A Meditation on Ecological Presence
The Trumpeter (2001)
Atonement:
A Meditation on Ecological Presence
Jason Wallin is a graduate of the University of Calgary’s Early Childhood Education Program. He is currently a teacher at Fish Creek Elementary School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and is working on his MA in Curriculum Studies, with particular interest in the place of ecology within pedagogical work.
Abstract
Atonement: A Meditation on Ecological Presence is an interpretative attempt to open our deeply rooted presuppositions regarding the Earth and our animal ancestors. Through the explication of two pedagogical moments, a conversation and a field experience with students, the power of ecology to renew and remind us of our Earthly heritage is drawn forth. Contrasted by the voices of Descartes and Bacon, this interpretive work calls us to reconsider both our notions of pedagogy as well as our positioning to our animal kin.
Neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature;
but of finding ourselves within nature . . . that is the key to a sustainable
culture.
LaChapelle1
A young teacher relates her professional unease about a research project, initiated by her colleagues, that has become problematic. Each student has chosen an animal to study and employs an analytic methodology in the collection of information. Each student comes to know their animal by its appearance, habitat, enemies and physical development. The teachers tell the students that their reports will be assessed on neatness, “completeness,” and overall presentation. With the time for the completion of the project approaching, the young teacher realizes that the information students have gleaned from textbooks has done little to nurture an ecological sensitivity toward the animals of their studies. They are represented as being wholly knowable and static subjects. In the collection of disembodied facts, the teachers have unwittingly invited students into a metaphysical orientation wherein wildness, ambiguity, and life are overshadowed by tameness, knowing, and the death of the possibility that animals might be known otherwise. In the “objective” and empirical study of animals, something of our greater ecological relationship to them is absent. This article seeks to make the ecological relationship present, as it attempts to expose the values implicit within the metaphysics of reason, reductionism, and scientific rationalism.
The crisis of value evoked by this work evokes Bacon’s call to “torture natures secrets from her,”2 eliciting the image of Eurocentric colonialism’s domination over the mysterious, the primordial, the wild—that which would be termed other. Bacon’s desire to place this other “in constraint” has had a profound impact on science education, “subjecting nature to the hand of man.”3 The violence inherent in Bacon’s patriarchal treatise is essentially anti-ecological, his method being rooted in conquest and domination. The “scientific method” employed by Bacon renounced an earlier view valuing integration with nature in lieu of an anthropocentric self-assertion upon nature, seeking to reduce natural phenomenon to truths which could be known unequivocally, a goal which is mirrored in contemporary science education.4 Aligning closely with Bacon’s anti-ecological method, our animal research reports make bold and sweeping truth claims while relegating the other to the shadows. The other of our research reports, the rough, textured, and mythical relationship to animal is smoothed by a pedagogy of exactness, of taxonomy, and of imaging the other as something to know as removed and objective observers—as mental voyeurs in an age of accelerated voyeurism.
The Grade three students leave their classroom research and excitedly take part in nature walk through the dense brush of Fish Creek Provincial Park’s southeasterly tip. We sit amongst the deadfall. Fallen leaves, golden and brown, crackle beneath bodies pressed against the ground; some smaller children disappear completely, hidden among the tall, swaying grass. Fall has brought with it its distinct odor of sweet decay, perfuming the air and scenting the ground. Encouraged by their teachers, the children write delicately and gently in their scribblers, careful not to disturb the ladybugs that flock to the inviting white pages. Squirrels and birds chatter from high above, and from distant, secret locations. The children immerse themselves in their environment, describing their feelings poetically and through illustration, far removed from the stolidity of the “scientific process.” The intent of our field experience has more to do with our being in nature than it does with our analytic observation or categorization of nature. The students’ appreciation for being in “at-one-ment” with nature resounds in their echoing laughter and intense watchfulness. Yet, our field experience is not meant to influence our animal research reports, nearly complete and ready for evaluation.
