5 PRACTICING

Cairn 1: Nature as Co-Teacher, Human Teacher Stepping Back

Recently, a graduate student in our Place- and Nature-Based Experiential Learning program shared a story with the rest of the class, which set off an interesting chain reaction of stories about similar experiences. The original story involved Wasp, also known as “Frank” (for so the children had named Wasp). Frank had likely entered through the open window. This is not surprising, since the more one tries to ecologize education, the more one opens windows and takes note of the outdoors. Of course, typically, a wasp in the classroom leads to an eruption among the students—screams, wild handwaving, and shouts to “kill it!” The response involves the teacher coming to grips with the situation and deciding what should be done with this “dangerous” interloper.

Here, in this classroom, though, the tale deviates from the norm. The human teacher does not follow the regular, the expected, or the shouted-for trajectory. As a result of a growing relationship with the natural world and an interest in having nature as a co-teacher, the human teacher decides against the easy kill or removal of Wasp and instead focuses on the teaching moment that Wasp has presented. The itinerant being is gently captured.

Once captured, Frank becomes the centerpiece of discussions around wasp species, their likes and dislikes, and the whys, wheres, and hows of their living arrangements. Soon Frank is calmly returned to what may or may not be a more hospitable environment outside the classroom. Now there is an opportunity to track Wasp’s movements upon release, to imagine, to think into, and to write about this winged mystery that appeared in the classroom. Next, the human teacher, excited personally and by the students’ engagement, spends the evening researching Frank and making a plan for the following day that will continue the questions and learnings that happened in response to an event created—even facilitated—by Frank. The next day, it is apparent that many of the students had made similar inquiries about Wasp after they got home from school.

After hearing this story, many of the other teachers in the graduate class related similar experiences of rich learning that had resulted from unplanned intrusions by Wasp, Spider, Ant, and Fly. They also observed how children operated differently when given permission to notice and care for Wasp or Spider. We educators ought to pay close attention to this. Our response to the natural world greatly influences how our students come to make sense of the natural world as well. To simply squash and discard a living other is to affirm a particular hierarchy—and that lands painfully for many.

For these teachers, this moment of allowing Frank to be noticed and encountered also created an opening toward changing the how of teaching. Recognizing nature as co-teacher means changing one’s perspective, being invited into a different relationship, and taking up new obligations. When the human teacher in this story took one small step in this new way of teaching, it set off an interesting cascade of events. First, the students’ hysterical and seemingly threatened responses changed to expressions of interest and even care. This, in turn, challenged the human teacher (and inspired some of the students) to follow this interest further. The result was that space was opened for further learning, discussion, and possibility. And for a while at least, the class escaped from the more controlled, human-centered, fully structured, carefully planned, learning outcome–directed lesson on the agenda. For who doesn’t want to learn more about the mystery of Frank?

Just as more-than-human denizens participated in the cocreation of the Maple Ridge Environmental School, an important part of ecologizing education involves actively trying to recognize teaching as a shared endeavor. On a human level, this kind of thinking is already quite common in education, with teachers committed to lifelong learning and many noting that they learn from their students. In ecologizing education, though, the goal is to take this idea of co-teaching much further. After all, the lessons that teachers receive from their students are often “accidental.” They are certainly not intentionally solicited. The student is not preparing a lesson, being positioned as the teacher, and/or given space to enact their chosen pedagogy. And, as the previous participatory democracy example revealed, to democratically participate in the education at hand, co-teachers (children and more-than-human) need to be recognized as equals and thus be able to cocreate the educational practices. The ecologizing teacher’s reaction to Frank illustrates how we might begin to recognize and respect the natural world as co-teacher and ultimately come to understand that the myriad denizens of the natural world have something to share with our learners and ourselves and are deserving of the respect and space in which to offer it.

Many human teachers consider this notion odd and perhaps a bit scary. Acknowledging the natural world as teacher means going outside on a consistent basis and leaving space for the natural world to appear. That means not planning everything down to the second. It means finding ways to step back and honor what comes—and the way it comes, for the natural world often employs very different pedagogies. It means being willing to follow a co-teacher’s lead, whether that co-teacher is a parade of insects, the shade cast by a tree, or owl pellets filled with mice bones. Intriguingly, it also means trusting the learners to come into the process and find things, ideas, curiosities that draw them in. The further implication of this, of course, is that the human teacher gives up a bit of control so that co-teachers and learners have the freedom to teach and learn what fits for them at this specific moment.

Let’s return to Frank’s story for a moment: notice that the human teacher relinquished some of their control, worked to decenter themselves, and adapted in response to Frank’s interactions with the students. Notice too that the students were also taking a risk in not doing what the system expected of them. Recognizing and naming this has been important for our graduate students, for it has become apparent how much we police and limit ourselves in light of how we think we are supposed to teach and be teachers. For many, this can be a difficult process. Whispers are heard down school hallways as parents and caregivers wonder where the “real learning” is. The oppression of scarce linear time coupled with the desire to “do a good job” make changing one’s practice a risky endeavor. Yet, in releasing a little bit of control, in honoring their own desire for richer relationships with the natural world, and in decentering themselves as the sole expert, many teachers we have worked with have found a wealth of unexpected learning.

Importantly, recognizing nature as a co-teacher involves trusting the natural world to “come through,” though not in an anthropocentric way, as if Bottlefly, Spruce, and Basalt are just waiting to offer small humans lessons. Cultivating this attitude of trust is no easy feat, though. Some human teachers think, “If I do this nature-as-co-teacher thing and nothing happens, won’t I just be wasting everyone’s time?” These worries are often accompanied by anxiety about being considered “out there” and being accused of always playing outside and not teaching anything. However, experience suggests that, although those feelings are very real, especially in the beginning, the natural world always offers something. It is filled with endless possibilities, affordances, and wonders. (And, if nothing seems to be working, the teacher can always go back to the ever-popular and readily available topic: poo.)

It’s also important to think about what we mean when we say that we trust the natural world to “come through.” In our experience, teachers who are just beginning this journey are often tempted to focus solely on “mega-events,” like Bald Eagle fighting Grizzly Bear or Meadow Vole giving birth to four tiny pups. If this is the expectation, then much disappointment is inevitable, and cultivating the attitude of trust will be difficult indeed. We have found, however, that if teachers work to develop careful, humble, and deeply receptive attentivity to both the natural world and their students, some kind of learning experience is always happening—and trust follows.

