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& What do we talk about when we talk about climate change
Notes
- Yes
Highlights
Throughout this discussion, I locate several ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student’s agency and empowerment, by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems, mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy 2021-11-23 1:24 PM
approach climate-change education existentially and philosophically 2021-11-23 1:25 PM
I feel this personalized orientation to the article is important and necessary as it is these students' voices that drove me to ponder these questions seriously in my own life and teaching, and furthermore, because it is these student’s future that needs to be a constant and principal consideration in these scholarly conversations. 2021-11-23 1:29 PM
his reason for discussion?
these young people were not buying overt anthropocentrism, and they were unhappy with Barrow’s unecological, culturalist, and disembodied approach to the philosophy of education. 2021-11-23 1:30 PM
If you look at everything we’ve learned in field ecology, cognitive ethology, zoology, and other such fields over the past 30 or 40 years […] it’s clear at this point that we are not
What do we talk about when we talk about climate change?
the only persons […] on the planet. And so, at that point things become very complicated. 2021-11-23 1:33 PM
consider animals as well
By talking with young people, I realised that they were generally extremely knowledgeable about the facts of climate change and were simply fed up with what Morton (2018, Ch. 1) calls “information dump mode”: “Ecological information delivery mode in the media [and, arguably, in much educational practice and research] seems most often to consist of what we could call an information dump. At least one factoid – and often a whole plateful –
seems to be falling on to our heads. And this falling has an authoritative quality […]” (p. xviii).
Global warming, behind all this factiness seems unquestionable and essentially de-ontological –
it presents data as unequivocable– denying the basic (semiotic) observation that “[i[n order to have a fact you need two things: data, and an interpretation of that data” (Morton, 2018, pp. 19-20) 2021-11-23 1:32 PM
how we currently consume climate change media
“The funny thing is a lot of my [high school]
classes did actually talk about climate change. But they focus on facts, and I guess, fixes or solutions. They don’t really ask for our experiences with this stuff 2021-11-23 1:33 PM
Bombarded but not personally motivated
Such an existential and world-centered approach toward education (Biesta, 2021a) in the Anthropocene, I argue, requires that we turn facts into knowing, not to offer solutions from a place of hubris or technocratic certainty, but simply to wonder ‘how to go on living from here?’. 2021-11-23 1:34 PM
Including our personal positions
as a teacher, I aim to create a pedagogical space where uncertainty, vulnerability and intense emotions can be met and explored – not reductive ‘solutions talk’, but a kind of active dialogical listening 2021-11-23 1:35 PM
However, it is repeatedly stressed that “living ecological facts is difficult” as it often requires “that we shouldn’t immediately know what to do” 2021-11-23 1:35 PM
By engaging in collective sharing and reflection, and precisely by allowing ourselves to feel emotions – primarily grief, sadness and anxiety – in relation to these events, we were, in a sense able to take in the world around us, to notice it – to be affected by it 2021-11-23 1:36 PM
introducing positioning and personal affects in what we learn
Other students quickly noticed other ways they had been prodded and encouraged to devalue animal life and disregard animal intelligence and emotions – like, to offer another example we discussed, ideas around factory farming practices that disregard animal suffering and try to minimize societal awareness and confrontations with animal suffering 2021-11-23 1:37 PM
“I grew up always wanting to have a family and kids. Now I’m not so sure. I mean, it really scares me what’s going on. The fires, the smoke, all the animals with nowhere to go. Where am I going to go?” -3rd year student. 2021-11-23 1:40 PM
The purpose of death literacy is not to tame death or to alleviate the pain of grief and loss.
(That would actually be the purpose of illiteracy – to sanitise awareness and conversation of all that causes pain, to keep us in the dark about what we don’t know.) If anything, death literacy will awaken the pain of death, and of all loss and grief, and dignify it with fuller awareness. […] – a way of turning toward pain (rather than away from it), and of
What do we talk about when we talk about climate change?
allowing the reality of our vulnerability and the inevitability of loss and grief to burn through our emotional bodie 2021-11-23 1:43 PM
use the emotion for resolve
“Well maybe you’re not saving the world or anything, but it orients you differently, like in terms of how you live your life, and that’s something” – 2nd year student 2021-11-23 1:43 PM
Ultimately, these conversations about life in the Anthropocene hinged upon what it means and perhaps more importantly, what it takes, to embrace less-materialistic (see Lehtonen et al., 2019, p. 343), and non-dominating relationships to the more-than-human in a culture that both reduces all decisions and life-events to forms of consumption and consistently diminishes the concerns of animals and the planet 2021-11-23 1:45 PM
Though we may be, at one level, drowning in facts and information, we are still in a stage of pre-conversation (Lilburn, 2017; cf. Lilburn & Campbell, 2019) when it comes to addressing what really matters: what it means to live well, flourish, suffer and die in a time of tremendous loss. The question we must ask as educators and educational theorists is how can we support,
What do we talk about when we talk about climate change?
animate, inspire and contribute to this dialoging-through the Anthropocene – how can we continue to be in, with, and even for the world, in the face of this loss and suffering? 2021-11-23 1:45 PM
Ideas
- Sharing stories through dialogue help keep us knowledgeable about the current world
Actionable
Thoughts/Questions
- Have an app that lets users mark hotspots of garbage, people can be paid to clean up, quality insurance measured by before and after pictures
Review
Connections
Backlinks
Created:: 2021-11-23 13:11