Changing Culture
CULTIVATING POSSIBILITIES FOR A BETTER WORLD
Every new school year, the Maple Ridge Environmental School begins by meeting the children at the Alouette River site. But not this year. After record-breaking heat domes scorched the land all summer, a series of atmospheric rivers pounded the area with rainstorm after rainstorm throughout the fall. Because of the danger, Alouette River Park was closed to the public, and the children were not allowed to return for many weeks. When they did, they witnessed the catastrophic effects of flooding for themselves.
Teacher Jodi MacQuarrie reflects, “There were kids in tears. Some of them said it looked like a bomb went off. All the analogies that the kids provided were very warlike—it was that level of destruction.”1 Windfall and river debris were scattered everywhere. All the gravel on the side of the riverbed was gone. Gentle slopes where Bear could fish had been chewed away by turbulent waters. Now there were two-meter drops. These students, like increasing numbers of children around the world, are experiencing the lived realities of the ecological crisis. The world around them is changing, and they know it.
The Maple Ridge children understand the situation in more visceral, comprehensive ways than many. Jodi explains that when everyone else was talking about the flooding of the plains and the impact on people, her students were talking about Salmon. They know that in two to four years, Salmon numbers will be catastrophically low. The children are deeply bonded to Salmon. Salmon lives are important to them. The older Maple Ridge children have studied generations of Salmon returning up this river, have watched their offspring swimming downstream toward the ocean every year. The students have created art, performed science experiments, and heard local Indigenous histories about Salmon. They feel a sense of obligation and connection to Salmon, a responsibility to care for and protect them. For the students—in the words of one Elder—“Salmon are family.”
Consequently, the loss of most of a generation of Salmon is devasting and emotional for the Maple Ridge students. But, as Jodi reminds them, this is also why they are here. They are not helpless bystanders witnessing catastrophe (even if in some moments it feels like that). They are here to learn a different and more ecologically responsible way to be in the world, a better way to relate to our kin, a changed way to enact humanness. Supporting students through this tragedy means giving the little ones extra love. It means giving all of them the opportunity to voice their feelings, stress, and concerns. Fired up from the tragedy, some of the older children write a letter to a local developer, articulating the problematic impacts of a proposed development on local habitat. Because conversations around sustainability and ecological practices are daily occurrences at this school, the children have some framework both for understanding what caused the flooding and for what they personally can do to make more responsible choices than those being made in the broader culture.
As winter comes on, water is reabsorbed into the soil. River’s roar begins to settle a little. Scattered salmon carcasses are eaten by scavengers, decomposed by insects, and composted into the earth. While some lives have been lost, the land itself absorbs, adjusts, settles, and composts much of the tragedy. At Maple Ridge, Jodi notes, children are learning to think like an ecosystem and learn from ecosystems. As the land heals and adapts, so might the children to some extent. But the stress is real—and all of this occurs against a backdrop of year two of the COVID-19 pandemic. In nearly thirty years of teaching, Jodi has not experienced so many mental health concerns with students. Indeed, across the school district, at every kind of school, mental health issues have risen drastically.2 Though the broader culture continually reinforces an individual ontology, the huge numbers of young people suffering anxiety and depression are evidence of a much more connected world, where humans and all-our-relations suffer together—and potentially can heal together.
Educators are feeling the strain on their own emotions too. Jodi and other educators at the eco-school have worked harder than ever to build community during the polarizing political climate of COVID-19. They have also worked hard to support each other emotionally, by gathering often to debrief and express thoughts. But for these ecologizing educators, some comfort, respite, and healing comes too from simply being outside. When asked about her own self-care, Jodi comments, “The kids have been drumming a lot lately, and it resonates through the trees. I spend a lot of time listening to that.” She has also been gifted a song to help her heal, and she spends time singing it to herself.
Doing School Differently
Despite the incredibly hard work and valiant efforts of many educators and administrators, standard education generally fails to make the deep changes necessary to shift culture toward being a more caring, just, and ecologically responsible one. And because of that, it is failing a great many students whose relational awareness, creativity, diversity, and multiple ways of knowing are overlooked. It’s failing parents who report feeling traumatized by their own schooling experiences. It’s failing environmentally minded educators who cannot attend to their students or the more-than-human world in meaningful ways because institutionalized education sets up implicit and explicit obstacles every step of the way. And it is failing our more-than-human kin, whose suffering, losses, and destruction have resulted from careless, elitist, and anthropocentric cultural tendencies.
