerer has positioned the process of meaning-making as necessarily including listening and asking different questions. She appears to be asking for a different kind of learner, one that is in the world differently and thus able to ask different questions and “hear” the answers from different teachers. Like the Americas, nature as teacher has always been there—but it requires a reorientation of how one does “human in the world” to recognize and respond to the teachings nature offers. Along related lines, some environmental philosophers believe we should be trying to cultivate a general mode of engagement with the world as a whole, a mode of sensibility that is “open, responsive, and responsible” toward the multispecies world (Bonnett 2003b, 683). This “frame of mind,” as Bonnett terms it, encompasses not simply our attitude toward the environment but the epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical fabric of our being. Educationally, this would also help uncover and critique those hidden motives that constitute nature as the passive object of human knowing. Instead of devising scientific remedies for environmental issues, we would be asking permission for knowledge from the multispecies world and carefully and vulnerably listening and translating that knowledge received. Changing our understanding of who holds knowledge also implies changing our understanding of how knowledge is held. In contrast to the Western emphasis on the primacy of language and other systems of conventional signs such as mathematics, some recent lines of research have

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

63

explored the significance of “embodiment” and “becoming” for dissolving the nature/self split in epistemology (Wright 2014; Jones 2017; Baggs and Chemero 2021). Taking this direction of inquiry still further, Kohn’s “anthropology beyond the human” posits “a world of living thoughts” in which it is not only individual organisms that think and know, but biological lineages and multispecies assemblages (Kohn 2013). In the field of education itself, there have been explorations of the implications of actively positioning nature as a co-teacher (Blenkinsop and Beeman 2010; Jickling et al. 2019), so that human teachers learn to see themselves as part of a team of educators with different skills and things to contribute, and knowledge as something held relationally and dynamically rather than privately or definitively. A major focus of this kind of teaching is working to support learners to “be” differently so they can more fully encounter this wider range of knowers and eventually know differently themselves. All this has consequences for the kind of knowledge we might be trying to cultivate within a project of eco-social-cultural change. More than a decade ago, Le Grange argued for moving “from arborescent to rhizomatic thinking” in responding to the ecological crisis, drawing on influential work by Deleuze and Guattari (LeGrange 2011; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Unlike the dominant Western conception of knowledge as being linear and hierarchical, like a tree, rhizomatic thinking spreads laterally: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything else.” Understanding knowledge in terms of such “chaotically complex networkings … not only enables students to understand how phenomena/constructs become stabilized or normalized in society but also enables them to ascertain what the ‘faults and fissures’ … and the vectors of escape are” (LeGrange 2011, 745). He argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome allows for a dispersal of traditional disciplines that opens up nodes of deterritorialization and “lines of flight in which the assemblages of disciplinary knowledge are fragmenting and losing coherence giving rise to transdisciplinary knowledge networks” (LeGrange 2011, 750). Such dispersal and trans-sharing of disciplinary knowledge opens pathways and entry points for the inclusion of indigenous knowledges, among other possibilities. What is clear is that our taken-for-granted Western, modern conceptions of knowledge are inadequate for the work that needs to be done. In our interviews with diverse educators for the research project that gave rise to this book, we came across many situations where assumed knowledge was called into question. It was not so much that, say, the scientific name of a given tree in itself was problematic; it was more a questioning of

64 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

whether saying “Thuja plicata” has anything to do with knowing this particular Western Red Cedar. For some, the central problem was the conception of knowledge as individualized, located solely in a single person. For others, it was problematic to localize in a single species, humans. For still others, knowledge was seen to differ across cultures and the problem was the colonial prioritization of Western ways of knowing. Others questioned the extractive and “single story” tendencies in how knowledge was assumed to work. We noticed how oddly consumable knowledge has become for many people, as if Nature, or anything else for that matter, could be broken into digestible fragments to be absorbed by a single learner on their way to becoming educated. Context, inter-relation, mystery, the incompleteness, and complexity of it all is whisked away like so much unnecessary trash. This needs to change. Epistemological Reckonings and Questions for Practice Reckoning with cognitive justice. This starts with the question of “whose knowledge”? It’s not just a matter of which subjects are included in the curriculum and which are excluded, or what perspectives are favored and which are marginalized. It’s also a question of what kinds of knowledge are accepted as valid and valuable. Often the form of knowledge that takes precedence in Western schools is rationalistic, scientistic, European, Christian, etc. and positions itself as superior to all other forms of knowing (e.g., Indigenous, women’s, local, craft, cross-cultural, etc.). Measures of success, intelligence, performance, etc. are all tied to this dominant epistemological regime. • Questions for practice: Whose knowledge is being prioritized in my teaching? Who are my co-teachers? How am I listening to them, and how are their voices being heard? What other co-teachers might I seek out, learn from, and work with? • How did students make meaning today? Were there moments where scientistic conceptions of knowledge were undone? Were these moments noticed and honored? Reckoning with human exceptionalism. This extends the previous critique beyond the human; we might call it the question of “where does knowing happen?” Modern education is built on the idea that only humans are “knowers” and knowledge is the sole purview of humans; other beings

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

65

exist and respond to stimuli in unthinking, instinctual ways. All the ways in which they may interpret their experiences, transfer their ideas or ways of doing things, engage in communication, organize themselves in response to stimuli, recognize their own kith or kin, and so on are just “behavior” or “adaptations” without consequences for human education. • Questions for practice: Where is teaching and learning happening? How are the teachings of place and the more-than-human contributing to the learning process? How am I helping my learners hear those teachings better? • Are we learning in an environment that allows us to experiment with and even change who and how to be in the world? How am I and my co-teachers role-modeling that kind of process and the diversity it implies? Reckoning with individualism. If knowledge is held individually, it must be acquired and demonstrated and assessed individually. Moreover, teachers themselves, the human “experts” who hold valued knowledge, must transfer it individually as well, in fragments from one person to another. This narrow conduit of knowledge creates dependency; learners receive knowledge in the form determined by the expert, as if the latter had ownership over it (as, in the form of intellectual property, they often do). In such a system there is little room for the spontaneous and contingent arising of knowing (Zwicky 2019) or the presentation of gifts of knowing and imagining from the more-than-human world (Sheridan and Longboat 2006). • Questions for practice: How are context, community, and assembled relationships part of the knowledge we are working with? Are there ways I can understand knowledge to be more interconnected, collaborative, or shared than I had assumed? • How was knowledge encountered as being relational, reciprocal, and convivial in our learning space today? Who were involved in these relations? What parts of my practice seem to encourage these forms of knowing? Reckoning with linear progress. Ever since the development of modern Western science and technology began to gather steam in the eighteenth century, the kind of knowledge it produces has been viewed

66 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

teleologically; that is, as an unending process of improvement in which newer knowledge is better than older knowledge. This metaphor now pervades our thinking about many kinds of knowledge and many kinds of learning. It’s uncommon to encounter notions of learning leading to losses as well as gains (Egan 1997), or of some kinds of knowledge as better not developed and not shared widely (because they are potentially damaging, or protected, or sacred). “Arborescent” conceptions of knowledge and thinking remain dominant. • Questions for practice: Is/was there room for more rhizomatic, less linear, connections/knowings to be made? How were those “efflourescences” recognized, supported, taken up, and played with? • What room is there in the learning environment for not knowing— for allowing mystery and unknowability sufficient space to be recognized and honored?

The Ologies (B): Ontology (Being and Becoming) In our discussion of epistemology, you may have noticed a few moments when considerations of knowing veered toward questions of being: when we wrote of “doing human in the world” or cited Kohn’s (2013) notion of “a world of living thoughts.” This reflects a long-term shift in Western understandings of both knowledge and being. These days the philosophical world is buzzing with questions of ontology, not only as it applies to human beings (e.g., whether theories that posit the existence of autonomous, independent individuals are still tenable) but also with respect to the physical world in general. Quantum theory is now being used to design computers and explain the behavior of high-temperature superconductors, even though its fundamental postulates remain paradoxical (Rovelli 2022). Trees, previously seen as autonomous single-trunked beings, are now understood to exist in interconnected, multi-stemmed, vibrant communities (Wohlleben 2016). The data on how galaxies evolve and behave is now rich enough that they can be better grasped as ecosystems than as deterministic systems of inert matter (Grossman 2018). In short, even through the lens of Western science, so long wedded to a mechanistic ontology of particles and forces, the world now looks a lot more lively, fluid, and relational than it used to. Perhaps a classic Western mistake, arguably beginning with Platonic philosophy but amplified in modern Cartesian philosophy, was to separate knowledge from being,

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

67

from bodies, from movement, and from the natural world (Abram 1996; Ingold 2011). We think this has important implications for how we educate to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity. Ontological questions—what is the “being” in human being? where does one being end and another begin? in what sense does a person remind the same “being” through the process of development from child to adult?—are foundational to so much of what education concerns itself with. The strongly individualistic and anthropocentric bent of Western education is tied both to epistemology and to ontology; the insistence on individual human knowing and individual human achievement is only sustainable if one sees the human individual as the fundamental unit of valued being, the measure of the school’s success at delivering an ontological good. Once one starts to think about ontology in more relational terms, many taken-for-granted features of formal education start to seem odd or even perverse. And, conversely, new possibilities open up. One important impetus for taking relational ontologies seriously, at least where we live in Canada, is the resurgence of Indigenous philosophies of land, community, and ways of knowing (Corntassel 2012; Simpson 2017). Some of this was alluded to in the previous chapters, but here we want to underline the ontological depth of Indigenous thought, the extent to which everything in the world is understood to exist only in relation to other things (Mika 2017; Watts 2013; Wilson 2008). Indeed, for some Indigenous scholars (e.g., Hunt 2014) the Western concept of ontology can itself be a form of epistemic violence, separating out one particular aspect of Indigenous thought from the ways it is represented (e.g., through story), or transmitted (e.g., through ceremony, or time on the land), or embodied (e.g., through ethical responsibilities to family and community). Similarly, in the field of anthropology, discussions of “the ontological turn” (often thought of as a decolonizing move) have been criticized for their lack of attention to or understanding of Indigenous intellectual traditions (Todd 2016). Our intention here is not to subsume Indigenous thought within our own take on relational ontologies, but rather to acknowledge its importance and complexity. Especially valuable, from our point of view, is how it shows ontology to be intimately bound up with ethics, and thus to be a deeply political concept—not just in the abstract, but in how people conduct themselves in their everyday lives. The link between ontology and ethics can also be found in the work of French philosopher of science Bruno Latour, who moved from the

68 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

development of actor-network theory (a relational ontology: Latour 2005) to an extended consideration of the Earth (or Gaia) as a political actor in the era of climate change (Latour 2018; Flower and Hamington 2022). Latour’s work was inspired in part by a desire to recognize the agency of non-human actors, but the impact of his thinking on education has been limited by his insistence on regarding the “pedagogical” as essentially opposed to the “political”—that is, as a fundamentally conservative social force (Swillens and Vlieghe 2020). Although actor-network theory has achieved some currency with educational theorists (e.g., Fenwick and Edwards 2010), it has not had a great deal of influence in the fields closest to our own concerns (e.g., environmental and place-based education), where (perhaps surprisingly) there has likewise been little take-up of Latour’s more recent work on Gaian politics (though see Gleason 2019). More influential has been the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), mentioned in the previous section. The move they make from “arborescent” to “rhizomatic” thinking parallels a move from an ontology that privileges things like tree trunks (solid, singular, relatively unchanging) to an ontology that is more distributed, fluid, and plural. When exploring the pedagogy of relational ontology, many educational theorists have seen the concept of rhizomatic learning as a way out of reductive, extractive, individualistic, dualistic, recursive, colonial, anthropocentric, linear, top-down structures, and conceptual frameworks (Gough 2004, 2006; Clarke and McPhie 2016; Mikaels 2019; Semetsky 2003; Gregoriou 2004). While it’s tricky to summarize this ontological move in a short space, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the rhizome as an a-signifying multiplicity. A rhizome is not a substance characterized by its attributes, because there is no substance, only relations. It is contradictory to the nature of the multiplicity to engage with it through substantiation or codification, for this is to rob it of its creative force. Instead, in order to engage with the rhizome, it must be used, not as a metaphor, but as a way of learning (Semetsky 2003). A deterritorialization is at work with a rhizome that leaves room for experimentation, uncentered growth without foundation or essence. The rhizome cannot be pinned down, it is always already something else, always becoming. Educationally, then, rhizomatic learning can be understood as something that arises from immersion in a context, an ecosystem; what any individual comes to know is not detached from the relations in which it arose, the where and with whom and for whom. In fact, the individual themselves is not detachable either.

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

69

This means that we as educators must come to understand ourselves, our learners, and the work we do together in this complex relational context. This is not only an intellectual but also an embodied task, one that draws on all our modes of perception, feeling, and imagination to reveal the world and self as co-relational (Hung 2008; Bonnett 2003b). Perhaps more importantly, it implies that to work at educating is also to work toward a way of being relational—to enact the de-centering, de-alienating of this lone human object, bounded by skin and the present. Which in turn implies making thoughtful choices about where, how, and with whom to learn. If learners are “where they learn,” then do we want it to happen in static, sanitized, efficiency-oriented, alienating places and ways or … somewhere else? These questions are being explored in many contexts, in ways that the colonial understanding of ontology finds hard to reconcile itself with. Indigenous communities are reasserting and restoring their relationalities to Land, each other, and to ancestors. Phenomenologists are championing the ontological insights gained through examination of lived experiences and senses (Abram 1996; Hung 2008). Realist philosophers are proclaiming the continuing mysteriousness of objects in the world (Harman 2018). Ecofeminists are drawing attention to the challenges of interspecies kinship (Haraway 2016). Relational being is all around us. The question is: How do we prioritize co-relational being within education? Ontological Reckonings and Questions for Practice Reckoning with assumed autonomy. The concept of the autonomous individual is well entrenched in Western education. By treating learners as independent and separate beings, expected to operate in the world as such, educators instill this as both default assumption and lived experience. Positing a developmental arc of separation from family and community, schools contribute to creating a society of lonely individuals untethered from organic and reciprocal relationships. The illusion of autonomy creates the basis for economic and political ideologies that further erode communal ties. • Questions for practice: What in my work is supporting a sense of the learners themselves as a multiplicity? And how might we bring to light the relational quality of our learnings?