We’ll end with two brief points—consider them to be two small rocks added to the top of Cairn 1. First, how we respond to Wasp or Spider actively shows what we prioritize—that is, is the natural world important to us, as human teacher, or not? Our answer to this question makes a difference for all our learners, but in particular for those prone to deep caring about other living things. When we respond by ignoring Fern or killing Ant, we shut down particular ways of being in the world. But when we respond by engaging with and prioritizing the more-than-human, this serves as a model for learning—showing how one goes from an interesting, curiosity-sparking surprise to substantive, engaged knowing. It is important that human teachers not only model the process, but also share whatever tools are needed.

The second small rock we want to add to the top of Cairn 1 is to point out that changing one’s teaching practice might not be the Herculean task it initially seems to be. The teachers and graduate students we have worked with are talented, capable, and imaginative, but not out-of-this-world extraordinary (though that’s not what we tell them). They simply saw that the need to change, or just acknowledge, their relationship to the natural world presented opportunities to further discover and flex their practices. A small move, to recognize Frank as a co-teacher, led to a full day outside—which is Frank’s home, after all. It included a partially decentered human teacher and a move away from total control (where the teacher possesses all the knowledge, designs all the activities, and predetermines all learning outcomes). It also flipped their practice, from one driven solely by learning outcomes to one where wonder, interest, and the place itself become the starting point. The expected learning outcomes—plus a surprising abundance of unexpected others—appear as a result.

Cairn 2: Nature as Possibility, Teacher as Curriculum Messer

Think about the process of designing a lesson. Some readers went through teacher’s college, where lesson planning was drummed in from the get-go. For other readers, the task may not seem quite so easy, yet anyone who has had education done to them for many years can imagine their way into it. Usually, what appears in our imaginary lesson-planning process is some version of the Tylerian rationale. Ralph Tyler was a professor at University of Chicago in the mid-twentieth century and had a large influence on the areas of evaluation and assessment in education. In response to questions about his own teaching, he wrote a book that outlined a linear—very linear but much copied—process for curriculum design.³

Tyler’s process of lesson design goes like this: First, the human teacher selects the objectives. (Here, in British Columbia, the term “learning outcomes” is used, but the idea is the same.) Second, the teacher decides on the learning experiences to be offered, usually those they consider most likely to lead to the desired outcomes. Third, the teacher organizes, implements, and “puts on” the learning experiences. Fourth, the whole process is evaluated, or at least the learners are, to see if the objectives have landed and the aimed-for learning has been achieved. Finally, repeat with either new learning objectives or the same ones if the process failed.

Admittedly, much critique of Tyler has occurred,⁴ and you can find many examples of lesson planning strategies that are more creative and less linear, yet oddly, even in these less linear approaches, the skeletal structure of Tyler’s process often still remains because in many ways it is quite successful. But it is not the approach we want to use in ecologizing education, and we’ll briefly outline the reasons for this here, before moving on to our suggestions for more appropriate approaches to lesson design and curriculum development.

One obvious trouble spot in Tyler’s method is the central role of the single knower, teacher, planner, controller, human. This means that co-teachers of whatever stripe—and some do have stripes—are left out. Further, in its singular focus on particular outcomes, this method actively limits the range of learning that can happen. Perhaps the reader can hear the particular epistemological assumptions of the building metaphor we discussed previously in chapter 4. By extension, Tyler’s structure necessarily implies a sameness for all learners. The assumption is that everyone needs the same knowledge and that this knowledge is built and arrived at in the same way for everyone. Thus, diversity of learning styles, of learner experience, of cultural difference, of context, of situation, of outcomes, of ways of knowing all tend to disappear. Quite worryingly, this homogenizing of the learning experience also means that more marginalized and richly diverse populations are underserved, for they may be culturally, experientially, socially, or imaginatively not of the “norm” from which most teachers, and Tyler for that matter, come.

Another troubling outcome of Tyler’s linear approach is that learners come to recognize this structure and begin to orient around “figuring out what the teacher wants”—and this certainly does not fit the purposes of ecologizing education. After all, if today’s learners are going to find ways to cope with, respond to, and find possibilities within our massively changing world, they need to be able to think outside of teacher expectations, step outside the normal, and be creative and critical.

How, then, might ecologizing educators come to “mess with” curriculum while still keeping their jobs and changing the system? What skills might be involved? Let’s explore two approaches that we think can offer fertile possibilities for ecologizing education: the curriculum of the dirty sock (yes, we are returning to the dirty sock) and the inverted curriculum, also known as “letting the learning outcomes just come falling out.”

Cairn 3: Nature as Imaginative Gifter, Teacher as Critical Thinker

One of the unsettling experiences from our work with Maple Ridge has been how often we came across our own blind spots. We repeatedly confronted our own assumptions about who teacher is, faced reminders of our colonial views and deeply held anthropocentrisms, and realized the narrowness of our understandings when it comes to how learners make sense of and engage with everything around them. For example, when we meet a childlike Raven (from chapter 2), who talks to natural beings, we are thrust into having to rethink troublesomely rigid concepts, such as What is language? How does communication work? and How do humans and Cattail, Squirrel, or Hummingbird relate? At another moment, a parent names their trauma in relation to public schooling and the ongoing destruction of the natural world, and so we are pushed to consider holding space for pain, loss, and transformation while also “eco-street smarting” our green charges as they come into contact with the non-ecological world beyond the fringes of their school. Inevitably, the day comes when a school district requires “results,” and we are confronted with systems of evaluation and assessment that are hierarchical, competitive, compartmentalized, profoundly individualized, and weirdly unecological. For us, doing this work has required a willingness to be open and critical, humble and strong, all at the same time.

With all of this in mind, we want to turn to a very recent challenge to our work that unexpectedly appeared. We don’t yet and may never have a complete answer to it. It all started with this quote from the work of Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat: “Imagination is understood to be a quality of mind in settler culture. In Haudenosaunee/ Mohawk tradition, the same quality is understood to be animal and spiritual helpers manifesting their presence in one’s life.… [The settler conception of] imagination dominates where fear of the unknown, uncertainty of memory, and placelessness thrive.”⁷ (Readers may remember that this work of Sheridan and Longboat also informed our discussion on “old-growthing” in chapter 1.) It’s one thing to appreciate theory, though, and quite another to enact it within our practices. We were unsettled—literally and metaphorically—by the implications and potentials of this quote for teaching practice.