Suddenly, our being-in-this-place is interrupted—a great whitetail buck bounds past us not 50 metres away from where some children are sitting in the grass. No one screams. No one panics. Some children stand silently, others move in more closely. This huge animal, so close to us that we can feel its greatness, its energy and vitality, holds us in a way that speaks our kinship, our being-together. Our distanced writings and “imagings” shattered, our lives as objective knowers devolve in the face of our being in this place, in our at-one-ment with that which we had forgotten—that which is suddenly re-membered; “That strange little lesson having to be learned again.”5
The fact-filled animal reports, kilometers away in empty desks, have suddenly become incomplete. The claims of knowledge within them seem small. What was missing from them, the relationship of ecological presence, of at-one-ment, is remembered in our encounter. Our ability to be objective strangers in the classroom is turned as we realize ourselves in nature, finding that we too have a place and a responsibility in the wild. This responsibility, made present by our experience, reminds us that our relationships are a plenum of possibility—that things may always be otherwise. We are reminded that the images made present by our animal research reports are abstractions, replete with gaps and partialities.
At-one-ment speaks to our remembering, an opening up of the self through the process of coming into relationship with something that allows us to see ourselves and our project anew. In at-one-ment, it is not the this or the that which moves us, it is the understanding that things go on without our conscious willing of them; that we are motivated not by polarities but by the hope that life is “serendipitous despite [your] earnest plans.”6
That great, bounding deer, slicing it’s zig-zag path up the bank has changed all the work that has come before it. The buck has altered our project in such a way that to return to our work without remembering its greatness would be a disingenuous denial of the potency of our lived experience. At-one-ment is not a state of being removed from, but instead, describes a movement in which we are immersed in lived experience. Being at-one is being part-of, as we were part of the movement of the buck in its earthy home. Our experience could not have affected us as it did if it were merely a recollection or televised presentation. At-one-ment confirms something of our being alive in the way that we never could have predicted either the buck’s presence nor its effect upon us. In our surprise, our objectivity is agitated. In being at-one, we withhold our knowing and are moved in the face of lived experience.
The anecdote at the start of this paper illustrates a denial of the Earth’s voice to speak its wildness. We have instead granted ourselves the right to speak in its place, often with violent repercussions and spiritual consequences. What the sterile, glitzy, and yet brilliantly consumable animal-research report says hides the immense potency of the buck bounding from its grassy bed, muscles twitching and tail wagging-warning. Textbook research sets our relationship to the buck apart from experience, yet roots it in data, perpetuating truth claims as if we know. It is a provocative reminder of the privileged status of heady knowledge to consider that these reports, which we push upon our youngest students, are devoid of any real experience. Created largely a priori, the knowledge claims within our classroom research reports refer to nothing other than the presumed knowing(s) of others. It is through trust in the knowledge of others that we reproduce and perpetuate the marginalized position of the wild. If we once again consider Bacon’s claim that scientists may only know nature’s truths through its “torture” or subjugation to scientific research, we will see the need for our children to consider their research differently, and not merely reproduce it as it is passed on to us.
The whole method consists entirely in the ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our mind’s eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try and ascend through the same steps to a knowledge of all the rest
Descartes7
Descartes’ metaphysical, expository narrative purports that the truth may only be derived from analysis, classification, abstraction, and simplification. The buck rising out of the grass before us is “obscure,” to be known only through its bodily dissection and abstraction into parts. This reductionist analysis of nature is key to Descartes’ “scientific method,” wherein complex phenomena are broken into smaller, “clear and distinct” truths. In Discourse on the Method, Descartes asserts that these smaller, simplified “truths” may be pieced together in order to reconstitute a picture of a knowable, and static, whole. In order to ensure the clarity of truth claims, proposes that we must first analyze the subject of our study, disregarding any properties assigned to it by the senses. In the face of Descartes’ doubt, the imaginative, mythologized, and intuitive feelings we have toward animals are denounced as illusory, leaving in their place a mechanized simplification, barren and conquered. Seeking to understand their functions through the “analysis” of their “parts,” Descartes evoked his own method by simplifying animals into disparate mechanical processes, going so far as to regard the tortured screams of vivisected animals as if they were similar to the noises produced by any machine being dismantled.8 In his conception of animals as automata, Descartes demythologizes and rends asunder an ecological relationship in which humans and animals, by their very co-dependence, could be regarded as kin. Rendering them mathematically measurable and therefore assigning them properties that lie beyond doubt, Descartes, in the Baconian spirit, subjugates “nature to the hand of man.”9
To locate the echoing voices of Descartes and Bacon in science education is to reveal what their discourses dismissed, allowing us the possibility to glimpse the hegemony implicit in our scientific research. Similarly, the agency of Descartes and Bacon in our research allows the discourses they marginalized to bubble up and speak. It is critical to unearth and identify both Descartes’ and Bacon’s agency, scarcely hidden in our grade three science reports, wherein the buck is taken apart, understood as one would study a machine. Similarly, as Descartes proposed in his analytic method, by knowing the buck’s appearance, habitat, and enemies, we contend to know its sum. The buck is reduced to a series of truth claims that speak on its behalf, it is conquered and fixed in our partial and distanced treatment of it. Yet, the reactions of the grade three students to the buck suggest that they did not completely know it, for if they had, its presence would not have moved them as it did. Our experience of at-one-ment is not piecemeal, but rather, captures us in a total movement which requires a response that is beyond fact and beyond parts. Our knowledge is not enough in the face of the buck, we cannot meet its wildness and intensity with our minds alone. At-one-ment makes possible that which had previously been closed, turning their fact-laden reports back to face the difficulty of life.