70 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

• Was I able to work from the traditional detached individual trope toward co-relational beings in my lessons today? What forms of assessment support the latter? Reckoning with the colonized other. The denial of relationality as the basis of human being, becoming, and agency has long been the foundation of colonization, which works to render the other as a detached object of commodification and exchange. All too often, the “politics of recognition” in colonial societies have worked to produce “a class… of ‘citizens’ whose rights and identities have become defined more in relation to the colonial state and its legal apparatus than the history and traditions of Indigenous nations themselves” (Coulthard 2014, 42). Restoration of ties to land, culture, and community is fundamental to decolonization. • Questions for practice: Does my teaching consider carefully where, with whom, and for whom it is occurring? What opportunities are there for reciprocity and the strengthening of relationship? • Is there space in our learning for voicing and considering other ontologies, especially those that have been silenced or marginalized within the dominant culture? How can these be invited in safe and respectful ways? Reckoning with noun-based reality. Indigenous and other scholars have frequently noted that Indigenous languages tend to be more verb-­ based than noun-based, reflecting and supporting a more fluid, process-­ oriented way of perceiving and making sense of the world. Thus, the tree under which I sit is not so much static in its tree-ness but fluid in its treeing. By contrast, English and other colonizing Western languages tend to be noun-centered, just as the underlying ontologies privilege the existence and qualities of objects over the relations between them. This should encourage us to be wary about the metaphors, the examples, the language used in everything we do. Are the beings of the more-than-human world “co-teachers” or “resources” for human learning? • Questions for practice: How did our work together allow learners the opportunity to explore their own verbiness? Are there imaginable options for being differently human (or, say, human-plus-more-­ than-human) in this classroom and community?

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

71

• What metaphors and images are foremost in our current discussions? How do they acknowledge or allow for process-centered understandings? How is our work together helping us become more thoughtful about the use of language?

The Ologies (C): Axiology (Values and Ethics) We have already touched on ethical issues in our discussions of epistemology and ontology, reflecting how these traditional distinctions in Western philosophy are becoming blurrier as more relational theories take center stage. It’s noteworthy that axiology is the younger sibling among these big three Western conversations, whereas philosophies that prioritize relationship might tend to place it first. In any case, there is agreement across most justice conversations that Western axiology centers a particular incarnation of the (individual) human: male, of European extraction, able-­ bodied, fairly slender, middle-aged, heterosexual, at least upper-middle class, educated to a certain level, and leaning to the right politically. Fall outside of any of those categories (and others not named) and you are marked as being outside the norm and implicitly of less value. While the normative force of most or all of the mentioned characteristics has been contested, their human-centeredness still goes largely unremarked. As with the previous ologies, this one too has real-world consequences. The valuing of a particular form of individual human plays into how a culture operates ethically; systems are created and perpetuated which sustain, prioritize, protect, and promote that “center” while also actively demoting, repressing, and oppressing that which is seen as different from the norm and therefore positioned as “marginal.” It is no secret that education has been an arena where much of this normalizing work plays out; indeed, it’s been argued that this is part of the “hidden curriculum” and a vehicle of both symbolic and real violence against racialized and queer students, among others (De Lissovoy 2012; Wozolek 2020). Education for eco-social-cultural change requires a different axiology, one that includes the more-than-human within its conceptions of value (Fettes and Blenkinsop 2023). Our specific interest in ecopedagogies led us to several lines of thought within axiology: kinship of being, feminist intersectionality, and queer ecology, among others. The kinship discussion is a long-standing one, updated recently by the series of edited books produced by the Center for Humans and Nature (Van Horn et al. 2021). Some of the challenges of a

72 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

kinship ethic to Western axiology are explored by Li (1996), starting with a narrative analysis of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and Arne Naess’s deep ecology. She unpacks their efforts to recognize the intrinsic value of nature while critiquing this belief as creating a false dichotomy between humans and nature. She claims that “the values of natural objects and processes cannot be independent from human moral reasoning” (1996, 256) and that a framework for environmental ethics should not be distinct from the ethics of human affairs. This view is contested, however, by Bonnett (2003a, b), who believes that nature has an intrinsic value independent of humans; according to this view, Li conflates intrinsic value with a human/ non-human dualism. Nature can still be interdependent with humans through kinship while maintaining a value that is “self-arising”—revealed/ perceived by humans but not “authored” by them. However, Bonnett acknowledges that humans can be oblivious to nature as “self-arising,” when caught up in anthropocentric, biocentric, or aesthetic relationships to nature—each of these providing an inadequate basis for an environmental ethics (Bonnett 2003b, 688). A good introduction to the ecofeminist and eco-queer conversations is provided by Greta Gaard (1997), building in particular on the work of Val Plumwood (1993). “The root of ecofeminism is the understanding that the many systems of oppression are mutually reinforcing,” writes Gaard (1997, 114). It is not simply that the patriarchal societies of the West exclude both women and nature from their normative definitions of value; it is that they deliberately tie these forms of oppression together. “The rhetoric and institution of Christianity, coupled with the imperialist drives of militarist nation states, have been used for nearly two thousand years to portray heterosexuality, racism, classicism and the oppression of the natural as divinely ordained” (1997, 122). The same oppressive structures persisted with the rise of Western science: “There is a clear and necessary connection between the development of science as the rational control of the chaotic natural world and the persecution of women as inherently irrational, erotic and therefore evil creatures” (Gaard 1997, 132). Thus, as Gaard points out, the devaluation of the erotic parallels the devaluation of women and nature, while the construction of binaries works to portray heterosexuality as the “natural” norm over homosexuality. However, “the problem of oppression based on sexuality is not limited to the heterosexual/queer dualism … the larger problem is that of erotophobia of Western culture, a fear of the erotic so strong that only one form of sexuality is overtly allowed” (1997, 118). Finally, Gaard examines how

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

73

people of color and nature have been feminized, animalized, eroticized, and queered as part of the “othering” strategies of Western culture. The theme of transcending binaries is picked up by Kurth-Schai (1992) in a continuation of the ecofeminist discussion. Arguing for a moral and philosophical vision that transforms oppositional relationships, she is especially interested in the ethical implications of continuity between humans and the non-human world. “If subjectivity is not attributed to humans alone… [m]oral consideration must be devoted to the well-being, diversity, and longevity of nonhuman entities and ecosystems due to their unique and inherent value” (1992, 154). As an educational project, this involves “promoting awareness of and response to an infinite variety of being” through what she calls “loving perception” and the deliberate undermining of dualistic thought. Thus, the liberation of the natural environment from human oppression is connected to the liberation of all humans from oppression, and change becomes a question of the eco, the social, and the cultural (Kurth-Schai 1992). Along similar lines, but grounding his arguments in queer theory, Russell notes the ongoing need to “challenge what appears to be the normal, naturalized course of a human life” as a fundamental task of ecopedagogy (2013, 20–21). He writes that “queer ecopedagogy invites all of us to experience and imagine ways of being and acting that challenge our notion of what constitutes a ‘better’ life, including those that seek more radical change in the world” (Russell 2013, 13). The pedagogical value of queerness lies in its ability to “disorientate,” to teach us to be humble in the face of the queerness of the world—that is, the world’s capacity to surprise, shock and mystify us, to be stranger and more wonder-full than our expectations could ever prepare us for. “A queer ecopedagogy seeks out the margins in our educational endeavours exploring uniqueness and diversity among ourselves, each other, and the more than human world” (Russell 2013, 24). In a related line of reasoning stemming from twentieth-century phenomenology, Hardy (2002) draws on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to make an argument for the importance of the “Other” in environmental ethics. She compares Levinas’ notion of the “Other,” as the “irreducible and inassimilable alterity” (Hardy 2002, 461), with the notion of plurality in environmental ethics, stressing that the latter must be understood not as tolerance but as what Levinas calls the face-to-face—the encounter with otherness that “exemplifies approaching difference as difference” (Hardy 2002, 472). Writing around the same time, Plumwood (2002) argues for

74 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

a more situational understanding of such encounters, where ethics are not overarching and invariant principles but are in fact context dependent— each encounter requires a different ethic. In a later contribution, Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2015), in seeking to undo human species elitism, argue that worms and other faceless species deserve as much moral consideration as the larger more humanlike species. They critique the common assumptions that moral worth is dependent upon how similar species are to humans. The links between feminist analysis, Indigenous and phenomenological ontologies are explored further by Fawcett and Johnson (2019), who problematize the notion that humans can “independently and objectively decide what other humans should learn about the multispecies world, whether that is through art, experience, or textbooks” (2019, 179). They propose that artistic practices might offer education a way to transform colonial power, “telling a different story” of ethically just relations between coexisting entities, including increasingly complex cyborg beings. These intersectional and “posthumanist” leanings are echoed in other recent work such as that of Lloro-Bidart (2017), which sets out to challenge the capitalist, neoliberalist, and colonial projects that reproduce all binaries, nature-culture in particular. In order to blur the lines in such dichotomies as mind/body, animal/machine, and idealism/materialism, she emphasizes three main sources of value: (1) the real, lived experiences of animals and humans; (2) embodied, emotional, affective ways of knowing that allow humans to see non-humans as persons; (3) changing the political, ecological, and economic context in which these human/non-human relationships occur (Lloro-Bidart 2017). For our purposes it is also noteworthy that she concludes that more-than-humans should be understood as part of the community of knowers. Axiological Reckonings and Questions for Practice Reckoning with human elitism. The historical trajectory of the West, especially in the Capitalocene, has been built on the assumption that humans are of more worth than any other beings on the planet. That has made it extremely difficult to limit the exploitation of nature: in the end, human interests always end up trumping those of other species and ecologies. Educationally, it has justified a focus on human values and concerns to the virtual exclusion of all else. The spread of smartphones and electronic media has increased the saturation of the perceptual environment

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

75

with human images and human language. Even the increasing effects of the ecological and climate crisis have yet to shift this cultural self-absorption. • Questions for practice: Are more-than-humans positioned in my teaching as having intrinsic value? Are their experiences, bodies, rights, and political needs being recognized and honored? Am I helping learners develop the capacities to do this? • In what ways was I able to allow for nature’s teeming subjectivities and interdependences be present in my teaching today? What demands for recognition or reciprocity did we experience? And act on? Reckoning with historical norms and traditions of the “teacher.” Western education has traditionally been teacher-centric, assuming and fostering a strong hierarchy of value and privilege between teacher and students. At the same time, teachers are not necessarily ranked highly in social perceptions of value, and issues of race, sexual and gender identity, able-bodiedness, and so on intersect with professional status and roles. Pressures to conform to cultural and institutional expectations are rife in formal education at all levels. And teachers themselves may feel the pull of conflicting ethical imperatives: to respond to their students, to implement the curriculum, to build a convivial school culture, to work for social justice. • Questions for practice: What values, ethics, use of power, privileges are implied by my position as “teacher” or “educator”? Do those align with my personal goals, values, ethics? What could I change in my practice to make it more authentic to who I am and what I value? • How is my teaching contributing to a larger purpose, giving back in relationships, or maintaining reciprocal, ongoing relationships? Who do I serve through my work, and how do I know that it is received by them in the way I intend? Reckoning with cultural privilege. As noted, mainstream Western culture continues to uphold a very restrictive norm of a “reference human”—male, White, able-bodied, upper-middle-class, and so on. And for groups excluded from this category, further norms apply—for instance around body shape for women or word choice and pronunciation for working-class people. This means that privilege is intersectional: people

76 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

who lack privilege on some dimension may possess it on others. And privilege is one of the most consequential obstacles to encountering the other “face-to-face,” because it is difficult to become aware of and difficult to give up. Few educational programs prioritize ways of working with privilege and creating spaces where people can learn to let it go. • Questions for practice: How does my work normalize (or not) the projects of colonization, modernity, and capital? How does my teaching avoid or push back on the marginalizing power of explicit and implicit value-laden binaries? • Whose values, words, knowledges, voices, stories, etc. are being prioritized? Who is guiding, influencing, or benefitting from the collective agenda? How are we practicing collective respect, reciprocity, responsibility, accountability?

The Ologies (D): Cosmology (Storying Our Origins) Why are we here? How and why was the world created? What is it becoming? The stories we tell to answer these questions form our cosmology. This is not something that modern Western philosophy has concerned itself with very much, perhaps because such questions were traditionally the domain of religion and thus, in the case of the West, of Christianity. Nowadays cosmology tends to be framed in scientific terms, where the story that is told has to do with the physical nature of the universe, its structure and evolution, the laws of space and time. But this simply demonstrates our need for such stories, and the way that modern science is harnessed to such cultural imperatives. The passionate controversies over evolutionary theory can be understood in terms of competing cosmologies; the underlying issue is not one of truth but of meaning. At its core, cosmology is about this planet and all its beings, and humans’ place and role within that vast and ancient and complex world. That is why it is of such importance to eco-social cultural change. Foundational stories provide orientation and guidance for how to be in the world; they open doors to particular possibilities while foreclosing others. They form the basis for how a culture operates and how it sees itself. In the research project that led to this book, we gained a sense of the importance various communities attached to telling their own distinctive origin stories, while distinguishing these stories from the “mainstream” ones they were rejecting or re-evaluating. At the heart of these stories were

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

77

different value systems (axiologies), but also different understandings of being human (ontologies) and different images of how knowledge and understanding are held and cultivated (epistemologies). That is, the stories worked as complex wholes, enabling community members to represent to one another and to outsiders who they were and what they were achieving. These were mostly small-scale stories, in a sense, since the communities and projects involved were themselves limited in size and scope. Implicit within them, however, were more general stories about human being-in-­ the-world, and indeed the people we talked to always saw their project as holding implications and possibilities for social change writ large. In the place of the dominant story told by capitalism, that of the autonomous self-willed individual engaged in competition for personal gain, these alternative stories generally positioned people within relationships of mutual aid and collective endeavor; in place of a natural world serving as a mere backdrop and resource for human striving, they evoked the complexity and interconnectedness of existence and the wonders of being a part of a larger living ecology of being. It’s clear that such stories not only explain where we come from but actually sustain and shape the culture and possibilities for what it means to live an authentic and fulfilling life. Their educational significance is self-evident: such cosmologies are the foundation out of which education is built, they are the cultural constructs into which the young are “educated.” In his book and lecture series The Truth About Stories, Indigenous writer Thomas King (2003) makes the same argument by placing two creation stories in relation to each other. “Contained within creation stories,” he says, “are relationships that help define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist” (2003, 10). The first one he tells is of the Woman Who Fell from the Sky, a version of a story told by Algonquin peoples across North America. The second, briefly recounted, is the Christian story from the Book of Genesis. And then he goes on to trace their implications: A theologian might argue that these two creation stories are essentially the same. Each tells about the creation of the world and the appearance of human beings. But a storyteller would tell you that these two stories are quite different, for whether you read the Bible as sacred text of secular metaphor, the elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierachies—God, man, animals, plants—that celebrate law, order,