We realized that, despite our emphasis on enacting pedagogies that honored the intrinsic worth of the natural world, that tried to leave space for and foreground the diversity of teachers around us, and that worked to move toward more relational conceptions and enactments of knowledge, we were still isolating a particular part of the educational process: the individual human mind. Comments such as “What are you thinking, Ahmed?” or “Great idea, Louise!” or “Awesome, your group has come up with such a creative idea!” were implicitly and normatively reifying the point Sheridan and Longboat are making: in settler culture, ideas, thoughts, and the imagination are uncritically assumed to belong to a single human or group of humans. To seriously consider this challenge—that the mind is a shared space and that ideas and imaginings are not the “product” of one’s own brilliance but a gift from the world around us—we had to puzzle over our assumptions and practices again. We had to wrestle with the uncomfortable possibility that our assumptions not only were continuing to separate us from the world around us but also were sustaining a colonial fear-based way of being with, in, and upon this land now called Canada.

Notice what happens when you consider the mind to be a shared place—a relational space where gifts are offered and where dialogue, in whatever language, allows for the more-than-human world more broadly to speak and be heard. Now those comments have a markedly different flavor: “Wow, Ahmed, where do you think all those gifts are coming from?” “Nice, Louise, I hear River spilling through!” “Great work, group, don’t forget to cite all your helpers.” The ramifications are interesting and important. As we noted in chapter 1, for Sheridan and Longboat the individual imagination is actually just an early developmental step toward becoming a mature adult with an emplaced, “old-growth” mind. The language here is lovely and worth noting, but it is also not metaphoric for those of us interested in ecologizing education. In a way, Sheridan and Longboat are pointing toward a developmental model where the aim is not an autonomous, “self-reliant” individual but rather a sophisticated, embedded, place-thinking,⁸ relational being. As such, the current goal for public education appears to be a quite-limited early step toward a land-based, even autochthonous, growing-out-of-place citizenship.

Sheridan and Longboat also make a direct connection between their understanding of the imagination and the need for changed relations between and amongst humans and the world. This different quality of mind, they propose, is “modernity’s guide to recovering the necessary relationship between healthy ecologies of land and human minds.”⁹ Part of the educational project, then, becomes one of helping students start to grow out of the land they inhabit, whether they are Indigenous, are Indigenous to another place, or are part of a culture that requires them to be nonrelational.

This project of autochthony—to grow out of place—is, in fact, that “old-growthing of the mind” we discussed previously. So, in concert with Basso’s assertion that wisdom sits in places,¹⁰ this suggests that the deepest wisdom sits in the oldest places, with the oldest beings. It suggests the importance of allowing the geography of place and the gifts offered by animal and spirit helpers to be part of the shaping—the old-growthing—of human students’ minds. This, in turn, involves providing space for those beings and the land to be heard, in the way they would wish to be heard. Gifts need to be offered and also thoughtfully, even reverentially, received, for as this imagination is developed, the human actually gains access to “a sentient landscape,” as Longboat and Sheridan articulate.¹¹

Even as ecologizing educators come to accept the sentience and wisdom of place, the spatial and shared nature of the imagination, and the importance of context, they are urged to slow down and listen yet again. There is more to do. They can make room to actively recognize the gifts being offered; to find ways to better “place” their work in order to allow the landscape to validate nascent learners like Raven as they encounter this wisdom; and to allow place to breathe, to speak, to teach, and eventually to thrive.

All of this may sound a little overwhelming for your average public school teacher. Frankly, it’s a little overwhelming for us, too. And yet, can we really afford to keep replicating the status quo? Besides, overwhelming as it may be, this idea of old-growthing is where hope and possibility can be found—first, because it provides a frame for a more relational model of human development (which, while still a little foggy, if not completely invisible); and second, because there are already many examples of relationships being built, of lives changing, and of communities doing and being differently. Some of them are at Maple Ridge, examples that we have been documenting even before we knew what we were looking for.

Recall how Raven talked of “little words” curling into her mind, particularly when she isn’t thinking.¹² We see this as an extraordinary description of how the world is gifting ideas; after all, there is no indication that Raven is leading this process. Here, the space of the mind is shared—ideas and imaginings curl into it, with Raven patently and patiently honoring the sentience of the living landscape. The reader must remember here that this is a nine-year-old child, enunciating, as best she can despite the limitations of the English language, what we think Sheridan and Longboat are pointing toward. Given the space to immerse herself in the outdoors, build relationships, and be heard—even though she is saying things that settler culture might denigrate or position as fantastical—Raven has the capacity to think with place. This gives us hope—not because Raven is unusual but because Raven is quite usual. The ecological imagination is part of all of us. Only when it is tamped down and consciously restricted, as it is in settler culture, do we fail to hear and know its presence. Only then do we miss out on its offerings of gifts.

Raven’s story offers something further for us to reckon with. As she grew older, Raven became more aware of the responses of the larger world, that is, those from outside her family and the school. Often, those responses were unkind. At times, Raven would check in with her mother to confirm whether a particular place was “safe” for her to be her relational self. We know, in fact, that Raven’s situation is not uncommon. Indeed, we have heard epithets and hateful comments directed toward some of our deeply relational young people. Some feel forced to choose between acknowledging and honoring their interconnected, relational true selves and their desire to be a part of more superficial but culturally sanctioned relationships. Too many times we have seen deeply connected students turn away from the natural world in order to remain part of the human group. Somehow, the ecologizing educator must find the wherewithal not only to respond to these experiences of deep loss, but also to be forthright about their own connections and diligent in preparing learners for this reality. This is a kind of eco-street smarting.

We’ll end here by touching on one exciting but at the same time frustrating aspect of doing the questioning that is essential to ecologizing education: as we educators ask those important questions, we are, in a way, turning over cultural rocks and starting to dig around underneath—inevitably, though, this leads us to see other rocks that need flipping … or maybe this isn’t the right metaphor. Let’s try another one. We are examining a single tree, say, a Douglas Fir in a functioning ecosystem. We soon discover, though, that this tree is dialed into other trees, which in turn are connected to still further trees, which are themselves connected to rhizomes, to water sources, and on to spiders and woodpeckers. Exciting, yes, but challenging in its complexity and never-ending-ness. Just as there is no single being to examine here, there is no easy “remove and replace” if you want to change the culture.