We see ecologizing education as moving toward a meaningful alternative, an opportunity to bring about change in Western cultural modes of being. Here, Hemlock, Salal, and Water Strider are honored as co-teachers, as they offer rich and sometimes spontaneous lessons that exceed the lesson plans human teachers alone could create. Truth and reconciliation processes are active and ongoing, as Indigenous educators who have developed long relationships with students, educators, and administers share histories, stories, and ceremonies with the school communities. Parents, caregivers, and other community members are respectfully invited to share their own wisdom and expertise with students, marking the recognition of a more equitable distribution of knowledge, as opposed to a vision of knowledge as necessarily professionalized and hierarchical. This collectiveness fosters a greater sense of belonging and inclusivity and offers a wider range of learning. In doing so, it honors somatic, intuitive, relational, and diverse other ways of knowing. Bringing children outdoors into an ecologizing frame to interact with soils, plants, and waters supports their health and well-being, even as many struggle with the relational anxiety of the present world. Here, at this school without walls, practices of isolation and individualism are being undone, while practices of community-building, cultural and individual change, and collective healing are being enacted.
Furthermore, we believe that the immersive, critical, philosophically robust, and hands-on experiences of ecologizing schools better prepare children for our ecologically uncertain future and for understanding and caring for their local and global ecosystems. The children are able to build community, to take risks, to engage with the natural world, to question the status quo, and to have discussions about adaptation, self-care, and community, all in the context of their rapidly changing world. Activism is a part of their world, beginning in kindergarten, and at a fundamental level, they are learning a different way of being human in the world. This deeply relational education causes them to think first about how their actions will impact the ecological world. One wonders how the world might look if the leaders of tomorrow hold such commitments.
Imagining Cultural Change
What might North American culture look like if, indeed, it were to radically change? Having been dragged through standard education and being fully surrounded by the dominant culture ourselves, we sometimes struggle to imagine it. Yet we catch heartening glimpses here and there.
Some of the small-scale local farms popping up in our area offer one glimpse. The microfarm might have a market stand next to the road where locals come for eggs, greens, in-season veggies, maybe even a few jams and jellies. In front, a pile of small brown envelopes are tossed into a shoebox. Scrawled in purple crayon on the open lid are the words “Heritage seeds, free for the taking to a home that will love and care for them as they deserve.” All around are signs of the work being done and of further jobs that need doing as well as many things that appear to be held together by love, twine, and duct tape. The human components of this microfarm might appear regularly at the local farmer’s market, selling the results of their care and earthy relationships. The children and adults involved in these gardens can be overheard mumbling about seed-saving, microclimates, and composting. Sometimes, they are just talking quietly to their more-than-human partners. On occasion, they might hold forth a little against monocultures, big agriculture and factory farms, disappearing genetic diversity, pesticides, and soil loss.
Chances are, our microfarmers feel themselves to be outside and different from mainstream culture. At the same time, they feel a bond between and among the humans and more-than-humans in this enterprise. In fact, they might even feel that this is a shared project—where success will involve all beings playing their part—that undoes any sense that the humans are “in charge.” And these people are onto something with their knowledge of the lands, their commitment to place, their desire to live and let live, and the diversity of the beings and the diversity of soils they work with. They point in a promising direction with their lived experience of shared flourishing and the real challenges those entail. They model eco-ethics with their concern for human alienation from the natural world, for the damage caused by the colonial orientation of the culture, and for the effects of all of this on our health and well-being, as well as that of future generations.
Ecologizing education does not require that humans visit distant and “wild” ecosystems. Rather, it is about finding, supporting, and sustaining the place right here, where most of us live and work, where humans and all-our-relations can live together in a mutually beneficial, flourishing relationship. That includes the city school and neighborhood. As we have seen, without some thoughtful and purposeful mediation, the culture as it currently stands merely recapitulates itself. Without such mediation, what we have is centralized human domination, a loss of diversity and voice, and, in education, a troubling monoculturing. Of course, many teachers in mainstream schools do incredible work in their classrooms to respond to the diversity of humanity which they encounter every day. Yet we question whether the more massive, sometimes factorylike, form of design is ultimately just as problematic in our schools as it is in our agriculture.3 Hence, the reason we see the microfarms as a glimpse of the changing culture we seek.