78 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

and good government, while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations—Charm, the Twins, animals, humans—that celebrate equality and balance. (King 2003, 23–24)

In King’s analysis, it becomes quite explicit that these stories are deeply political—they differ not only in where humans are positioned vis-à-vis other humans and the more-than-human, but also in where power is located and distributed (e.g., a perfect but detached lone creator vs. a communal multispecies effort). It’s the myth of human exceptionalism, “being made in God’s image,” that “we continue to elaborate as we fill up our tanks at the gas station, … as we bolt our doors at night, … as we search our guidebooks for just the right phrase. The lie we dangle in front of our appetites as we chase progress to the grave” (2003, 28). Not all ecological thinkers as quite as categorical about the story of Genesis: Deborah Bird Rose, for instance, suggests reading it as two parallel stories illuminating different aspects of the human experience (and potential), those of Adam (1), the engineer given dominion over the Earth, and Adam (2), “who knows he is part of the world and seeks ‘fellowship’ within it” (2018, 505). But the deeper point, shared by many thoughtful commentators on our current predicament, Indigenous and non-Indigenous (Plumwood 2002; Irigaray 2013; Bold 2019; Williams 2022), is that stories are not just things that teach us a few bits and pieces about what we should and shouldn’t do, but profound sociocultural tools. Thus, as environmental thinker Paul Kingsnorth (2017) suggests, the environmental crisis, and the social one for that matter, can be understood not primarily as a crisis of economics, politics, or technology—although all of those are problematic—but a crisis of story. Unless we can find new, different, more inclusive, and thus flexible and imaginative stories that allow for different, more relational, less anthropocentric, possibilities to be produced, we are oddly stuck if the goal is eco-social cultural change. Note that we are not arguing simply for getting rid of problematic cultural stories, as if we could just get along fine without them. All the evidence suggests that such stories serve a necessary purpose, enabling each of us to make sense of the world and our place within it. Nor are we suggesting that we can just mix and match existing stories in a kind of cosmological métissage; some stories just do not play well with others. However, métissage does offer an image of how to consciously cultivate a kind of hospitality to others’ stories—how “relationality and difference can be productively held in tension” (Donald 2012, 548) and thus a space

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

79

created where understanding can evolve. As Bird Rose (2018) suggests in her re-reading of Genesis, all stories have some flex to them; by devoting more attention and care to the work of storying and re-storying, listening to others’ stories, and learning to hold one’s own more lightly, teachers and learners alike may find pathways into new ways of being. Cosmological Reckonings and Questions for Practice Reckoning with foundational stories. Wherever we teach, there will likely be more than one foundational story in operation. In Western societies, variants of the Christian cosmology co-exist with the secular materialist cosmology that evolved from it, and some groups may hold foundational stories from other religious traditions. In some places in North America, Indigenous cosmologies are being more widely articulated and shared. All of these stories both open and foreclose possibilities regarding our relationships to each other and to the planet itself. Creating spaces where different foundational stories can be heard and wrestled with in meaningful ways remains challenging, especially in the case of stories that undermine key premises of the Capitalocene. • Questions for practice: What are the foundational stories that undergird public education where I teach? How do they influence curriculum, pedagogy, assessment? How can I make space for alternative stories that would help expand options for how students can be in the world and support eco-social cultural change? • What are the foundational cultural stories of the learners in my classroom and how are they being recognized and honored or ignored and discounted? How are we building the capacity to listen to one another’s stories and the stories of our cultures? • Are there some key foundational choices that might be made (e.g., nature as partner vs. nature as resource, nature as co-teacher vs. nature as backdrop) that can have ripple effects on how our learning connects with the more-than-human world? Reckoning with cultural hegemony. Closely connected to the first reckoning, this asks about the ways that foundational stories position different learners (and teachers) differently. Often such positioning relies on overt or implicit binaries, such as those underpinning anthropocentrism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ableism. Such stories

80 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

do not necessarily take linguistic form—they can be told through architecture and design, the images of advertising and the content of textbooks, what is invisible or omitted as well as what is foregrounded and included. Disregarding such cultural hegemony reinforces its influence as it is the unmarked social norm. • Questions for practice: What problematic binaries are present in the everyday life of my school or place of practice? What kind of reflective work might I do to begin my own transformation that potentially pushes back against these cultural problematics and limitations? • Are there stories available that undo these binaries and sustain and give credence to alternative understandings? How am I working with concepts of human, gender, race, and even nature such that a wider diversity of voices are heard and learners see themselves more clearly as a part of an ecosystem of living and learning? Reckoning with place and agency in storytelling. The question of who gets to tell stories, and under what circumstances, is critical for questions of empowerment and agency. Foundational stories are often accompanied by strict rules regarding their use. The dominant foundational stories of an institution or culture can be presented as unquestionable. Stories of place typically foreground only certain experiences and perspectives and omit or downplay others. Some stories serve to label, stigmatize, other, control, dominate, objectify, pathologize, etc. certain groups, communities, or the more-than-human world. Developing their ability to tell “counterstories” is a vital step toward involving all learners in shaping the educational space. • Questions for practice: Who gets to tell stories in my context of practice? How can this be expanded to include more learners, and how can they be supported to develop their storytelling capacities? How can we also be attending to and learning from the stories told by the natural world? • What is the evolving story of ourselves as a learning community? How are we shaping that story together, and how does it foster respect, inclusion, equity, well-being, reciprocity, relationality, and responsibility? How do we respond to moments that don’t fit within that story—can the story expand to include them?

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

81

The Ologies (E): Psychology (Understanding Ourselves and Our Development) In Western cultural history, psychology came into being as a separate discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Before that time, questions about the human mind were largely the province of philosophy, while dealing with mental health was the domain of religion and, increasingly, of medicine. Yet it can’t be said that psychology has succeeded in establishing a monopoly over these questions, which came up again and again in our research on eco-social-cultural change. What does it mean to be a mature adult human being? And what is the pathway of development that can get us there from our original state of infancy? If that developmental pathway goes awry, what remedies are there? Are the answers to these questions specific to particular cultures, and if so, how do the answers change as those cultures evolve and adapt, especially in the conditions of the Capitalocene or in response to our current crisis? These are all questions with far-reaching implications for education. Despite the importance of these issues, for most educational philosophers, invoking psychology as a key conversation in educational change is a controversial move. Part of the problem, of course, is the sheer variety of psychological theories on offer. Different psychological frameworks have very different educational implications. Is the goal (i.e., the implicit or explicit psychological ideal) the self-willed, autonomous, achievement-­ oriented individual? Or the relationally attuned, communally immersed, situationally responsive participant in a collective culture? Or the spiritually aware, deeply self-reflective, disciplined practitioner of a sacred tradition? Or the culturally conformist, politically passive, pleasure-seeking citizen in a mass consumer society? Those are just four examples from an array of possibilities, and it is by no means assured that a given psychological approach will make such a goal explicit. This reflects the fact that Western psychology itself is a social endeavor that developed within the conditions of the Capitalocene. In recent years there has been a great deal of pushback against some of the more “mainstream” psychological frameworks, along with questions as to whether the Western bias of the entire field is not deeply troublesome and even colonizing (Adams et  al. 2015; Pillay 2017). There is a questioning of the deficit-model thinking that characterizes much psychological research (Wong 2011), including educational psychology, which has tended to locate problems in the learner rather than in the circumstances,

82 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

affordances and expectations shaping the learning process (Valencia 2012). There is a current push to expand working with social-emotional skills, helping learners to better understand their own emotional landscapes and how those affect and influence their relationships with others (Katz 2018); at the same time, is had been argued that this is often more about managing behavior and achieving particular forms of compliance (Williamson 2017). There are also growing theoretical criticisms that find that many of the psychological frameworks being employed are biased with regard to gender, race, socio-economic status, and diverse cultural ways of being (Settles et al. 2020). And lastly, there is a growing conversation about the presence of trauma in the lives of many learners, and a push toward learning to teach in ways that at the very least do no further harm to these wounded psyches (Record-Lemon and Buchanan 2017). All of these aspects of psychology are important in eco-social-cultural change conversations. And yet, from our perspective, they might not be going far enough. At this point in public education, it doesn’t matter if you are a behaviorist, a constructivist, an “inclusivist” committed to social-­ emotional learning, or a social constructivist—the implicit goal of the “healthy” psychological process is still the independent, autonomous, self-­ aware (though often community-engaged) adult human. Although becoming “environmentally aware” is often seen as a positive thing, possibly including opportunities to connect with and build relationships to the more-than-human, this is still basically optional. We don’t tend to shape the educational process around the image of an ecologically immersed, deeply relational, expanded/semi-permeable self that might (who knows?) be what the mature adult in a truly eco-relational world would look like, and what the whole developmental process would be oriented toward. So there is no getting away from the importance of psychology, understood as how we think about the process and goals of human development. Nor is there much doubt about the failure of our current educational systems and practices to support a holistic conception of human well-­being and growth. We hear this a lot from teachers who are trying to meet the needs of an almost overwhelming diversity of learners in their classrooms. We also heard it in our conversations with a range of educators outside the school system, many of them immersed in community work. The latter were more prone to express dissatisfaction with the end point of the developmental process of “education,” the “young adults” coming out of high schools and moving into the communities. They saw these young people

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

83

as being taught to pay more attention to their head than to their heart and soul, to deny their intuitions and foibles, and even (as we heard from folks with stronger eco leanings) to deny, or at the very least ignore, their interdependence upon and relationships with the more than human. To our knowledge, not a lot of attention is paid in teacher education these days to larger questions of human psychology; the focus tends to be on dealing with specific learning needs and exceptionalities and the management of an “inclusive classroom” (which notably does not include the participation of the more-than-human world). And of course, once immersed in their context of practice, teachers have their hands full from moment to moment with assessing the whys of behaviors while at the same time trying to determine where learners are in their understanding of a particular topic or subject area (or for that matter their understanding of their own feelings and relationships, their own needs, strengths, and stretches), what the blockages might be, and what might be the most useful next activity, encounter, learning possibility that will further their intellectual, social and emotional development toward adulthood. There is, in short, a lot to be thinking about, even without raising questions of how that future adult is expected to be in the world. Yet could it be that tackling these larger questions might help to make the work of teaching easier, more joyful, more enlivening for teachers and learners alike? Maybe part of the reason why schools can be such exhausting and deadening places is that they have been built around an inadequate psychological ideal. We certainly think that this has a lot to do with the depth of the current crisis. Reorienting education toward a different image of the “educated self,” one deeply embedded in reciprocal relationships with a wide range of beings, human and more than human, individual and collective, might not only help us learn to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity, but also to live together more fully and radiantly in our diverse places of learning and teaching. Psychological Reckonings and Questions for Practice Reckoning with health and well-being. In the fragmenting epistemologies of the Capitalocene, health and education are constructed as different fields of knowledge and practice. Although questions of health and well-­ being inevitably come up in educational settings, they are rarely approached pro-actively or holistically. Furthermore, the separation of schools from other community institutions and care services limits what educators can

84 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

do; there is little provision for working with families or cultural groups to promote collective practices of well-being. In such a context, educators are often constrained to operate in a reactive mode, where health only emerges as a concern and an objective in situations of crisis and dysfunction. • Questions for practice: How can education become a more community-­based undertaking, oriented to a holistic conception of well-being? What roles do place and the more-than-human play in the concept of health and the development of the healthy person? And how can education contribute to the health of place and community? • In our context of practice, are we helping to create a healthy learning environment for all? Healthy on whose terms? How do we work with seemingly “unhealthy” learners and situations, and what are the challenges and incompletenesses in that work? Reckoning with individual autonomy. Western psychology and public education tend to position the independent autonomous adult (or citizen) as the developmental or educational goal. That is in part a legacy of the Enlightenment and in part a response to the modern demand for economic and social mobility, which is hampered by strong attachment to place and community. Yet the downsides are evident, among them loneliness, anomie, the weakening of family ties and social cohesion, and the dilution of a sense of responsibility and reciprocity with respect to both human and more-than-human others. • Questions for practice: How do I imagine the process of becoming an adult, and what a well-developed adult looks like? Am I supporting and furthering that process in my practice? Are there ways that ideal needs to be shifted or expanded, and what are the implication for how and where teaching and learning take place? • Can I recognize and respond to those moments when a student is either turning into or away from relation? Are there any learnings from the diversity of cultural realities that might support this practice I am seeking? And what supports or possibilities might the natural world offer? • What are other options for the “self” that might be considered and even lived into a bit in our learning community? How might

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

85

e­ducational practices traditionally focused on the individual (e.g., almost all assessment) be transformed within a more relational, interconnected developmental model? Reckoning with trauma and loss (cultural and relational). There is a great deal of suffering in the Capitalocene, even in wealthy Western societies. Its sources are myriad: isolation, colonial structures/myths, micro and macro violences, structural racism, and many other social pathologies and forms of oppression. It is difficult to move toward eco-social cultural change when so many are hurting so deeply. Put more strongly, our response to the ecological crisis must also seek to heal the human wounds inflicted by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and all their grim legion. As has been acknowledged in both spiritual and political traditions, my own freedom is dependent on the freedom of all beings. This principle alone calls for a radical reorientation of education. • Questions for practice: How does my practice support and further healing? Am I aware of ways in which learners may suffer further trauma in educational settings, and am I working to lessen or reverse such harms? • Do I understand how trauma and loss of relation are connected? Can I recognize early signs of learners who are suffering? How do I as an educator think through and respond to the traumas that I myself might be carrying? • Does my practice enable and support students to grow and sustain their relationships with the more-than-human world? How do I work with experiences of pain and loss in response to ecological devastation? How do I support relational learners who may feel pushed to detach, even alienate themselves to avoid the pain? Reckoning with disempowerment. In spite of its rhetoric about the development of individual capacity and agency, formal education is experienced as profoundly disempowering by many learners. This has many causes, but the result is that both children and adults may have little confidence in their own capacity to learn, to create, or to bring about social change at even the most modest level. Clearly the individualist bent of mainstream education contributes to this by depriving learners of the experience of collective efficacy, to say nothing of self-efficacy. Equally consequential is the way that a very limited range of abilities is recognized

86 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

as valuable and systematically developed in mainstream education, with other potentials, such as our capacity to care, cooperate, and collaborate, downplayed, ignored, or even belittled. • Questions for practice: How do I recognize disempowerment in learners and myself? And how do I work with it once it has been identified? How do I recognize, encourage, and support learners’ agency, and can that work be extended to support capacities that are not usually valued in education? • What does it mean to create mutually beneficial and empowering relationships in context of learning and teaching? How can the natural world be part of this, as an active participant, co-teacher, carer, healer?