Indeed, to consider nature as a co-teacher is to change how we think about knowledge, which has implications for assessment if educators follow that rhizomic thread in one direction. By following the thread in another direction, though, we come to realize that the very definition of human is in doubt. Yes, it can be somewhat unnerving, but we are not in this alone. Support and possibility are offered by all-our-relations, and our job might be to just quieten ourselves a bit and let them “curl” into us and our students. It is intriguing work. Thankfully, over time, we seem to have become better at sitting with the sense of not knowing. When we discover a tangle of threads, we can feel wonder and curiosity rather than the urge to compulsively untangle them. We are getting used to encountering our own failings over and over. We are getting used to listening to the wider more-than-human and accepting the gifts being offered. We are getting used to constant rock flipping. Sometimes these questions and challenges appear on cue, as expected, such as the challenges that will inevitably arise if you advocate for including the natural world in an authentic and active way in every PTA meeting.

Let’s move on now to consider how teachers might practice and be teacher differently in order to support this project of decentering the human, building relationships, and healing. Here, the territory we are traversing becomes even foggier. It is hard to see the entire landscape of ecologizing education, but perhaps we will find that the cairns along the way offer some comfort that we are in the rightish place.

Cairn 4: Teacher as Activist, Moving toward Ally

It has happened again. One of us has just finished a public talk about ecologizing education, describing the challenges, positioning things as a cultural problem, naming the natural world as both co-teacher and colonized. Someone in the audience has queried—thankfully quite calmly this time because these are often very aggressive confrontations (red in face and tongue, as it were)—our “move to propagandize” learners. As they understand it, the act of foregrounding the natural world moves away from the “neutral,” secular position of public education and into some form of green manipulation of young minds. These kinds of questions challenge us—and, by extension, anyone who seeks to ecologize education—to find ways to respond because propaganda and manipulation of any kind, even if aiming in a good direction, is problematic indeed. Who gets to decide what learners are exposed to? Who is included and excluded in any educational process? Whose notion of “good” do we rely on? What is prioritized in one’s classroom? These important questions help frame our layered responses, which aim not only at individual educators and classrooms but also at the institutional and cultural structures in which those classrooms are situated.

The first response, aimed at the individual level, is to remind the questioner that everything is political. Perhaps this isn’t immensely helpful as a comment, except it does challenge educators to remember that they are making public life decisions constantly. They are advocating for and in fact helping to construct a particular vision of society, no matter what they do. Those decisions—and nondecisions, of course—are indicators of what they, as educators, prioritize and how they believe learners might or should be in the world. Every decision point could go myriad ways, and each one positions us with regard to our politics. Students are called on to compete or cooperate. Resources, rights, responsibilities, and ideals are decided on and distributed. These are all political acts. Being political is not something we educators can avoid, no matter how much we might like to. Thus, the second, and related, response is to posit that we, as educators (and parents/caregivers for that matter), are being asked to be political actors, making decisions each and every day, maybe not at the global or national level but definitely at the particular, local, face-to-face interactional and public level. We constantly ask ourselves: What shall we do now, how are we expected to behave, and where might this all be leading for a small group of learners?

As the philosopher Martin Buber suggests in Between Man and Man, educators are bringing a world to the students.¹³ The political nature of this process is implicit here, for it is not the world that is being offered but a world, suggesting that it is impossible to bring everything. Rather, the educator must make selections, impose limitations, and determine emphases—which means that, in making these choices and bringing this world to their students, the educator is also accepting a profound responsibility.

Even if our vision of this world is of one that is more equitable and participatory, that is, one where students and all-our-relations are treated with mutual respect, given the opportunity to flourish in their own ways, and work with the teacher to create this best world together (the world that we strive for in ecologizing education)—even in this scenario, the educator is still making political decisions about what needs to be discussed, challenged, problematized, and disrupted and about what could be added, extended, created, and embraced. This process still includes naming a vision and putting forward a plan for how the world works. It still demands particular ways of teaching, of talking about the natural world, of engaging with students and communities, of doing a lot of things that this book is proposing. The result is that actions, decisions, and curricular offerings all become part of this world being offered.

Ultimately, then, ecologizing education, like all teaching, is an ongoing series of political acts. Part of what we are doing is supporting and suggesting a vision of a world to learners. In choosing to use that vision as a lens through which to make decisions, we must acknowledge that there is a kind of propagandizing and manipulation going on. The audience member who asked that challenging question is correct, to that extent. The problem, however, is the questioner’s assumption that there exists a form of education that is apolitical—neutral and propaganda-free. In fact, a “neutral” position does not exist. Every teacher in every classroom continually makes decisions that enable learners to understand the world in particular ways. That is, no teacher brings the world to their students; rather, every teacher brings a world.

Let’s step out of the individual classroom for a moment now and consider the larger picture. After all, teachers are not autonomous beings operating in some kind of utopian free-to-be-and-do wonderland. There are rules, of course: explicit and implicit centralized curricula and “accepted” pedagogies and structures, both physical (classrooms, timetables, Christmas concerts, exams, and learning outcomes) and cultural (hierarchies, concepts of knowledge and knowing, ideas of success, various and intersecting forms of privilege, and so on), that are often outside a teacher’s control and even knowing.

We want to name those structures as being part of the “invisible” cultural assumptions and social values that imbue mainstream education. These are the often-unseen political values that resist change and tend to turn the innovations of the most inspired teachers back to the status quo. They are embedded, unacknowledged propaganda. The system has deemed them important and necessary as part of the world that is being brought to the students. Because they are in the center, in the mainstream, these norms, truths, politics being offered can be positioned as neutral, common sense, and secular, by virtue of the assumption that most people agree with or have been immersed in them. Anyone doubting this fact might find a recent Muslim immigrant, transgender youth, or Indigenous child and ask them whether the public education they encounter in North America is propaganda-free with respect to Christian ideas or gender binaries or Caucasian epistemologies. Those on the margins inevitably recognize the implicit and explicit propaganda of the center far better than the center does.

So where does this leave us in response to the question of ecologizing education as a propagandizing machine? Given that all educators—ecologizing and mainstream and all the others—are always engaged in propagandizing and manipulating, then perhaps what is needed is to reframe the question. Let’s ask instead: Which forms of propagandizing and manipulation are we, as educators, willing to be a part of? How aware and critical are we of the politics embedded in our practices and places of teaching? What kind of world do we want to bring to our students? And, if that is different from the one that the central structures are pushing, what might we do in response? We believe that questions like these open the door for the teacher to become advocate and activist, and to work toward allyship.