Considering the anecdote that begins this paper, we may observe that, through the research process, children have been encouraged to “come to” content as stolid collectors of minutiae, with an overwhelming sense of the otherliness of their topic. We bump up against, produce, and then abandon. We methodically render the Earth’s animals as facts, as otherly-bodies, as things to do. We speak them through our work, regard them on smooth pictured pages, and then leave them as if we know. As if we can, as much educational epistemology has led us to take for granted, know anything in any definite sense.
My colleague and I glimpse gaps in the idealized pedagogy of modernity, holes within the dominant machine metaphor informing much of our social order, hegemonies and control hierarchies. The “gaps,” the liminal space from which the suffocated voices of silenced discourses strain to speak, are seemingly not the neatly designed penetrations of Euclid, they are the irregular and strange claw, hoof, and teeth marks of a primordial animalness contained and dismissed by the certainty and predictability of traditional mathematics and scientific methodology.
The great and mysterious animals that tightly hold hearts and slow our panicked-city-breaths disappear in their being produced, they are made absent in our haste to show that we know them, or that we have been watchful enough to have made them our teachers.
My colleague and I look at each other as if we have come upon something of importance, a realization that we have opened, through frustration, through not knowing, a case that bears upon our lives in a way as to point us through the “gaps” and “tears” made possible by the very difficulty of life; a life that refuses to be known in its totality—a life that refuses to be foreclosed upon. Through the experiential movement of at-one-ment, we may now know our work with children differently, literally bringing it back to life.
References
Capra, F. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York, NY: Bantam
Cottingham, J & R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch. 1988. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doll, W. 1993. A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press
Jardine, D. 2000. Under the Tough Old Stars: Ecopedagogical Essays. Brandon, VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal, Inc.
LaChapelle, D. 1995. “Ritual - The Pattern that Connects.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boston & London: Shambhala
Robinson, D. & Garrat, C. 1998. Introducing Descartes. Cambridge: Icon Books
Sessions, G. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boston & London: Shambhala
Smith, D. 1994. Pedagon: Meditations on Pedagogy and Culture. Bragg Creek, AB: Makyo Press
Wallin, J. (Spring/Summer 2000.) “Beyond Modernism: Emergence and Chaos in Curriculum.” Early Childhood Education: 33 (1). Alberta Teachers Association
Whitehead, A.N. 1967. The Aims of Education. New York, NY: Free Press
Endnotes
1. Sessions, G. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boston & London: Shambhala. p. 62
2. Capra, F. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York, NY: Bantam. p. 56
3. Doll, W. 1993. A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 167
4. Capra, F. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York, NY: Bantam. p. 56
5. Jardine, D. 2000. Under the Tough Old Stars: Ecopedagogical Essays. Brandon, VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal, Inc. p. 227
6. Jardine, D. 2000. Under the Tough Old Stars: Ecopedagogical Essays. Brandon, VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal, Inc. p. 226
7. Cottingham, J & R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch 1988. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 6
8. Robinson, D. & Garrat, C. 1998. Introducing Descartes. Cambridge: Icon Books. p. 100
9. Doll, W. 1993. A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 167
Copyright retained by author(s)
PID: http://hdl.handle.net/10515/sy51834f1
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