References Abram, D. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-­ than-­Human World. Penguin. Adams, G., I. Dobles, L.H. Gómez, T. Kurtiş, and L.E. Molina. 2015. Decolonizing Psychological Science: Introduction to the Special Thematic Section. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3 (1): 213–238. Baggs, E., and A.  Chemero. 2021. Radical Embodiment in Two Directions. Synthese 198 (Suppl 9): 2175–2190. Bai, H. 2009. Reanimating the Universe. In Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education, ed. M. Mckenzie, P. Hart, H. Bai, and B. Jickling. Hampton Press. Bamford, B. 1999. From Environmental Education to Ecopolitics: Affirming Changing Agendas for Teachers. Educational Philosophy and Theory 13 (1): 157–173. Beery, T., and D. Wolf-Watz. 2014. Nature to Place: Rethinking the Environmental Connectedness Perspective. Journal of Environmental Psychology 40 (1): 198–205. Bird Rose, D. 2018. Connectivity Thinking, Animism, and the Pursuit of Liveliness. Educational Theory 67 (4): 491–508. Blenkinsop, S., and C.  Beeman. 2010. The World as Co-Teacher: Learning to Work with a Peerless Colleague. The Trumpeter 26 (3): 27–39. Bold, R., ed. 2019. Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change. Springer. Bonnett, M. 2003a. Chapter 7. Nature and Knowing. Journal of Philosophy of Education 37 (4): 641–655.

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

87

———. 2003b. Chapter 9. Education for Sustainability: Sustainability as a Frame of Mind. Journal of Philosophy of Education 37 (4): 675–690. Bowers, C.A. 2008. Why the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Theory of Metaphor Is Inadequate for Addressing Cultural Issues Related to the Ecological Crises. The Trumpeter 24 (3). Clarke, D., and J.  McPhie. 2014. Becoming Animate in Education: Immanent Materiality and Outdoor Learning for Sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 14 (3): 198–216. ———. 2016. From Places to Paths: Learning for Sustainability, Teacher Education and a Philosophy of Becoming. Environmental Education Research 22 (7): 1002–1024. Corntassel, J. 2012. Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1).,: –86-101. Coulthard, G.S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press. De Lissovoy, N. 2012. Education and Violation: Conceptualizing Power, Domination, and Agency in the Hidden Curriculum. Race, Ethnicity and Education 15 (4): 463–484. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massui. University of Minnesota Press. Donald, D. 2009. Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives: The Journal of the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre 2 (1): 1–24. ———. 2012. Indigenous Métissage: A Decolonizing Research Sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 25 (5): 533–555. Egan, K. 1997. The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding. University of Chicago Press. Fawcett, L., and M. Johnson. 2019. Coexisting Entities in Multispecies Worlds: Arts-Based Methodologies for Decolonial Pedagogies. In Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy, ed. T.  Lloro-Bidart and V.  Banschbach, 175–193. Palgrave Macmillan. Fenwick, T., and R.  Edwards. 2010. Actor-Network Theory in Education. Routledge. Fettes, M., and S.  Blenkinsop. 2023. Rewilding Imagination: Reorienting Eco-­ Leadership in Education. In Imagination and Educational Leadership: Research, Practice and Possibility, ed. G.  Judson and M.  Dougherty. Teachers College Press. Flower, M., and M.  Hamington. 2022. Care Ethics, Bruno Latour, and the Anthropocene. Philosophies 7 (2): 31.

88 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Foucault, M. 1983. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 2nd ed., 229–252. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gaard, G. 1997. Toward a Queer Ecofeminism. Hypatia 12 (1): 114–137. Gasparatou, R. 2017. Scientism and Scientific Thinking: A Note on Science Education. Science & Education 26 (7–9): 799–812. Gleason, T. 2019. Towards a Terrestrial Education: A Commentary on Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth. Environmental Education Research 25 (6): 977–986. Gonzales-Guardiano, E. 2001. Complexity in Environmental Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 33 (1): 153–166. Gough, N. 2004. RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing Posthuman Pedagogies. Educational Philosophy and Theory 36 (3): 253–265. ———. 2006. Shaking the Tree, Making a Rhizome: Towards a Nomadic Geophilosophy of Science Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 38 (5): 625–645. Gregoriou, Z. 2004. Commencing the Rhizome: Towards a Minor Philosophy of Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 36 (3): 234–251. Grossman, L. 2018. The Ecosystem that Controls a Galaxy’s Future Is Coming into Focus. Science News, July 12, 2018. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cosmic-­cloak-­controls-­galaxy-­future-­coming-­focus Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hardy, J. 2002. Levinas and Environmental Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 34 (1): 459–476. Harman, G. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican. Humphreys, C., and S. Blenkinsop. 2017. White Paper Concerning Philosophy of Education and the Environment. Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (3): 243–264. Hung, R. 2008. Educating For and Through Nature: A Merleau-Ponty Approach. Studies in Philosophy and Education 5: 355–367. Hunt, S. 2014. Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept. Cultural Geographies 21 (1): 27–32. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge. Irigaray, L. 2013. In the Beginning, She Was. Bloomsbury. Jickling, B., S.  Blenkinsop, N.  Timmerman, and M.  Sitka-Sage. 2019. Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, D. 2017. Embodied Cognitive Ecosophy: The Relationship of Mind, Body, Meaning and Ecology. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 99 (2): 156–171.

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

89

Katz, J. 2018. Ensouling Our Schools: A Universally Designed Framework for Mental Health, Well-Being, and Reconciliation. Portage & Main Press. Kimmerer, R.W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed. King, T. 2003. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi. Kingsnorth, P. 2017. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. Graywolf Press. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press. Kurth-Schai, R. 1992. Ecology and Equity: Towards the Rational Reechantment of Schools and Society. Educational Theory 42 (1): 147–163. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press. LeGrange, L. 2011. Sustainability and Higher Education: From Arborescent to Rhizomatic Thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (7): 742–754. Li, H. 1996. On the Nature of Environmental Education: Anthropocentrism Versus Non-Anthropocentrism: The Irrelevant Debate. Philosophy of Education Yearbook 1: 253–256. Lloro-Bidart, T. 2017. A Feminist Posthumanist Political Ecology of Education for Theorizing Human-Animal Relations/Relationships. Environmental Education Research 23 (1): 111–130. Luke, T. 2001. Education, Environment, and Sustainability: What Are the Issues, Where to Intervene, What Must be Done? Educational Philosophy and Theory 33 (1): 187–202. Mignolo, W. 2011. Decolonizing Western Epistemology/Building Decolonial Epistemologies. In Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy, ed. A.M.  Isasi-Díaz and E.  Mendieta, 19–43. Fordham University Press. Mika, C. 2017. Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. Routledge. Mikaels, J. 2019. Becoming-Place: A Rhizomatic Exploration of Friluftsliv in the Swedish School Curriculum. Curriculum Perspectives 39 (1): 85–89. Pillay, S.R. 2017. Cracking the Fortress: Can We Really Decolonize Psychology? South Africa Journal of Psychology 47 (2): 135–140. Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge. ———. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge. Record-Lemon, R.M., and M.J. Buchanan. 2017. Trauma-Informed Practices in Schools: A Narrative Literature Review. Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy 51 (4). Rovelli, C. 2022. Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Penguin.

90 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Russell, J. 2013. Whose Better? (Re)orientating a Queer Ecopedagogy. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 18 (1): 11–26. Semetsky, I. 2003. Deleuze’s New Image of Thought, or Dewey Revisited. Educational Philosophy and Theory 35 (1): 17–29. Settles, I.H., L.R. Warner, N.T. Buchanan, and M.K. Jones. 2020. Understanding Psychology’s Resistance to Intersectionality Theory Using a Framework of Epistemic Exclusion and Invisibility. Journal of Social Issues 76 (4): 796–813. Sheridan, J., and R. Longboat. 2006. The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred. Space and Culture 9 (4): 365–381. Simpson, L.B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Smith, L. 2018. Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education. Routledge. Stables, A., and W. Scott. 1999. Environmental Education and the Discourses of Humanist Modernity: Redefining Critical Environmental Literacy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 31: 145–155. Swillens, V., and J.  Vlieghe. 2020. Finding Soil in an Age of Climate Trouble: Designing a New Compass for Education with Arendt and Latour. Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (4): 1019–1031. Taylor, A., and V.  Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2015. Learning with Children, Ants, and Worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a Common World Pedagogy of Multispecies Vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 23 (4): 507–529. Todd, Z. 2016. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. Valencia, R.R., ed. 2012. The Evolution of Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice. Routledge. Van Horn, G., R.W. Kimmerer, and J. Hausdoerffer, eds. 2021. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Center for Humans and Nature. Watts, V. 2013. Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European Tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2 (1): 20–34. Williams, L. 2022. Indigenous Intergenerational Resilience: Confronting Cultural and Ecological Crisis. Routledge. Williamson, B. 2017. Decoding ClassDojo: Psycho-Policy, Social-Emotional Learning and Persuasive Educational Technologies. Learning, Media and Technology 42 (4): 440–453. Willinsky, J. 1998. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. University of Minnesota Press. Wilson, S. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing. Wohlleben, P. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees. Greystone Books.

3  REFRAMING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

91

Wong, P.T.P. 2011. Positive Psychology 2.0: Towards a Balanced Interactive Model of the Good Life. Canadian Psychology 52 (2): 69–81. Wozolek, B. 2020. Hidden Curriculum of Violence: Affect, Power, and Policing the Body. Educational Studies 56 (3): 269–285. Wright, K. 2014. Becoming-With. Environmental Humanities 5 (1): 277–281. Zemblylas, M. 2017. The Quest for Cognitive Justice: Towards a Pluriversal Human Rights Education. Globalization, Societies, and Education 15 (4): 397–404. Zwicky, J. 2019. The Experience of Meaning. McGill-Queen’s Press.

CHAPTER 4

The 4Cs: Practicing Education for Eco-­Social-­Cultural Change

The previous chapters have explored the big picture of how education needs to change in response to the ecological crisis. Chapters. 1 and 2 suggested approaching this as a process of transformative design, and offered some organizing concepts and design prompts intended to undermine foundational premises of the Capitalocene. Chapter 3 examined the philosophical/theoretical underpinnings of modern Western education and proposed an array of fundamental shifts in educational thinking and practice needed to support the work of eco-social-cultural change. Behind these arguments lies our conviction that there is no point in trying to bring about radical change while blithely using the tools, structures, ways of thinking, and assumptions of the previous paradigm. Here, in this final chapter, we approach practice from a different angle. These ideas emerged through an extended process of reflection on the different emphases and concerns that we encountered in our interviews with a diverse range of educators and from our review of educational literature, encompassing both formal and informal settings. While all the people we talked to were clearly committed to a process of fundamental change, the kinds of skills and purposes and interactions they highlighted varied quite a bit from person to person and from context to context. We came to think of this as expressing four somewhat distinct educator “stances” that we see as complementary—essentially, four different kinds of educational “ethos” for change. Articulating these stances, and the purposes and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fettes, S. Blenkinsop, Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7_4

93

94 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

practices associated with them, seems potentially helpful as a way of helping a range of educators find a place for themselves in the work of educating for a more eco-socially just world.

Competencies, Capacities, Capabilities The teacher education literature often speaks in terms of the “competences” that teachers must develop in order to adequately meet the needs of their learners and fulfill their other responsibilities within the education system. While the notion of competences/competencies can be helpful (see below), we want to think more expansively than that, since the educators we have in mind are often working in organizational and community contexts where roles are less clearly defined, and the educational processes and outcomes involved are more holistic and relational. Furthermore, our work in Chap. 3 shows that these qualities need cultivating in formal education as well—that is, current conceptions of what it means to be a classroom teacher are a key part of what needs to change. So we will start with a quick definitional discussion of competencies, capacities, and capabilities, as these terms are used somewhat indiscriminately and interchangeably in the literature but can do some useful work in framing our thinking in this chapter. The notion of competencies (or competences) stems from attempts to define what teachers (and other professionals) need to be able to do in order to achieve particular outcomes. Day (2017) succinctly summarizes the strengths and limitations of this way of thinking about teaching practice: the “identification and delineation of appropriate qualities, knowledge, skills associated with expectations and standards in the workplace” can be helpful in both communicating expectations and enabling accountability, but on the downside, this approach can also be “atomistic, potentially reductionist, oversimplified and unable always to be applied as a means for judging quality in contexts which require the possession and sustained application of complex, situation-related and contingent cognitive and emotional human relating and decision-making, i.e. the teaching profession” (2017, 168). In practice, competencies can be defined in more or less reductionist ways. The Flanders teacher standards cited by Day, for example, include things like “In his [sic] contacts with others, the teacher is genuine, true, and heartfelt,” and “The teacher should be creative and innovative in dealing with situations” (2017, 170–171). Thus, competencies are often used

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

95

to communicate an image of an ideal teacher, and don’t necessarily entail a behavioral or managerial emphasis on measurable outcomes. Like Day, we think there can be a place for this kind of thing—the effort of trying to articulate one’s assumptions about teaching can support thoughtful dialogue and even shared philosophical explorations such as we advocate in Chap. 3—but we also share his reservations about whether lists of competencies actually help anyone become a better teacher or teacher educator. Capacities is a broader term than competencies, and especially helpful to our purposes in the way it can include both individual and collective agency. For example, the resilience literature uses the notion of “adaptive capacity” to refer to ecosystems, communities, and individual humans (Fazey et al. 2007). Whereas competencies are framed around the notion of knowing how to do something, capacities invoke something like being able to learn how to respond in new ways to changing circumstances, as proposed by adult learning theorists Yorks and Nicolaides (2013): This ever intensifying shift from relative contextual stability to an environment of rapid change with unpredictable outcomes presents adults with the need for preparing themselves for confronting confusing choices as familiar patterns of social interaction are continuously disrupted. The implications extend beyond technical, vocational, and workplace learning. Educated citizens must be aware of how they are in relationship with their environments as they think and engage in public discourse and balance personal lives in a world of interconnected volatility. This learning challenge both includes and goes beyond developing skills and competencies. In addition to skill and competency, it requires developing a capacity for awareness of how one is in relationship with that world and the ambiguity it presents. (2013, 3–4)