After all, if we accept the propagandizing argument and take seriously this idea of bringing a world to students, then teachers are, by definition, advocating for the world they choose to bring. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued this exact point in suggesting that moral beliefs in the world are evidenced in one’s actions. Everything we do is a positing of value, whether this is thoughtfully done or not, and, for Sartre, intention is not as important as action. For example, the intention to recycle does not outweigh the fact of not recycling. For ecologizing educators working toward eco-social justice in critical response to anti-environmental culture and institutional systems that are anti-environmental, the move toward advocacy and activism has, we think, already been made.

While advocacy flows quite naturally from the choices a teacher makes in bringing a world to their students, the move to activism is slightly more difficult to make or even acknowledge. This is particularly true for teachers who, through their histories and their training, see themselves as needing to be “neutral,” to present “balanced” accounts of everything, and to honor the diversity that appears in their classrooms. Unhelpfully, our vision of activism often involves marching, tipping cars, and going to jail. This vision is itself a particular kind of framing. But there isn’t just one way to be an activist. In fact, large-scale change has never happened without a multilayered approach. Some people are shouting and fighting to get the message out, while others are involved in working with groups, putting change into action, and educating.

Let’s return, then, to our idea of the rebel ecologizing teacher from the previous chapter, refining our definition of this rebel teacher now as advocate and activist. Their activism is tied directly to their offering of a different vision for the world. This vision includes mutually beneficial flourishing, which means resisting components of the educative process that are anti-ecological and unjust, and supporting students and all-our-relations to be heard in their authentic voices. As advocate, the rebel teacher leaves space for students to exercise their rights, to express dissent, and to expand the range of how to be student in the classroom and human in the world. Examples of activism, that is, moving toward something different from the status quo, include teaching about politics, political engagement, and the history of change; building students’ capacity to be critical; and enacting these other ways of being in the classroom.

Remember too that this work also involves more than just talking. (Recall, for example, the failure of the participatory democracy course to inspire students to be more engaged and empowered as community members.) None of this discussion is likely to land if our practices don’t embrace the ideas we are trying to communicate and if students don’t get to name and experience the politics of the classroom or encounter a world where many more voices are involved in the decision-making processes. Activism is also about standing up and speaking against practices in schools, classrooms, and the system that are contrary to the vision of a more eco-socially just world. Another important part of the work is holding space for students and the group as a whole to live into their vision and to practice and become acclimatized to different ways of being.

Activism as pedagogy, within the frame of ecologizing education, includes not only teaching students the tools of criticality but also building alliances beyond one’s classroom. For us, as ecologizing educators, moving toward allyship likely will include building deep relationships with diverse communities, particularly those that are marginalized within mainstream culture, including the natural world. Becoming an ally (which is an honor bestowed and not self-adopted) involves seeking out ways to listen to, to learn from, and to honor the diversity of the other. Ecologizing education and changing culture can only happen through listening, through building relationships (throughout the more-than-human), through decentering the singular educator and the human, and through having a chance to practice the more eco-socially just world we envision.

Cairn 5: Teacher as Identity Worker

Before the Maple Ridge Environmental School opened, we work hard to build community, find allies, share the vision, and then communicate that vision far and wide. This also involved much work with the school district itself. At one of the earliest meetings with the superintendent, we had, as mentioned before, a few requests: (1) no building; (2) a recognition that we wouldn’t have all the answers up front (for example, we didn’t really know how families would figure out the weather thing, but we knew they would—and they did, really quickly!); and (3) the opportunity to work intensively with the teachers assigned to the school—designing curriculum, undoing troublesome habits, and getting to know their places and co-teachers—for up to a year before opening.

As it turned out, we didn’t get our third request—the certificate program was a workaround, and none of the assigned teachers were part of it—but we want to reiterate here the importance of having time for human teachers to work on their ecologizing pedagogies. Our request for that year of preparation was mostly about supporting teachers into a more outdoor, experiential, and imaginative pedagogy. The idea was to help them prepare lessons, get to know the outdoor locations, and start laying down new teacherly pathways that were different from some of their tried-and-true habits of indoor teaching. That year was also going to be about assessing risk-management and developing local operating procedures and protocols that are part and parcel of overall safety and learning outdoors. Ultimately, we were right about this. There was a noticeable difference at the beginning between NEST, where teachers did get some paid planning time and a whole summer to prepare, and Maple Ridge, where one teacher was hired the day before the school opened. However, even we failed to fully appreciate one aspect of this important preparatory process we had requested: the rethinking of teacher identity. That is, what does it mean to be a teacher? How do individuals in those roles—and the communities they engage with—make sense of and position the idea of “teacher”?

This rethinking of teacher identity is necessary because ecologizing education asks us, as human educators, to change our identity as teacher. For one thing, it asks us to undo our own centrality and spread the role around: as an ecologizing educator, we must accept nature as co-teacher, parents/caregivers as teaching partners, and so on. It also asks us to rethink where knowledge resides, reconsider how and with whom planning is done, reevaluate the status we render to the position itself, and reconceptualize other deep structures implicit to being teacher. In most North American education, teacher is expert, teacher is center, teacher is in control.

At the beginning of Maple Ridge, we didn’t fully realize how deeply these ideas are entrenched and how much time it takes to unearth them and select and then learn different ways of being teacher. This process includes everything about being a teacher, some of which is really hard to change. Take, for example, teacher intuition, that deep-rooted, long-developed responsiveness that we grow and nurture over time and that we rely on to guide us when we are in the heart and heat of the teaching and learning process with twenty-five excited students circling. For the ecologizing educator, even one’s intuition can be suspect (remember the response to “why are these leaves red?”). This is true at least until much work has been done to overlay those older, and identified as troublesome, ways with new, more eco-socially just, cultural change-y ones. This work takes time and, for those of us who are impatient for change, a certain amount of gentleness with oneself. One tool we used quite a bit in this difficult task—in support of both reflection and implementation—comes out of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault proposed that the way to make explicit this challenge to change, the way to actively resist the pull toward the status quo, was to assume an attitude of what we are translating as “hyperactive pessimism.”¹⁴ The hyperactive component of this attitude refers to an assumed orientation in the world. Think about prey animals in a particularly risky moment. Mouse on top of Snow heading for its home, Fawn waiting for its mother’s return—both are always on the alert. In the case of the ecologizing educator, constant vigilance is required to recognize, name, and interpret ecologically and socially problematic habits, behaviors, teacher intuitions, and beliefs, many of which are unknown to us. They can sneak up and surprise, just like Owl on Mouse. Many readers likely already know this feeling a little bit: we find ourselves treading carefully to make sure that what we are saying and thinking is not degrading or offensive; we are continually aware that the expected ways of doing are no longer acceptable. Teachers in mainstream classrooms and elsewhere are already needing to examine and reexamine habits, behaviors, ways of speech, responses to students, observations, and priorities.