Capacities thus tend to be general in nature, since we don’t know in advance what they might be needed for. They also tend to be developed communally, through processes such as those outlined by Yorks and Nicolaides (2013), involving movement between “first-person experience, second-person collective learning, and third-person impact on the broader context” (2013, 16). This reinforces the insight from the resilience literature that increasing the capacity of individuals to change their thinking and behavior “provides the basis for shaping and creating new and adaptive institutions” (Fazey et al. 2007, 375–376)—except that we think this process also works in reverse. One can interpret the process of transformative design outlined in Chap. 2 in terms of building educational capacity

96 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

for the kind of “generative learning” sought by Yorks and Nicolaides (2013). Keeping all of these system levels in mind—individual, group, learning space/program, institution, community, landscape, ecosystem— seems to us to be the most productive and exciting way of thinking about capacities, which are held and expressed, for the most part, relationally rather than individually. Finally, capabilities have become an important way of thinking about social development as the pursuit of justice and freedom, stemming from the influential work of economist Amartya Sen and ethical philosopher Martha Nussbaum (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Robeyns 2017; Shepherd and Dissart 2022). The capabilities approach can be thought of as “a theory of justice that focuses on the capacities necessary for people to function fully in the lives they choose for themselves” (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010, 16). Although Nussbaum is explicitly individualist in her orientation, others have seen this framework as hospitable to all kinds of collective goods as well, and thus much more responsive to cultural and communal well-being. Schlosberg and Carruthers use examples of Indigenous struggles for environmental justice to argue that the capabilities approach provides “a broad and integrative way of understanding how varied … demands for equity, participation, dignity, autonomy, rights, and recognition can undergird a quest for the basic functioning of communities, the integrity of cultures, and the defense of local, inherited links between culture and nature” (2010, 30). More recently, “capability generation” has been proposed as a way of strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities in the face of ecological and climate change (Shepherd and Dissart 2022). Thus, although we can’t take up a fuller discussion of capabilities here, the term provides a valuable link with broader efforts toward justice, freedom, development, and resilience. Capabilities provide a way of thinking about what education for eco-social-cultural change is trying to achieve in specific contexts and conditions; they point toward a deliberative process “for ensuring that the pluralism of values that people hold can be voiced and engaged” and “for generating collective responsibility, agency and capability centred around shared sustainable ‘ends’ for society” (Shepherd and Dissart 2022, 9). To a greater extent than either competencies or capacities, they highlight the need to consider context, available resources, and the interactions of everyone involved in the learning space to consider “how can we get done what we need to do?” They are also about creating

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

97

and supporting the conditions in which the capacities and competencies that are needed for change can thrive. The four stances we explore in the rest of this chapter locate educators within this complex mix of needs and aspirations, vulnerability and resilience, struggle and flourishing. We hope to show that no one need try to do it all; that our flourishing as educators can be supported by sharing the work in complementary and mutually supportive ways. Competencies, capacities, and capabilities are different terms for naming the collective promise of this work, the key role of education in helping us move beyond the Capitalocene into a more hopeful future. Indigenous communities often insist on the importance of “doing things in a good way,” and we see this focus on process as a helpful reminder that striving for particular outcomes often gets in the way of deeper learning. Still more crucial than the appropriate and discerning use of skills and methods is the creation and sustaining of an ethos of change, in which the non-linear and co-­generated interactions between individuals, organizations, and environments can yield surprising emergent possibilities (Lichtenstein and Plowman 2009). For, as with good organic farming, the tools, skills, methods, and practices only get one so far. One must also deal with the history of the given place and restore and augment the soil so that the ground itself can be fertile, inviting and self-renewing.

Introducing the Four Stances/Positionalities What we have come to call “the 4Cs” are our way of creatively synthesizing a wide range of competencies, capacities, and capabilities relevant to eco-social-cultural change. As will be made more evident in the detailed discussion that follows, these four stances/positionalities are not wholly distinct from one another, and all can be cultivated and held simultaneously. Nonetheless, we think they help illuminate some distinctive, mutually complementary orientations to education that seeks to bring about lasting transformation. As prefigured in our earlier discussions, we don’t see these stances as necessarily characterizing individuals. They might characterize particular learning spaces, or teams of co-educators, or situations calling for a particular kind of educational framing and ethos. They can and should be understood fluidly, held fluidly, enacted fluidly. It might happen that some people feel called to step forward as educators in response to particular needs, and then step back from that role when things shift. You might find

98 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

that happening not only with adults but with children. Thus, although we describe each of the four by and large as a singular “educator” responsible for a particular set of functions, that’s just a rhetorical simplification. These stances or positionalities are best thought of as shared, fluid, dynamic, and in creative tension with one another. Another way of thinking about the 4Cs is in terms of orientation. After we came up with the four stances, we were struck by their resonances with Indigenous teachings of the Four Directions. There are many versions of those teachings, varying by nation, lineage, and individual teacher, but always used to orient the mind toward holistic understanding; the one we turned to for guidance is shared and elaborated by Loren Cruden (1995). As we sat with those Earth-centered teachings, new qualities and relationships in the 4Cs framework became apparent, and that has influenced how we understand and present the stances—though we would not want to claim any authority for our interpretations. Rather we want to invite our readers to consider approaching the stances as a way of orienting to the teachings and calling of the Earth itself. The Four Directions begin in the East, the direction of the rising sun, and proceed clockwise. Thus, our first C is that of the critical educator, whose mission is to shake up entrenched assumptions and cultivate critical self-awareness and reflection at the individual, group, and systemic levels. Depending on positionality and context, the critical educator may play the role of activist, critiquing existing relationships and norms and mobilizing resistance to injustice and oppression; or that of ally, walking humbly alongside the historically marginalized and disempowered and helping to open and hold space for their voices and practices. A third role is that of advocate, articulating and advancing alternatives to the status quo. These educators cultivate critical spaces that encourage both individual development and group self-reflexive competencies and capacities to intentionally mitigate colonial and oppressive legacies, respond to ongoing injustice, and leverage the power of diversity to move people out of entrenched habits and assumptions into spaces of growth. They work to build and sustain the capabilities and ethos that enable all this to occur. Turning to the South, we encounter the work of the community educator who facilitates relationship-building and collective flourishing— involving children, caregivers, knowledge holders and elders, and a spectrum of diversity encompassing both the human and the more-thanhuman. Such work nurtures the capability of self-governing groups of individuals to take responsibility for their actions, participate in

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

99

community building, and collectively resolve complex problems together. Community spaces are places of belonging, inclusion, and shared purpose, fostered through articulation of a shared vision, based on core values, and the cultivation of participants’ understanding of their own commitments, personal contributions, and shared responsibility. In the West, we find the change educator. While all of these positionalities involve educating for change, this one is especially concerned with how change is experienced by participants, in particular the challenges entailed by uncertainty, risk, discomfort, disruption, and loss. One of the greatest barriers to change is fear and the retreat from pain; thus, change educators seek to help people turn toward and move through fear and pain into new possibilities of growth and flourishing. At the collective level, this requires the creation of safe-enough change spaces where participants are supported to share their pain and grief, learn from past failures and disasters, experiment with new self-understandings and practices, and articulate their evolving understanding of their needs, desires, and possibilities. Finally, the North is the direction of the coeur/care educator, whose core vocation is to support and nurture well-being: mental, physical, social, and emotional. This work involves both connecting with and building on the strengths that people already have as individuals (i.e., the cultivation of resilience) and weaving new connections with human and more-than-human others and with the sacred. Coeur/care educators promote, encourage, and celebrate practices of connection, thoughtfulness, kindness, and gratitude. They foster a growth mindset: the belief that abilities, intelligences, and skills can be developed through intentional effort. Coeur/care spaces are inclusive environments that respond to the diverse needs of participants, their families, their communities, their contexts, and the denizens and beings that make up these more-than-­ human places. In the rest of this chapter we build a more in-depth profile of each stance—although we do so tentatively, understanding that this work is profoundly situational and responsive in nature. Here we wish only to highlight the way that the four stances work together to illuminate, support, heal, and connect. While each is valuable in its own right, it’s when they come together within a single context that we think their collective potential might best be realized. Returning to the language of capabilities, the 4Cs speak to the “full functioning” of individuals and communities even under the stressful and uncertain conditions of the end of the

100 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Capitalocene. That is, indeed, how we think of the proper role of education—building people’s capacity to live joyfully and resiliently in the world as it is, while working to be good ancestors. We hope this chapter helps make that work feel inviting, accessible, and full of promise.

East: Critical Educator Because manifestation originates in thought, it is with the mind that you begin the work. It is through consciousness that you experience an awareness of life, explore the potentials of reality, and choose what sort of life in which to participate. (Cruden 1995, 17)

Throughout our readings and interviews it was apparent that criticality was understood to be an important component of any project for change. This was no surprise—shining a light on the sources and structures of oppression, including how they play themselves out in our inner lives, has to be part of the core motivation for working to make things different. What we hadn’t anticipated, though, was how widely the focus for criticality could vary. For some, a macro-analysis took priority: questions of culture, race, gender, neoliberalism, settler culture, anthropocentrism, and so on. Others, though, were more drawn to self-examination, seeking to understand their identity and positioning and potential. Criticality for them was about locating challenges, blockages, and limitations to their own becoming. We think of the critical educator as working with this whole spectrum of possibilities—criticality, as it were, all the way down. As is true of the other stances as well, we witnessed how the work of the critical educator is often embedded in a larger collective. For example, an eco-community, with deep environmental commitments, might have robust language, sets of practices, explicit policies, and in-depth awarenesses with regard to the more-than-human world, yet they might be less critical and aware of issues relating to economic privilege, race, and ethnicity. It was clear that the ways communities positioned themselves affected which privileges and injustices were named, which problematic assumptions were explored, and which voices and ways of being and doing were sought out. At the same time, we saw some indications that a “culture of criticality” could deepen the awareness of at least some community members regarding their own cultural conditioning and privilege beyond the scope of community concerns.

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

101

Beyond this, there were some communities who were actively trying to discover their own underexamined areas. These for us were especially interesting; we understood them as perceiving themselves to be incomplete and ever in process, aware of human fallibility and interested in human possibility. We saw an active, vibrant, mutually influencing back and forth between community and individual, such that change at the community level might cause, inspire, or force change for individuals and those shifts might, in turn, lead to reconceptualization and further change at the community level. And at times we encountered this process as explicitly understood and actively sought out. Internal, individualized critical reflection was an essential aspect of this work. Through building this capacity, critical educators examined their successes and failures to determine whether or not they were “walking their talk.” It was understood that intention and action are not the same thing—that it takes time and effort and making mistakes to learn how to do things differently. So part of the work of the critical educator was to cultivate ways of fostering evaluation and feedback that helped people persist despite failures and setbacks and continue to expand their awareness and practice. All of the roles we mentioned earlier—activist, ally, advocate—were something that people had grown into over a considerable period of time, and in the context of relationships and commitments that were at times uncomfortable, painful, and disturbing (Carlson-Manathara 2021). Where this process could be held collectively, it relied on good facilitators. Some communities paid for members to be trained and develop these competences internally, while others sought outside expertise for this challenging work. One example of a community-based practice that succeeded in incorporating ongoing criticality within a somewhat formal process comes from an eco-school we worked with. In the process that led to the creation of the school, a commitment was made to including nature as co-teacher—a move aimed at undoing the anthropocentrism and species elitism of Western epistemology and the public-school system (Blenkinsop et  al. 2023; Blenkinsop and Beeman 2010). It was accepted that learning how to do this would be an open-ended endeavor, involving the experiential learning cycle of doing, observing, reflecting, and reworking. Teachers, staff, and community members held gatherings to share experiences and ideas, define their goals, evaluate their practices, and make plans for continued progress in light of this “standard” they wished to live up to. It was a messy process, involving much repetition and circling around as new

102 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

families and teachers joined the community and others left, but it helped to define and sustain the school as a place where “we do things differently.” The question of difference is interesting. Although critical educators are committed to a critique of mainstream society, very few named or positioned themselves as “not the dominant culture”—rather, they saw themselves either as working within the dominant culture to change it or as drawing on independent sources of meaning and abundance such as in the “nature as co-teacher” example. Sometimes these orientations were in conversation with one another: a good example is the differing pathways of Indigenous resurgence activists, who explicitly orient their work to Indigenous traditions and teachings without regard to the ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies of colonialism, and of those who see these traditions and teachings as helping to decolonize Canadian society as a whole (Asch et al. 2018). The literature on critical approaches to education is vast, and we have picked out just a few strands that we see as especially relevant to eco-­ social-­cultural change. The first has to do with creating critical spaces— safe, inclusive, and cohesive environments in which diverse people can successfully dialogue and work together without surrendering or concealing their differences. In such spaces, it is important to acknowledge people’s unique histories, experiences, and contributions (Charles and Samples 2004; Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010). Issues facing community members often have deep historical roots, and daily oppression thrives in judgment, silence, and invisibility (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010). Thus, it also requires personal and collective skills of criticality to acknowledge and seek non-violent responses to socio-historical-political issues, both past and present, without while neither ignoring not perpetuating confrontation, anger, defensiveness, denial, or guilt (Kivel 2017). Although such critical conversations have largely focused on human concerns, we see a need to extend them to human/more-than-human relations as well (Blenkinsop et al. 2017). Social change often begins with empowerment—with understanding, awareness, and action that addresses unjust psychological, sociopolitical, and structural circumstances (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010). Eco-social change must then also consider how to do this across the species divide. The process of “othering” or objectifying people and more-than-humans by constructing stories, or dominant cultural narratives, about disadvantaged or inferior groups serves to maintain power imbalances (Kivel 2017).

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

103

Often these stories help members with more power and privilege to rationalize their role in oppression or position in dominant groups. Listening, acknowledging, and understanding peoples’ stories, therefore, is a first step in repairing the damaging narratives that society has created about people “different from us.” What does it mean to listen to, acknowledge, and better understand the stories of Cedar, Wren, and Earthworm? And how can such practices be part of a broader effort to challenge destructive stories that serve to divide people and the natural world, and to better understand and appreciate the resistance, resilience, capacities, competences, and strengths of diverse eco-community members? Transformation that works toward positive social change for everyone is a dynamic, imperfect, ongoing process. The critical educator needs to be not only actively critical toward actions, beliefs, structures, and processes that perpetuate oppression, but also reflexive, self-critical, and transparent about their own actions and implicatedness in larger systems. In any society, there is never a “neutral” stance. The colonial Western form, however, is a society where one can benefit from oppression without being overtly oppressive oneself. Thus, as noted, we also need to be critically aware that in our determination to help or change the world, we can also unconsciously cause harm through our “good intentions” and blind spots. Communities who engaged in regular individual and group self-reflective practices were often the most aware about addressing this directly. Here are a few examples of the pedagogical competencies, capacities, and capabilities of critical educators that may be held and cultivated together or separately (note that these overlap with some of the other stances): • Activist/advocacy/allyship. Practices/embodies an anti-oppressive approach to team, community, and more-than-human relationships, seeks collective/mutual flourishing across differences in positionality, privilege, power. • Decolonizing guidance. Engages in reflective practices about power and privilege, challenges behavior that excludes others, learns how to take responsibility/accountability for leveraging strengths. Purposefully constructs empowering narratives. • Anti-oppressive communication/relational skills. Practices respectful communication while engaging in courageous or challenging ­conversations. Is personally dedicated to increasing skills such as self-­ regulation, active/attentive/responsive listening, empathy, and

104 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

emotional attunement. Cultivates collective commitment to finding common ground, viable solutions, or meaningful ways to move forward. • Mindful inclusion. Is deliberate in the generating, holding, and shaping of community culture. Co-creates safe-enough spaces that encourage everyone to meaningfully contribute (recognizing that “safe” does not mean the absence of discomfort nor does fully “safe” exist; rather the goal is to increase our ability to manage our discomfort, our problematic assumptions, and be courageous/brave with each other). In a timely manner, enforces anti-violence policies, resolves conflicts, and fosters relationship repairs. • Ongoing learning. For example: develops/deepens critical awareness regarding the sociohistorical-political issues impacting members and the natural world; teaches anti-/non-violent communication skills; and builds capacity for critically informed action and transformative change. • Integrated feedback. Evaluates/celebrates success, welcomes experimentation and innovation, and increases, invites, and facilitates the ability to fail forward.

South: Community Educator [Y]ou need the web of kinship to give you perspective. For this sharing to function properly, you must be in right relationship with the web and with the forces governing its harmonious purpose. … All your relations. It always comes back to this truth: the well-being of one is instrinsically linked to the well-being of the whole and vice versa. (Cruden 1995, 56)

The importance of community to eco-social-cultural change will already be evident from the previous section: time and again we heard that the work of building critical awareness and commitment and action, whether as activist, ally, or advocate, was best undertaken collectively. For some this involved careful consideration, a recognizing of the importance of diversity, a conscious gathering and building of capacities and competences, an active engagement with building internal authentic systems, and perhaps a conscious act of separation and boundary creation; for others, it was almost as if the engagement in shared critical work led to groups becoming communities by default. It was in accounts of the former that we came to recognize the stance of the community educator: community not just a

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

105

means to an end, or as a side-effect of working for eco-social-­cultural change, but also an end in itself. As might be expected based on our discussion of the change process in the last section, many of the community educators we heard from placed a high value on diversity in community membership, voice, and participation. For many this was related, in part, to questions of justice and the expansion of what the community might become. But it also appeared to stem, often at an intuitive level, from the recognition that greater diversity usually equates to greater resilience and resourceful possibility (Kivel 2017). The aim was not conformity, but richness of relational connection and dialogue, leveraging the full range of capacities and competencies of community members. Community, for these educators with their explicit interest in change, was not seen as static—it was much more of a process, a verb, rather than an entity, a noun, requiring diverse membership, divergent ideas, challenging voices, trickster energies, in order to continue to flourish. It was an ongoing, imperfect, ever-learning, and incomplete educational project at its very heart. Creating and maintaining the spaces and the boundaries allowing community to happen was a conscious and active process for these educators. In some cases, particular individuals understood their role as being that of gate-keeper, translator, or protector for/of the community, sometimes at a cost to their own well-being. Interviewees told us how they wanted the space to remain different from the mainstream, while recognizing that the community was not, or not yet, viable as a completely separate entity. In such cases, they took it upon themselves to be the necessary go-between, translating the community’s needs, ideas, and values into the language of “outsiders” (funders or educational administrators, for instance). This work was not necessarily widely known or understood in the community, and these educators often found it stressful to be bridging those divides— sometimes girding themselves to deal with the ignorance, aggression, violence, and suspicions of the general culture so that their community didn’t have to. Along with this kind of boundary work, many communities sought to actively differentiate themselves by re/adopting and re/adapting new and old traditions as signs of a distinctive culture and set of values. Sometimes these were acts of cultural resurgence, reaffirming and giving space to ways of being and knowing that had been backgrounded and disavowed by the colonizing mainstream. For Indigenous, Black, and other racialized justice-­ seeking communities, the revival or continuation of traditional

106 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

practices and teachings was a source of wisdom, spirituality, and cultural delight that affirmed their ability to persist and thrive in the face of the often-overwhelming colonial status quo. Other communities were seeking to establish or experiment with new ways of being differently, such as educational programs where individuals are encouraged to take nature names or more “authentic” names for the entire time they are immersed in the learning process with their fellow participants. Yet we noted that communities without deeper, more cultural, even cosmological, anchors sometimes struggled to maintain their meaningful and hard-fought changes. Under the conditions of the late Capitalocene, it can be an unending challenge to keep the troubling status quo at bay. Indeed, colonization, globalization, and modernization have deeply impacted our understanding of community. As such, the concept itself often requires a shift in mindset (Cajete 2015). There is a profound need in our society to rekindle our confidence in the efficacy of individuals to co-create, and move away from, the passive consumption of culture. Retrieving the wildness of the human spirit, in the sense discussed in Chap. 2, has profound implications for community and vice versa. Building a healthier and saner society has to rest ultimately on the capacity of self-­ governing but culturally embedded individuals to take responsibility for their actions, build collectives based on solidarity and mutual aid, and collectively resolve complex problems together (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010; Charles and Samples 2004). This is a different understanding of the modern individual than the individualistic ontology, axiology, and psychology we problematize in Chap. 3; it posits a notion of development where people become more fully themselves in the context of communities characterized by cohesion, core values, social support, reciprocity, common goals, shared respect and accountability, sense of belonging, and even trust. In keeping with our emphasis throughout this book, we think it is important to expand our thinking about community to include the more-­ than-­human world. Beyond doubt, our Capitalocene-driven separation from that world has proven devastating, not only for our more-than-­ human kin but also for our own health and well-being. There are things that are best, and even only known, in and through community, in place, and with the participation of the more-than-human. We think, for instance, of Charles and Sample’s (2004) observation that “the first teacher of the value of diversity is the natural world itself. In ecosystems diversity nurtures survival while specialization favors extinction. A diverse ecosystem

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

107

has inherently more options for survival than do less complex ecosystems. It is unlikely that any natural disaster can stress a diverse ecosystem to the point of extinction. Diversity assures resilience” (2004, 64). While, as noted in Chap. 1, the Western resilience literature generalizes rather uncritically from the ecological to the social, we think there is a deeply pedagogical insight here. Human communities in intimate relationship with their surrounding eco-communities have a fundamentally different understanding of how diverse beings think together and in relation—what Eduardo Kohn (2013) calls “an ecology of selves.” To believe that humans can figure out everything they need to on their own is a symptom of “cultures colonized by … the interior sources of their intelligence” (Sheridan and Longboat 2006, 366)—that is, an extraordinarily self-limiting and arrogant solipsism that is the very antithesis of community. Thus, community educators working for eco-social-cultural change need to be thinking about how to include the voice of the more-than-­ human in equitable ways. This points to some intriguing possibilities. Reciprocity, accountability, and acceptance of diversity all enhance trust and necessarily look differently when reaching across species; the process can challenge community members to explore their biases, privileges, and possibilities, and influence the language and metaphors they use to understand themselves. As communities build their capacities, competences, and capabilities across the socio-ecological justice spectrum, there may be lessons learned through relating and consulting with the more-than-human that can help those communities function more effectively, generate and respond to a greater range of opportunities and strengths, and nourish a more robust well-being for all. Here are a few examples of the pedagogical competencies, capacities, and capabilities of community educators that may be held and cultivated together or separately (note that these overlap with some of the other stances): • Relationship skills. Facilitates the ongoing development of intrapersonal skills (emotional intelligence) and interpersonal skills (social intelligence) to strengthen connection among students/families/ communities/place/All My Relations. Note that these skills are also learned, held, and practiced at the group level—it is not just about teaching individuals, it’s also about building an emotionally and socially intelligent culture, or set of capacities, within the community as a whole.

108 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

• Place/Nature/Land-based knowledges. Builds ecological consciousness, nature-based connectedness, and place-based awareness. Here too, these are group capacities, not just individual ones. A classic example of a cultural frame that needs undoing is the framing of care for the natural world as being “odd,” “corny,” or “weird”—the goal would be to have this as a cultural expectation and set of shared practices, along with an openness to new and surprising ways of expressing care. • Mindful attending. Cultivates the ability to provide open/non-­ defensive, attuned, undivided, present attention while at the same supporting a space where this is accepted and even encouraged. Employs, models, and shares relational tools such as empathy, curiosity, and active listening. • Group facilitation. Supports individual and collective well-being through co-creating vision, group process, school culture, ongoing group development, and community flourishing. Finds ways to simultaneously grow the capacities of the group and the individuals within it at the same time. • Incorporation of adult learning principles. Recognizes the distinctive needs and capacities of adults, both as learners and as parents and caregivers of children. This is particularly salient for adults (likely the majority) who have a very narrow lived experience of what education is and might be. It must be recognized that adults come to any learning situation (both theirs and their children’s) with a wealth of experience and bias, and may need time and support in order to recognize and embrace unfamiliar possibilities, for themselves and others. • Diversity and inclusion. Engages in regular practices such as strengthening a sense of belonging, ongoing team training, cultivating safer/ safe-enough space, and facilitating group dialogue. Prioritizes the active, intentional deconstruction of colonial status quo and other forms of oppression—not just as ideas/ideals but in practice. Offers allyship support for those who are “translating” between the community and external world. • Sacred/spiritual/ceremonial spaces. Recognizes that community building reaches beyond mind and body and beyond work, work, work. These competences, capacities, and capabilities are about sustaining the health of the larger community, recognizing when achievements are to be celebrated, and navigating that difficult zone

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

109

between burnout and complacency. Roles may include guiding community care, coping/healing, and celebration.

West: Change Educator Autumn is for exploring the depths, carrying with you the enlightenment of spring and the courage and alliance gained in summer. Autumn is the time of going within. You release what is finished, like a tree setting free its leaves, and store what will nourish the work to come, as the squirrels do in gathering food for winter. (Cruden 1995, 96)

Given that change is actually the project of all 4Cs, and this book, it may seem odd to single it out as a particular stance. And maybe there are other terms that we could have used—but, to our minds, it’s helpful to name it this way as a reminder that eco-social-cultural change is also about unwanted change, and that all of our intentional human efforts toward living within the Earth’s carrying capacity are taking place against a backdrop of massive ecological loss and disruption. What’s more, even when change is willingly embraced, it is a difficult path to walk, requiring that we let go of cherished assumptions, privileges, personal and collective ambitions, sources of security and certainty. The calling of the change educator, as we envision it, is to educate imaginative capacity, support deep-seated identity work at the individual and community level, and acknowledge and even, at times, hospice a wide range of emotions including anxiety, uncertainty, anger, sadness/grief, loss, and pain alongside happiness and joy. In previous work with eco-schools we have noted how challenging it can be for communities, even when provided with resources and opportunities, to really spread their wings and do things differently (Blenkinsop et al. 2019; Jickling and Blenkinsop 2020). One way of understanding this is to see the modern Western (or Capitalocene) imagination as culturally and experientially limited, normally unable to stretch very far beyond the parameters of dominant discourses and everyday life. If this is the case, then educational change work needs, among other things, to help flex and expand the imagination. This is no simple task. We are talking about the loosening up the root metaphors of a culture (Bowers 2008), about getting past the psychological barriers to creativity (Cameron 1992), about reawakening dormant modes of understanding (Egan 1997)… in short,

110 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

it’s work that requires deep sensitivity and attentiveness to people’s mental and emotional and even spiritual ways of being. It’s pretty obvious that this is not the kind of work that typically goes on in formal education. Indeed, from a sociological-anthropological point of view, the role of education in general has been to bring the next generation into the norms, ways of being, structural systems, even cosmologies of the dominant culture. In the case of public education, the huge and unwieldy enterprise that has developed over the last 150 years or so, one might even say that it is trying to educate students into the culture as it used to exist, since the system itself changes so slowly. And yet, of course, the teachers and students who spend their days together in schools go home to communities and news channels and social media where anxieties and pressures around social and ecological change are everywhere. Schools at the moment are caught in a tug of war between the tendency of the system to maintain the status quo and the manifest inability of the status quo to meet the needs of the planet or of human well-being and aspirations for justice. This makes for unbelievable pressures at the level of the individual educator. On the one hand, the recognition of and the desire to respond to the diversity of learners is growing, and schools are taking on (or being saddled with) more and more responsibilities such as mental health, social-­ emotional learning, and supporting families in poverty. On the other hand, teachers are being told by some parents that climate change does not exist, that Indigenization is religious education, and that they shouldn’t teach about political systems or controversial social issues (gender! race! sexuality! environment!) since there is no place in school for political agendas. Of course this just illustrates the fact that the role of the teacher is political and always has been. But it doesn’t make it any easier for the individual change educator to do the kind of work that is required, which has less to do with teaching “content” per se and more with cultivating an openness and flexibility in children’s understanding of the world they have been born into. Self-evidently, this does not entail reinscribing systemic injustices and environmental problematics in those children’s imaginations as “just the way things are.” Recalling our discussion of multi-level systemic change in Chap. 1, it seems best to think of education for eco-social-cultural change as happening in “niches”—little-noticed corners where space opens up and resources come together to enable something new. So the work of the change educator might include noticing when the conditions are right for something