This hyperactive component is also about locating, creating, choosing, and then implementing new habits, behaviors, and responses to students. It’s about implementing new beliefs, for without something to replace the troublesome ones, we are bound to be stuck. The goal is that these replacements are better aligned with who one wants to be in the world and how one seeks to have humans be in the world—although there is no guarantee. Thus, the hyperactive aspect of “hyperactive pessimism” recognizes the constant work and the need for continuing vigilance throughout the change process until such time as the new habits and behaviors are confirmed as being the ones desired and have replaced the old as the “automatic” ways of being. As we noted previously, this work parallels the kind being done in exploring questions of privilege.

For Foucault, the pessimism part of “hyperactive pessimism” relates to his assumption that if the challenges we are dealing with are built into the culture, then many of the “normal,” “habitual,” “common sense,” and “instinctual” ways of doing and being are likely to be problematic, for they rest on the assumptions of the problematic culture. Consider, for example, some of the current justice movements, such as MeToo, Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and the student climate strikes. Activists in these movements are coming up against the fact that the challenges being named—gendered violence and the patriarchy, racism, and environmental denialism—are deeply embedded in the culture. These causes are not railing against a few “bad apples” acting inappropriately. They are identifying a corrupt milieu. This is the “systemic” in systemic racism, after all. Thus, our assumed ways of being are thrown under the microscope of suspicion, and for Foucault, being pessimistic about those assumed ways of being is an important start toward changing them.

For us, the idea of “hyperactive pessimism” is a reminder of the continuing incompleteness of the work and that we ought not to become too comfortable or complacent. Given that it has taken multiple generations to create the kind of anti-environmental, alienated culture that currently exists, it is unlikely we will quickly reach an ecologized version. Perhaps the best one can do is to begin to push the project in what seems to be the most promising direction and help the next generations continue the work in new and changing ways. Indeed, it is quite likely that much of the work we have done in good faith will have to be undone. Fortunately, hyperactive pessimism also helps us to maintain an attitude of humbleness, keeping in perspective our contribution to the ongoing work. After all, we are all on a journey, both individually and communally, and there are no totally right answers, no Truths, or, to push against educational language, no “best practices” at this point. There are just people doing things to the best of their abilities with integrity, who bring an attitude of active questioning of the status quo and a willingness to change, rethink, and undo as needed.

Some, though not enough unfortunately, are beginning to do the difficult work of constantly examining their actions and learning to check and then change themselves and their explicit and implicit assumptions, sexisms, and racisms. The same hard work is no doubt required regarding our relationships with the natural world. For instance, in the ecologizing education conversation, we have argued that modern Western culture is, in fact, anti-environmental in its orientations, habits, politics, and assumptions—thus, it is likely that every habit, belief, behavior, and sanctioned way of being is anti-environmental too. Consequently, unless we have carefully and deliberately thought through our behavior in any given situation using some version of a critical eco-lens, and unless we have then done the work to develop new ecologizing habits, it is likely that everything we are doing is potentially problematic. The “pessimism” of hyperactive pessimism does not imply that change can’t happen, though. Rather, it assumes that the problematics run deep in the culture and, as such, the work to change will be difficult and slow and will require the utmost of attention and care.

Let’s step now beyond teacher identity and how that might be changed and consider the larger identities of ourselves and our students. In fact, some elements of this conversation have been around in environmental education for a long time. For instance, an old environmental educational practice involves switching a student’s environment. This gives them the possibility to try out being someone different, to change their identity. Often this has been done for—and to—students who are struggling. Sometimes it entails sending them outdoors to wilderness camps and other programs, because if someone really does want to change—and that part is important—it helps change not only schools and social groups but the entire context of learning, if possible. After all, context shapes us and, at the same time, positions and restricts us.

As an example, think back to those first return trips to your parental home after heading into the world and becoming an adult. Perhaps, upon stepping through the door, you were rapidly thrust back into your brooding, angry, lonely, goofy, or immature self despite best intentions. This is at least partially because your parents and family had not yet caught up with the changes you were going through, and so they remembered—and were responding to—a former version of you. No doubt, though, it was also partially a result of the house, the furniture, the neighborhood, and the community—the contexts in which you developed habits for how to be you. In some ways, the context itself didn’t know the new you, and so it directed you back into the old ways it had known you.

Detaching from context and community, though, is not just about getting away from things. It is also about going to things. When you are in a new context, when those around you don’t really know you, you have more freedom to “experiment” with yourself. You encounter fewer people who have pre-formed assumptions about you which might channel you into certain behaviors and ways of being. Also, different contexts offer different possibilities. For example, the natural world tends to have a larger diversity of “tools” to enable being in the world than most contexts in the North American mainstream, particularly if all-our-relations are understood as potential exemplars. It might seem to be a bit of a joke to ask, “What animal would you be?” but when taken a touch more seriously, this can be a source of possibility and even direction for growing identities. The answer to “What would nature do?” becomes a source of information. As we come to know the perseverance of Salmon or the transformability of Caterpillar or the community awareness of Cedar or the interconnectedness of Wolf and Caribou, these all become sources of inspiration and potential material for self-creation. Thus, part of being an ecologizing educator is about holding the space for these encounters to happen and be considered—and then allowing the time for reflection and practice such that possibilities can be sintered into one’s transforming identity. In fact, this might also include transforming the very concept of identity.

For much of public education in North America, identity is seen as a fairly static thing. For those in the mainstream, identity seems to be quite easily adopted and there is little need for self-evaluation and soul-searching. For many outside the “norms,” though, identity tends to be a constant struggle between authenticity and the colonizing power of those same norms. In fact, though, all of us establish, wrestle with, and change our identity over time, particularly through schooling and childhood. Hopefully, by adulthood, we have located and “settled into” a clearly established identity. Even then, however, we may find that identity shifts and changes.

Of course, often others are more than willing to reify our identities for us, to violently stuff our round selves into square holes. Sometimes we are pushed into an identity netherworld, where we are seen as other, less-than, and not belonging. Interestingly, part of the reason some people react angrily and violently at the notion of queer, fluid, binary, and trans ways of being is because admitting that this diversity exists also means critiquing the assumption of a solid and easily adopted identity. It means having to accept queerness as part of one’s own possibility.