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

111

like to unfold, and preparing the imaginations of educational leaders to be able to welcome and support it. Or of community or organizational leaders, for education has a way of not staying confined within schools or other designated places for learning. Advocates for change in the transformative design conversation put a lot of weight on gathering and mobilizing a diverse range of people, actively including those from these sites of possibility, and interests around common values and goals. This also allows the group to move away from the pressure of assumptions, often metaphorical, of permanent scarcity, systemic intransigence, and impossibility, toward ones of abundance, possibility, and even hope. Thus, as with the previous stances, we find the image of the change educator shifting from individual imaginative intervention to group imaginative process. Joy, possibility, abundance, emergence become much more accessible when diverse insights and ways of thinking and being in the world are brought together. Some ways of energizing and nourishing this process include experiential means, where group members encounter and are immersed in things that are outside their prior worldview and cultural context; artistic and creative means, where group members are prompted and supported to express themselves and explore their intuitions in unfamiliar media or genres; and through play and improvisation, whether dramatic or audiovisual or physical or all three, where unexpected patterns and juxtapositions prompt laughter and astonishment and new possibilities. While the eventual goal is to inspire and shape the work of eco-social-cultural change, it’s important not to impose “early closure,” as the transformative design literature puts it; these imaginative explorations have to be allowed to bear fruit in their own way and their own time. For us, as researchers, there was an interesting experience of this happening as we delved into our own speculative fiction projects and then sought guidance from them for our larger project. So far, this description of the work of the change educator has focused on change as a positive creative process, but as we highlighted at the outset, this is only one side of the coin. This came through more clearly in our interviews than in the literature, as a kind of pushback on the modern, Capitalocene idea that change is necessarily good, an improvement, and that most people, once they know the gains to be incurred, would happily come on board. We heard clearly that deep transformation is not that easy. It’s not only that the work of eco-social-cultural change itself is a response to widespread suffering and destruction in both the human and the more-­ than-­ human communities, and that committing to that path involves

112 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

rendering oneself more aware, open and vulnerable to those aspects of reality. It is also that the path of transformation involves loss (things that can no longer be done, thought, enjoyed, assumed), pain (recognition of things done in the past that need rectifying, forgivenesses sought, and restitutions offered), and grief (in some ways parts of oneself, one’s relationships, one’s community and stories are dying). That is why an important part of change educator work is what has been called “composting” or “hospicing”—helping people and groups move through these difficult experiences and feelings without denying or minimizing them, so they can do what is necessary to achieve resolution, restitution or forgiveness, and eventually let them go. Here are a few examples of the pedagogical competencies, capacities, and capabilities of change educators that may be held and cultivated together or separately (note that these overlap with some of the other stances): • Trickster wisdom. Makes space for nonconformity, the unknown, mystery, resisting and questioning the status quo. Enjoys the process of trial-and-error, play, and experimentation—the more far-out and boundary-pushing, the better. Challenges assumptions, poses paradoxes, welcomes shape-shifting and transformative change. • Storytelling, collective offering. Looks for stories of deep transformative resonance. Reinterprets individual/community stories to reveal new possibilities. Co-creates counter-narratives about individual and collective change. Helps weave stories that bring together place and community. • Innovation generator. Creates spaces of playfulness and possibility. Uses art and other means to awaken creativity. Supports group process for re-imagining diverse and radically new futures. Cultivates an ethos of openness, abundance, emergence. Provokes questions and explorations about achieving meaningful, equitable, transformative change. • Transformative insight. Cultivates skills of awareness and intuition regarding people’s inner states and readiness for change. Supports individuals through the work of personal transformation. Studies transformative change at the cultural and systemic levels. Builds group capacity for transformative change. • Risk and uncertainty. Allows for different forms of resistance in response to uncertainty. Creates safe-enough spaces to encourage

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

113

risk-taking, learning from failures, and responsiveness to changing needs. Builds individual and group capacity for coping with stress, adversity, and changing circumstances and possibilities. • Healing and recovery. Provides allyship, support, and guidance to individuals and groups who are engaging with and resisting external or larger system challenges and injustices. Holds space for the expression of anger, pain, grief, and other difficult feelings. Creates opportunities and gathers resources for recovery, healing, and rejuvenation.

North: Coeur/Care Educator If you didn’t have a grandmother to teach you the medicine of the North, you can apprentice in other ways. Spend some time with the mother of small children. Observe her shamanic capacity to do many things at once without resentment. Observe how she can also travel at a snail’s pace in the company of a toddler, being completely in the present moment, admiring pine cones, adventuring in puddles. Observe her strength of nurturing and protecting. Feel the love she makes available to her children. (Cruden 1995, 136–137)

The stance that we have called coeur/care is implicit in all work for long-­ term change, in that it addresses the fundamental issue of well-being— individual, social, and ecological. In all of the other stances we have pointed to the need to support people through the difficult work of transformation, and to cultivate healthy relationships and group process as a necessary foundation for the contributions of critical, community, and change work to education for eco-social-cultural change. But we also came to see the cultivation of well-being itself as a radical educational contribution. Just as, for the community educator, community is not simply a means to an end but a key dimension of what eco-social-cultural change is working to achieve, so the coeur/care educator sees well-being as, in a sense, what it is all about—and not as an ideal to be realized at some future time, but as something to be practiced, lived, and deepened continually, right here, right now. It goes without saying that this is a completely different understanding than the dominant Western biomedical notion of “health as the absence of disease,” or even health as a well-functioning individual physical body. In our interviews and in the literature, we encountered an emphasis on well-­ being as a holistic concept, encompassing mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions, but we also heard again and again that it is essentially

114 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

relational. Human beings need to experience and to express love and care in order to be well, including self-love and self-care—it is challenging to love when one does not feel worthy of love. So the work of the coeur/care educator involves supporting individuals to create and honor a loving relationship with themselves, in all their dimensions, and to encourage and guide the process of finding and growing reciprocal and loving relationships with myriad others, human and more-than. There is nothing especially original in the idea that teaching has a lot to do with love; voices making that argument have had a significant presence in the Western literature for decades now (Freire 2014; hooks 1994; Paris 2016; Darder 2017; Palmer 2017). And it has long been a truism in the environmental education literature that “we won’t save what we don’t love,” and that learning to love nature is “an essential pathway to sanity and health, for both individuals and societies” (Fleischner 2017, xi). But it is still rare to find these insights brought together within a coherent philosophy and practice of what we are calling coeur/care education. The most consistent and eloquent voices in that regard are Indigenous ones, supported by a cosmology that sees spirit, wisdom, and reciprocity in everything. We think, for instance, of Robin Wall Kimmerer: I sat once in a graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land. The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being. They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And then I asked them, “Do you think that the earth loves you back?” No one was willing to answer that. It was as if I’d brought a two-headed porcupine into the classroom. Unexpected. Prickly. They backed slowly away. Here was a room full of writers, passionately wallowing in unrequited love of nature. (2013, 124)

For us this passage hints at the way a coeur/care educator can challenge our habitual ways of thinking and being as surely as a critical educator or a change educator. It seems, on the face of it, that it should be easy to recognize the love the Earth has for each of us, given the gifts, protections, lives, care, and patience it offers continually. Yet the Capitalocene has made this challenging for many, in part by separating people from the direct experience of that loving care and from cultural practices of reciprocal care and gratitude. Rebuilding those relationships is vitally important, in part because it can help sustain us through the difficult years and decades

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

115

to come. Kimmerer advocates the simple practice of gardening as “a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence … once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself” (2013, 126–7). We might take this as an image for the larger project of cultivating relational well-being. Despite the individualist and physicalist bias of Western conceptions of health, there is a growing literature that speaks to the vital role of relationships and the failure of materialism to promote well-being (Dittmar et al. 2014; White 2017; Insel 2022). Land and nature are also more and more widely recognized as offering relationships that generate a felt sense of belonging, meaning, and being cared for, even in Western cultural settings (Tsing et  al. 2017; Clatworthy et  al. 2013; Kuo 2015). And of course there is a burgeoning Indigenous literature on land as the primary source and ground of healthy being-in-the-world (Rose 2009; Sheridan and Longboat 2006; Simpson 2017; Williams 2021; Yunkaporta 2020). That is to say the work of the coeur/care educator is more likely to be recognized and supported now that at any time in recent decades. And yet we are not yet seeing many connections being made with education for social justice, anti-racism, radical inclusion, or even sexuality and gender, despite the increasing presence of queer theory in theoretical eco-conversations (see Chap. 3). Love is only radical when it embraces difference and difficulty; that ethos has yet to make itself felt in much nature- and land-­ based work. The same is true, as one would expect, of the situation in public schools—certainly in Canada, the context we are most familiar with. There has clearly been growth in both outdoor and place-based education (Purc-­ Stephenson et al. 2019; Asfeldt et al. 2021; Webber et al. 2021) and in a variety of wellness practices and frameworks: mindfulness (Zenner et al. 2014; Sibinga et  al. 2016), trauma-informed practice (Minahan 2019; Crosby 2015), social-emotional learning (Schonert-Reichl 2017), and so on. And the COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the close relationship between relational well-being in schools and the well-being of the larger community (Naidu 2021; Schafft 2016; Vaillancourt et  al. 2021). For some schools, administrators, and policy-makers, this has been a wake-up call to what has always been present. Yet most of this falls short of what we would consider radical coeur/care work, which is still more likely to happen in settings and programs that are shaped or substantially influenced by Indigenous teachings and practices (Scully 2020). In short, we see some movement in schools that corresponds with movements in the broader

116 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

culture, but as yet little that can really trouble the foundational premises of the Capitalocene. The other way into this work is to see it as a social justice response to violence, oppression, and neglect. In our interviews, readings, and discussions it became apparent how much psychic dissonance, including trauma, exists in the larger culture. Indigenous scholars pointed directly at colonization and the ongoing trauma of schooling; racialized voices noted the traumatizing impacts of environmental racism and systemic discrimination; eco-educators highlighted the cumulative effects on students of climate anxiety, economic and environmental insecurity, alienation from nature and community, and experiencing pressure to be someone other than themselves both in the virtual or in the physical world. In such circumstances, working for individual and collective well-being is emotionally and spiritually taxing: it means being on the front lines of the struggle for justice and equity. Back in Chap. 1 we reviewed some of the literature on the concept of resilience, which we saw as promising for thinking about the interconnectedness of individual, community and ecological well-being. Does it make sense to think of the coeur/care educator as working to build resilience? On the plus side, the literature on children’s resilience in the face of trauma and neglect (Boyden 2003; Perry and Szalavitz 2006) and on resilience in education (ahmed Shafi et al. 2020; Wosnitza et al. 2018) does demonstrate a holistic bent and a genuine concern for practice (see also Kain and Terrell 2018; Naidu 2021). Yet our concern is that resilience is too readily used as a term that evades discussions around justice and social transformation, as we noted in the context of the literature on socio-ecological systems in Chap. 1. If “resilience” often operates as a code word for “adaptation” to the oppressive conditions of the Capitalocene, it is at best a flawed conceptual tool for thinking about eco-social-cultural change. Perhaps there are ways of reworking it to match our conception of coeur/ care work—developing a theory of radical resilience that celebrates the strength of BIPOC, queer, working-class, and migrant youth, prioritizes staying with and leaning into difficult conversations, and works for redress and reconciliation at the larger scale of community and society. And planet—for that is what is ultimately at stake in this work. Loving ourselves, loving each other, loving our more-than-human relatives, not just as an attitude or philosophy but as a way of practice and a way of life: that is the heart of this calling, and the thread that runs through all the chapters of this book. Education for the sake of the Earth and all our Earthly kin.

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

117

Here are a few examples of the pedagogical competencies, capacities, and capabilities of coeur/care educators that may be held and cultivated together or separately (note that these overlap with some of the other stances): • Positive relationships. Educates about the impact of positive relationships, self-care/compassion, positive feedback, and encouragement. Encourages the building of relationship with the more-than-human community. Connects individuals with larger groups or movements where they can experience acceptance and belonging. • Decolonial love. Deconstructs colonial conditioning, including limiting notions of well-being. Leads, models, or supports ceremony and traditional or holistic healing practices. Fosters expressions of love and care through allyship and kinship. • Gratitude and reciprocity. Practices, models, and encourages the expression of gratitude. Promotes and celebrates acts of connection, thoughtfulness, kindness. Helps individuals and groups develop ethics of reciprocity involving both human and more-than-human others. Educates about the cultures and practices of gift economies. • Optimism, hope, and resiliency. Creates supportive spaces to share vulnerabilities, deal with challenges (e.g., healing pain/trauma), and ask for/receive help from others. Fosters a growth mindset, that is, the belief that abilities, intelligences, skills, capacities can be developed through dedicated effort. • Healing/therapeutic support. Develops and supports trauma-­ informed practice in classes, schools, communities. Recognizes and responds to individual/group/family needs for help, support, or intervention. Connects with external community supports as needed (e.g., health professionals).

References ahmed Shafi, A., T.  Middleton, R.  Millican, and S.  Templeton, eds. 2020. Reconsidering Resilience in Education: An Exploration Using the Dynamic Interactive Model of Resilience. Springer. Asch, M., J.  Borrows, and J.  Tully, eds. 2018. Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings. University of Toronto Press. Asfeldt, M., R. Purc-Stephenson, M. Rawleigh, and S. Thackeray. 2021. Outdoor Education in Canada: A Qualitative Investigation. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 21 (4): 297–310.