Work in queer ecology has compellingly shown how the natural world is drawn into these discussions in quite troublesome ways as well.¹⁵ Cisgendered scientists, for example, appear to inscribe gender binaries (and patriarchies and heteronormativities) onto the natural world in their “scientific” work.¹⁶ And then the culture uses the language of “natural” as an aggressive, even violent, tool against humans who do not fit these implied norms, even though ample evidence exists that the natural world is much more fluid (in sexuality, gender, and identity) than given credit for. We see the world through our cultural lenses, do not allow its diverse voices to come through, and then use our “findings” against the posited other. Sound familiar?

Three intertwined but different layers of identity relate to the work of the ecologizing educator. The first is at the conceptual level, that is, how we conceive of identity itself. Our sense is that identity is not as static, or essentialized, as traditionally posited. It is potentially much more fluid. This notion of identity as static is likely connected to the desire to control, to resolve into definiteness, and to create and affirm hierarchies. If we are correct, though, in seeing identity as more fluid, this means that more possibilities to teach “old dogs new tricks” exist and that these possibilities might be all around us if only we deign to dive under our assumptions and truly take in our surroundings. The natural world is much more fluid and dynamic than we often realize. See, for example, Slug, Earthworm, Bonobo, and Alligator to name just a few. This dynamism suggests, then, that we be very careful of the lenses we bring with us as we engage our more-than-human kin. Indeed, the careful attender might discover diverse possibilities, fluid examples, and imaginative ideas all around both the concept of identity and with regard to one’s own particular identity choices.

The second layer of identity that relates to work of the ecologizing educator is at the level of the individual, the “who we be” and “who we become” in the world, that is, as Estella or Sean or teacher. Again, we want first to suggest that identity at this level is more fluid—a process, a verb even, rather than a noun. As such, we are Seaning, Estellaing, teachering. Second, our identities are actually never complete. We are complex, varied, flexible becomings (incomplete and fluid), and that diversity can change “who we are” and “who we be” depending on context, desire, and so on. Thus, we might find belonging in myriad locations, each sustaining and supporting our identity range. This fluidity also means that those who believe they know for sure who they are, no matter the situation, are likely wrong, either in terms of their range of self-awareness or in terms of their responsiveness to diverse situations. And finally, all of this suggests that part of being a human educator is not so much about helping the individual find their particular self, but rather about providing the space and, we think, the diversity of possibilities so that students can be continually finding, flexing, and reimagining themselves.

The third layer of this identity discussion relates to the identity of being human, writ large. This aspect of identity is not about the particular individual, but about the cultural concept of what it means to be human. Historically, change educators have most often focused on the individual without actually addressing the possibility of change for the larger concept of human. We sense that this oversight has left the work incomplete. As should be clear by now, part of ecologizing education is finding ways to critique, to challenge, and to change the modern West’s concept of human and, further, to change the culture out of which that concept arises. This involves a complete renegotiation, in dialogue with the diversity of human cultures (the range of possibility expressed through what Wade Davis calls the ethnosphere¹⁷) and with the planet’s biodiversity so that there is a better chance of the mutually beneficial flourishing we are all hopefully advocating for. So it seems that we have now stepped into the landscape of cultural change. And there, in the foggy distance, is one final cairn.

Cairn 6: Teacher as Cultural Change Worker

When we began this project of ecologizing education with Maple Ridge Environmental School, we understood the change challenge to be cultural, at its depth. We knew that the historical environmental education tradition, which focuses on changing the behavior of individuals, did not go far enough. That tradition was based on the idea that if enough people change their behaviors and care more actively for the natural world, the world will change. Unfortunately, though, fifty years of significant environmental education and activism effort had brought little change on a larger scale. Thus, we sought to change culture: we chose to work with the smallest semi-independent cultural unit of the educational system—the school—to see if we could make “changes all the way down.”¹⁸ Even at the beginning, we knew that things would arise that hadn’t been planned for, that our understandings would change over time, and that we were going to have to be hyperactively pessimistic. Still, one of the biggest surprises was how underprepared we were for the actual work of cultural change.

One of the long-standing pedagogical ideas in environmental, outdoor, eco-change education work, which we advocate for throughout this book, has been to get students outside. Extending this, David Sobel has done wonderful work around the importance of children having spaces away from the prying eyes of adults, where they can be themselves, play at being adults, feel safe, and develop relationships.¹⁹ Sobel has long advocated for setting aside pedagogical time when students get to build “forts” (more on that in a second), dens, bush-huts, hidey-holes, whatever. He even claims that this kind of play is almost universal across cultures. As a result, Maple Ridge decided to build in about forty-five minutes per day of mostly independent time for students to do just this. In fact, ours may have been one of the more comprehensive, long-term research endeavors looking at Sobel’s work in action.

Over time, the students’ play grew in sophistication. Many imaginative paths and projects were being pursued at the same time. Some of the projects were more all-encompassing and involved almost all the children, while others were very localized, involving just a few. The village itself—for that is what it became—eventually consisted of many structures. Eventually, some became two- and even three-story buildings, illustrating marvelous displays of lashing that were a testament to the students’ visions and fine motor skills.

However, early on, teachers and researchers felt compelled to intervene on a couple of issues. The first involved the overuse of “resources” and the denuding of life in particular areas. The second related to the term “forts,” for it became apparent that using that language and imagery was problematic as we considered and worked with our Indigenous partners and students. This led to adopting the term “village” and also to a much more considered and caring approach in selecting what might be appropriate for building. Overall, though, interventions by adults were kept to a minimum. This decision, at least partially, rested in the assumption that with independent time, immersion in nature, and opportunities for imaginative play, students will be automatically influenced in a “good” way by the world around them. But this was not our experience.

We wanted to give this independent play time a fair chance for success, but after about six months, we had to conclude that the influence of culture—that is, the mainstream eco-problematic culture—was stronger than the influence of nature. Our first hint should perhaps have been the denuding of areas and lack of care for the living denizens (Moss, Huckleberry, Salamander) as the students focused on acquiring “resources” needed for building. Soon, some students were complaining about not being allowed to play, about being left out of things, about not having access to some of the buildings and materials. In fact, the village had become a childlike and worrisome version of a police state. A single, self-appointed autocratic leader (an older boy) ruled. His power and position were reenforced by a posse (yes, that was the language) of enforcers (mostly the other older boys). Resources were centrally controlled—in particular, rope, building materials, and access to the buildings themselves. Pieces of wood had become currency, and violators of this single, centralized story were actually incarcerated in one of the three jails that now existed in this ninety-person village.