118 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Blenkinsop, S., R.  Affifi, L.  Piersol, and M.  Derby. 2017. Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the “Natural World”. Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (3): 348–365. Blenkinsop, S., and C.  Beeman. 2010. The World as Co-Teacher: Learning to Work with a Peerless Colleague. The Trumpeter 26 (3): 27–39. Blenkinsop, S., J. MacQuarrie, and C. Maitland. 2019. In Search of Policy that Supports Educational Innovation: Perspective of a Place- and Community-­ Based Elementary School. Policy Futures 17 (4): 489–502. ———. 2023. The Maple Ridge Environmental School a Case Study: Ten Years as an Outdoor Public Elementary School and What We Think We Know Now. In Outdoor Environmental Education in the Contemporary World, ed. J. Č inčera, B. Johnson, D. Goldman, I. Alkaher, and M. Medek, 183–198. Springer. Bowers, C.A. 2008. Why the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Theory of Metaphor Is Inadequate for Addressing Cultural Issues Related to the Ecological Crises. The Trumpeter 24 (3). Boyden, J. 2003. Children Under Fire: Challenging Assumptions About Children’s Resilience. Children, Youth and Environments 13 (1): 1–29. Cajete, G. 2015. Indigenous Community: Rekindling the Teachings of the Seventh Fire. Living Justice Press. Cameron, J. 1992. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Putnam. Carlson-Manathara, E. 2021. Living in Indigenous Sovereignty. With G.  Rowe. Fernwood Publishing. Charles, C., and B. Samples. 2004. Coming Home: Community, Creativity, and Consciousness. Personhood Press. Clatworthy, J., J.  Hinds, and P.  Camic. 2013. Gardening as a Mental Health Intervention: A Review. Mental Health Review Journal 18 (4): 214–225. Crosby, S. 2015. An Ecological Perspective on Emerging Trauma-Informed Teaching Practices. Children & Schools 37 (4): 223–230. Cruden, L. 1995. The Spirit of Place: A Workbook for Sacred Alignment. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co. Darder, A. 2017. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. Taylor & Francis. Day, C. 2017. Competence-Based Education and Teacher Professional Development. In Competence-Based Vocational and Professional Education: Bridging the Worlds of Work and Education, ed. M. Mulder, 165–182. Springer. Dittmar, H., R. Bond, M. Hurst, and T. Kasser. 2014. The Relationship Between Materialism and Personal Wellbeing: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107 (5): 879–924. Egan, K. 1997. The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. University of Chicago Press. Fazey, I., J.A. Fazey, J. Fischer, K. Sherren, J. Warren, R.F. Noss, and S.R. Dovers. 2007. Adaptive Capacity and Learning to Learn as Leverage for Social– Ecological Resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5 (7): 375–380.

4  THE 4CS: PRACTICING EDUCATION FOR ECO-SOCIAL-CULTURAL CHANGE 

119

Fleischner, T.L. 2017. Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness. Torrey House Press. Freire, P. 2014. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. Bloomsbury. hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. Insel, T. 2022. Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. Penguin. Jickling, B., and S.  Blenkinsop. 2020. Wild Pedagogies and the Promise of a Different Education: Challenges to Change. In Social Ecology and Education: Transforming Worldviews and Practices, ed. D.  Wright and S.  Hill, 55–64. Routledge: London. Kain, K., and S. Terrell. 2018. Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma, an Integrative Somatic Approach. North Atlantic Books. Kimmerer, R.W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions. Kivel, P. 2017. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice. New Society Publishers. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropolgy Beyond the Human. University of California Press. Kuo, M. 2015. How Might Contact with Nature Promote Human Health? Promising Mechanisms and a Possible Central Pathway. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1093. Lichtenstein, B., and D.  Plowman. 2009. The Leadership of Emergence: A Complex Systems Leadership Theory of Emergence at Successive Organizational Levels. The Leadership Quarterly 20 (4): 617–630. Minahan, J. 2019. Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategies. Educational Leadership 77 (2): 30–35. Naidu, S. 2021. Building Resilience in Education Systems Post-COVID-19. Distance Education 42 (1): 1–4. Nelson, G., and I.  Prilleltensky. 2010. Community Psychology: In Pursuit of Liberation and Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan. Palmer, P.J. 2017. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Wiley. Paris, J. 2016. Teach from the Heart: Pedagogy as Spiritual Practice. Wipf and Stock. Perry, B., and M. Szalavitz. 2006. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook. Basic Books. Purc-Stephenson, R.J., M.  Rawleigh, H.  Kemp, and M.  Asfeldt. 2019. We Are Wilderness Explorers: A Review of Outdoor Education in Canada. The Journal of Experimental Education 42 (4): 364–381. Robeyns, I. 2017. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined. Open Book Publishers. Rose, D.B. 2009. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge University Press.

120 

M. FETTES AND S. BLENKINSOP

Schafft, K. 2016. Rural Education as Rural Development: Understanding the Rural School–Community Well-Being Linkage in a 21st-Century Policy Context. Peabody Journal of Education 91 (2): 137–154. Schlosberg, D., and D. Carruthers. 2010. Indigenous Struggles, Environmental Justice, and Community Capabilities. Global Environmental Politics 10 (4): 12–35. Schonert-Reichl, K.A. 2017. Social and Emotional Learning and Teachers. The Future of Children 27 (1): 137–155. Scully, A. 2020. Land and Critical Place-Based Education in Canadian Teacher Preparation: Complementary Pedagogies for Complex Futures. In Rural Teacher Education: Connecting Land and People, ed. M.  Corbett and D. Gereluk, 227–244. Springer. Shepherd, P.M., and J.C. Dissart. 2022. Reframing Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Change Through the Lens of Capability Generation. Ecological Economics 201: 107556. Sheridan, J., and D.R. Longboat. 2006. The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred. Space and Culture 9 (4): 365–381. Sibinga, E., L. Webb, S. Ghazarian, and J. Ellen. 2016. School-Based Mindfulness Instruction: An RCT. Pediatrics 137 (1): 1–8. Simpson, L.B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, A., H.  Swanson, E.  Gan, and N.  Bubandt. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minnesota University Press. Vaillancourt, T., P. McDougall, J. Comeau, and C. Finn. 2021. COVID-19 School Closures and Social Isolation in Children and Youth: Prioritizing Relationships in Education. Facets 6 (1): 1795–1813. Webber, G., J. McVittie, D. Miller, and L. Hellsten. 2021. Terrain of Place-Based Education: A Primer for Teacher Education in Canada. Brock Education Journal 30 (1): 10–29. White, S.C. 2017. Relational Wellbeing: Re-Centring the Politics of Happiness, Policy and the Self. Policy & Politics 45 (2): 121–136. Williams, L. 2021. Indigenous Intergenerational Resilience: Confronting Cultural and Ecological Crisis. Routledge. Wosnitza, M., F. Peixoto, S. Beltman, and C.F. Mansfield, eds. 2018. Resilience in Education. Dordrecht: Springer. Yorks, L., and A.  Nicolaides. 2013. Toward an Integral Approach for Evolving Mindsets for Generative Learning and Timely Action in the Midst of Ambiguity. Teachers College Record 115 (8): 1–26. Yunkaporta, T. 2020. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperOne. Zenner, C., S.  Herrnleben-Kurz, and H.  Walach. 2014. Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Schools – A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 603.

Index

A Activist, vii, 1, 98, 101–104 Advocate, 15, 95, 98, 101, 104, 111, 115 Agency, 5, 9, 32, 38, 68, 70, 80, 85, 86, 95, 96 Alienation, 14, 48, 116 All our relations, 31–35 Ally, 98, 101, 104 Alterity, 37, 38, 73 Ancestors, 35, 36, 46, 69, 100 Anthropocene, 6, 11, 13 Anthropocentrism, 7, 9, 14, 26, 28, 61, 79, 100, 101 Anti-oppressive, vi, 103 Attention, 2, 6, 13, 14, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 40, 59, 67, 69, 79, 83, 108, 115 Autonomy, 48, 66, 69, 77, 81, 82, 84, 96 Axiology, 58, 71–77, 106

C Capabilities, 94–99, 103, 107, 108, 112, 117 Capacities, vii, 2, 4, 5, 23, 30, 36, 42, 50, 57, 59, 73, 75, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 94–98, 100, 101, 103–109, 112, 113, 117 Capitalocene, 13–16, 21, 23, 25, 27–31, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44–48, 50, 57, 59, 74, 79, 81, 83, 85, 93, 97, 100, 106, 109, 111, 114, 116 Carrying capacity, v, 21–23, 25, 26, 58, 67, 109 Change, eco-social-cultural, vii, 1–17, 21–51, 57–86, 93–117 Change, radical, 1, 3, 57, 73, 93 Change, social, v, vii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 77, 85, 102, 103 Change, systemic, vi, 2, 6, 12, 16, 110

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fettes, S. Blenkinsop, Education as the Practice of Eco-SocialCultural Change, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45834-7

121

122 

INDEX

Colonial, colonizing, colonized, 10, 11, 21, 23, 28, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 58, 60, 61, 64, 68–70, 74, 81, 85, 98, 103, 105–108, 117 Competencies, 9, 12, 94–98, 101, 103–105, 107, 108, 112, 117 Control, 30, 39, 48–50, 72, 80 Cosmology, 58, 76–80, 102, 110, 114 Creativity, 46, 109, 112 Critical, criticality, 11, 80, 98, 100–104, 113, 114 D Decolonization, 3, 33, 59, 70 Design, 7–12, 16, 17, 22, 29–51, 57, 66, 80, 93, 95, 111 prompts, 30–51, 93 systemic, 9–11, 16 transformative, 16, 29–31, 57, 93, 95, 111 transition, 9, 11, 17, 30 Dialogue, 28, 43, 45–47, 95, 102, 105, 108 Discourse, v, vii, 11, 12, 15, 23, 28, 37, 45, 57, 95, 109 Diversity, 8, 11, 29, 35, 40, 46, 47, 49, 65, 73, 80, 82, 84, 98, 104–108, 110 E Ecofeminism, 72 Ecological crisis, v, vii, 1, 3, 49, 63, 85, 93 Ecopedagogy, 71, 73 Ecoportraiture, 27, 47 Education, 30 formal, 10, 11, 29, 67, 75, 85, 94, 110 modern, 1, 2, 64 Educator, change, 99, 109–114

Educator, coeur/care, 99, 113–117 Educator, community, 98, 104–109, 113 Educator, critical, 98, 100–104, 114 Educators as designers, 16, 29–31 Educator stances, 58, 60, 61, 93, 97–98, 104, 107, 111, 112 Embeddedness, 10, 16, 29, 41–44 Embodied, embodiment, 24, 33, 50, 67, 69, 74 Emergence, 2–5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 36, 40, 111, 112 Empathy, 39, 40, 47, 103, 108 Empower, empowerment, 80, 102 Epistemology, 37, 58–67, 71, 77, 83, 101, 102 F Futurism, vii, 16 G Grounded normativity, 4, 45 H Hegemony, 22, 79, 80 Human-centered, see Anthropocentrism Human elitism, human exceptionalism, 64, 74, 78 Humility, 36, 38, 39, 46, 59 I Imagination, vi, 2, 9, 13, 23, 27, 30, 40, 46, 69, 109–111 Inclusion, inclusive, 5, 7, 8, 11, 28, 33, 37, 39, 49, 63, 78, 80, 99, 102, 104, 108, 115 Indigenous knowledge, 11, 61, 63

 INDEX 

Indigenous perspective, 24 Individualism, 65 Integration, 6, 14, 16, 41–44 Interconnection, 43, 46 Interdependence, 46, 75, 83 J Justice, 6, 26–29, 32, 47, 48, 60, 71, 75, 96, 105, 107, 110, 115, 116 cognitive, 60, 64 intergenerational, 36 multi-species, 28 K Kin, kinship, 2, 23, 24, 65, 69, 71, 72, 104, 106, 116, 117 L Land, vi, 4, 22, 24, 27, 28, 31, 42–45, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 72, 108, 114, 115 Land as teacher, 43 Learning, v, 5, 8, 15, 24, 27, 29–35, 39–43, 49, 50, 59, 65, 66, 68–70, 79, 80, 82–84, 86, 95–97, 101, 104, 106, 108, 111, 113, 114 Learning, social-emotional, 82, 110, 115 Love, 36, 62, 113–115, 117 M Metaphysics, 62 Metissage, 78 Modern education, 1, 2, 64 Multi-Level Perspective, 12–17 Multi-species, 28

123

Mutual flourishing, 21, 24, 29, 48, 103 Mystery, 16, 37–41, 64, 66, 112 N Niche-innovation, 15, 29, 37, 57 O Ontology, 58, 66–71, 74, 77, 102, 106 Organizing concepts, vii, 21–24, 26, 29, 30, 48, 93 Otherness, see Alterity P Pedagogy, 14, 32, 39, 43, 44, 60, 68, 79 Phenomenology, 37, 73 Practice, vi, 4, 25, 57, 93 Principles, vi, vii, 9, 16, 24, 29, 30, 38, 42, 43, 48, 74, 85, 108 Privilege, 4, 5, 11, 33, 35, 68, 70, 75, 76, 100, 103, 107, 109 Progress, 14, 27, 39, 46, 50, 65, 78, 101 Psychology, vi, 58, 61, 81–86, 106 Q Queer ecology, 35, 71 R Reciprocity, 24, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 46, 61, 62, 70, 75, 76, 80, 84, 106, 107, 114, 117 Reckonings, 58, 59, 64–66, 69–71, 74–76, 79–80, 83–86 Reconciliation, 27, 28, 116

124 

INDEX

Relational pedagogies, 32 Relational, relationality, relationship, 2, 4, 7, 9, 16, 23–25, 27–29, 32–35, 40–48, 62, 65–75, 77–80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 94, 95, 98, 101, 103–105, 107, 108, 112–115, 117 Resilience, 4–7, 22, 46, 47, 49, 95–97, 99, 103, 105, 107, 116 Respect, 24, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 43, 58, 66, 76, 80, 84, 106, 114 Resurgence, 3–5, 28, 67, 102, 105 Rhizomatic, 63, 66, 68 S Sacred, sacredness, 22, 24–30, 32, 41, 42, 48, 66, 77, 81, 99, 108 Scale, 9, 11–13, 25, 28, 32, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49 School(s), schooling, vi, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 33, 34, 44, 45, 48, 57, 64, 67, 69, 75, 80, 82, 83, 101, 102, 108, 110, 111, 115–117 Social innovation, vi, vii, 6, 7, 9, 12, 16, 44 Story, storytelling, 37, 42–44, 46, 58, 59, 67, 76–80, 102, 103, 112

T Time, 2–4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 22, 24, 27, 30, 34–37, 43–50, 57, 58, 67, 73, 75, 76, 81–83, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115 Transformation, v, vii, 3–5, 7–12, 15, 35, 40, 44, 46, 50, 80, 97, 103, 111–113, 116 Transition, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 30 Trauma, 82, 85, 116, 117 Trickster, 49, 50, 105, 112 U Uncertainty, 50, 99, 109, 112 W Well-being, wellness, 4, 31, 33, 37, 73, 83, 84, 96, 99, 104–108, 110, 113–117 Wholeness, 16, 21, 25, 26, 28, 32, 41–43, 48 Wild, wildness, 2, 14, 22–30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 40–42, 45, 48, 106