In essence, the children had recapitulated the mainstream culture, as they understood it, using it as imaginative building blocks. Consequently, all the social and ecological problematics the school itself was trying to undo were entering into and being exhibited and reenforced by the children’s play. Because, as a group, we hadn’t purposefully imagined our way into other options, the children were left with only the tools available, those of the mainstream culture, to build their own world.

It was now clear that, in order to address this challenge, educators needed to play a role in this time of free play by offering the students other tools, potential cultural scaffolds even, to avoid this reaffirmation of the troublesome culture. So we began to involve teachers more actively in the village. We also met and discussed together as educators and researchers to better understand what was happening and to consider what we might introduce. We were challenged to imagine into different cultural ways of being and to find tools and offerings for the students that might support the process of cultural change.

One of the changes we chose was to facilitate was to develop a more consensus-based, almost socio-cratic, decision-making process for the students. The entry point for this was quite apparent, given how disgruntled and even aggrieved many of the students felt about the centralized domination of the current form of governance. In fact, a lot of ideas for this were generated from the students themselves. Many of the quieter, perhaps more eco-connected, students didn’t like the village play as it was enacted and just needed support, recognition, and minor interventions for their voices to be heard. A governance group was set up, facilitated by one of the educators, and representatives were chosen. Almost immediately, an expanded range of activities and play began happening in the village. More joy was evident, and two of the jails were quickly repurposed.

The second big change the educators involved themselves in, after politics and governance, might be understood as economic in nature. In the village, a very centralized, competitive, capitalistic ethos had appeared, as it does in mainstream culture, around the idea of scarcity. This seeming lack of the particular resources for the dominant activity in the village (that is, rope and wooden building materials for creating structures) meant that those who were “powerful” could collect, horde, restrict access to, and overinflate the values of these resources. It also meant that many were left out and marginalized from the play and community altogether, both because they had no access to resources and because they weren’t interested in and didn’t fit into the dominant narrative of competition and scarcity. This reality was named, and together students and teachers worked out a more equitable system of distribution, found an outside source of materials, and increased rope volume. More importantly, undoing the central dominant narrative allowed other play narratives to flourish, In fact, because many of these had no need for those particular resources, they began producing them as “extraneous” materials—and an eco-economic system was born.

The result was the disappearance of the dominant narrative of scarcity, a diversifying of how students could be, play, and imagine in the village and a quite obvious shift in the energy and even happiness of the culture therein. Ultimately, we wonder if this imaginary village in the woods might have something to teach us all about cultural change.

Given this village experience, we suggest that one of the starting points of ecologizing education as cultural change lies in the not knowing. That is, ecologizing education requires the fundamental unlearning of cultural habits, assumptions, expectations, and norms—both those that can readily be seen and, more challengingly, those that sit in cultural blind spots. It requires the willingness to “not know” but to try anyway. We like to think of it as humming softly with the humility of being human while joining with the more-than-humans in a new venture of experience-learning.

To the Question of Change

The project of cultural change and identity development is upon us—and upon you as well. If we are right, it means that a lot of the things that currently seem like common sense, that are everyday and obvious, become problematic once seen through the ecologizing lens. Consider, for instance, these assumptions: that humans come first no matter what; that new political and economic structures can be found without involving many diverse beings; that the natural world doesn’t feel or do anything (or matter, for that matter). In ecologizing education, such challenges to our habitual, common-sense ways of thinking are played out at all levels of pedagogy, from the larger theoretical constructs—such as the concepts of politics and economics that are available for imaginative play and the framing of the classroom—right down to the immediate, decision-making level of the teacher in action in the playground or when responding to student questions and behaviors.

Imagine you are on yard duty today, and you notice two students running around a meadow, pretending to shoot each other with sticks. Your school has a no-shooting-games policy, so you call the children over to discuss this and to put a stop to the game. Then you notice that the sticks they are using were very recently alive. In fact, a few green leaves are still attached. When you question this, the students admit that they pulled up Willow from the edge of Stream to make their guns. The three of you head to Stream and you engage the students in a discussion about life, about interconnection between Willow/Stream/Water, and about Trout spawning. Proper reparations are discussed, and restorative actions are taken.

Notice that for the nonecological school this story would have ended after the second sentence—when the game is stopped. The priority is the no-gunplay rule, and where the sticks came from is background noise. Within the frame of ecological and cultural change, however, the priorities and emphases are different. Yes, no gunplay still stands, but ripping up Willow is the main focus of the discussion and the main determinant of consequences. The focus on the death of Willow is an acknowledgment of the changing ecological emphasis and the importance of care for neighbors, while the acts of restoration and reparation suggest cultural change with regard to ideas of power and justice. The work of change that ecologizing education is pointing toward—this careful and critical awareness to detail and an ongoing willingness to reflect, to lean in, and to recreate beliefs and habits that sustain ourselves, our school systems, and our culture—is challenging indeed.

Part of the challenge, as our village example so clearly shows, is that people don’t come to systemic change unaffected by the systems in which they live. Both educators and children are immersed in cultures, in our ways of being, in our habits and beliefs, with our cultural tools—and many of these are invisible to us. They are simply our “natural” ways of doing things. Change, then, requires identifying these cultural problematics while at the same time offering options for how to be differently at both the individual and cultural levels. And all of this must happen while we are immersed in a larger frame that is continually pushing us to return to the status quo.²⁰ Thus, the individual and cultural change process becomes a mutually reenforcing project, and the ecologizing educator who responds to gunplay and autocratic governance is having to think and work at the level of immediacy and the individual, while also enacting—creating even—processes and tools that align better with the larger cultural project.

The education system tends to be where we learn the rules of culture and how it works, but it can also be where we learn to deconstruct, challenge, and critique those norms and even change and live into new, vibrant, and rich ways of being human in the world. These root metaphors and cultural assumptions have shaped our identities as individuals and as humans, writ large.²¹ They are the structures through which “normal” is first created and then enforced and evaluated on an ongoing basis.

And yet we believe these norms can be changed: we do not have to walk alone through the same landscape over and over again. There are options. Others have been here before us, and more—including all-our-relations—are interested in coming with us. The world in which we exist changes when we change our paths therein, and we aren’t alone even if we don’t totally know where we are or where we are going. Let’s explore and try new things and continue to add our own stony, storied offerings that add to the cairns along the way.