Who, then, might be able to enact similar microcosms of ecologizing effort? The qualities called for include community-building, activism, care, a willingness to take risks, and an orientation toward change. Importantly, this work cannot be done alone. No one can care for and grow well all the seeds themselves. Different beings have different aptitudes. All are needed and are welcome. Anyone who understands seed-saving will readily recognize this. One person may take the lead in tomatoes (or even just protecting fifty species of sauce tomato) and another in rare types of beans or squash, creeping out at night to hand-pollinate and ensure parentage and lineage. Accepting seeds from the roadside shoebox comes with a responsibility to care, come into relationship, and keep the line alive.
Seeds are the adults and Elders of the future, be they Human, Tomato, Duck, or Aphid, and it makes a difference into what soil they are placed. It matters what foods, environments, possibilities, and cultures they are offered. It matters how they are cared for, what room they are given to grow, and how that growth is shaped, directed, limited, and enhanced. Educators, like farmers, play a huge role in all of this, and the range of possibilities for how to be teacher/farmer is tremendous. From monocultured agri-farming to place-based microfarming, the “results” are diverse.
Throughout this book, we have been pushing for an educational process that takes the natural world seriously, that questions the colonial and unjust relationships toward planet and people, and that sees possibility in these ecologizing education school projects. Now, as we near the end, we would like to turn our gaze once more to the ecologizing educators themselves. We offer a frame we call the 4 C’s (or maybe four seeds), which are community, critical, care, and change. The first three of these represent important aspects of the ecologizing educator, and while most teachers doing this ecologizing work will have a certain measure of each of these, we’ll discuss them individually. But rather than thinking of each section—the community-focused ecologizing educator, the critically engaged ecologizing educator, and the care-based ecologizing educator—as being a description of a single ecologizing educator who brings one particular strength or capacity or fluency to their work. We recommend thinking about these as much more fluid than that. Sometimes care, for instance, might be the purview of a single individual, but it is more likely to flex and move between, among, and across members depending on the particular situation or the energy of those involved. The fourth C—change-embracing ecological education—takes us back to the farm, where we are reminded that change will require vision, timely action, risk-taking, creative energy, perseverance, and an enduring optimism.
The Community-Focused Ecologizing Educator4
Community is the soil of ecologizing education. Without it, not much happens. Yes, it’s possible to produce food from marginal soil. However, that is largely a testament to plant resilience, and plants in such conditions are hardly flourishing. Unfortunately, in many educational situations, community is an under-considered component of the work. Not so at NEST and Maple Ridge. We see community as an important factor in our mutually beneficial flourishing, so much of our work is about having, creating, retreating into, finding, and growing it. Just like creating good compost, creating community involves bringing many sources of energy and minerals together, monitoring them on an ongoing basis, turning the whole mix over, adding heat at times when things are not breaking down, and letting the detritivores and processes do their thing. For the ecologizing educator, community work involves careful consideration of place, all-our-relations, and all human members of the community, including those not immediately proximal to the work (for example, grandparents, neighbors, and educators from other schools).
This work also includes recognizing and at times facilitating the importance and range of diversity present, a conscious gathering of skills, an active engagement while building internal, authentic systems. In many cases—and perhaps this is little surprising—community-building also includes conscious acts of separation from the mainstream or neighboring but different communities. In our work, separation from “the outside” has helped create safety, mutual understanding, and the space to practice different ways of being and knowing in the world, away from larger cultural pressures. In gardening terms, this work might be like creating a micro-niche—an ideal growing space for plants (ways of being) that are usually not sustained by the larger ecosystem in which one finds oneself. Where we live, for example, soft body fruits can only be grown by changing the soil, by building reflective walls, and by protecting the plants from too much rain and insufficient heat.
At both schools, particular individuals understand their role as that of “gatekeeper.” They act as translators for and protectors of the community, often, it should be noted, at a cost to their own well-being. For example, they might be responsible for communicating the school’s mission to a new administrative body or translating the community’s needs, ideas, and values into other languages, that of funders, for instance. These individuals act as a kind of educator for those who might be interested in our project but only have a passing connection. This work is similar to the work of the farmer at the weekend market when someone asks about seed-saving or about growing such amazing pole beans. In the case of the eco-school, the work might involve helping superintendents understand in empirical and individualized terms the weird language of a more relational and qualitative assessment process. It might involve sharing with colleagues, through professional development, for instance, some of the lessons and learnings that are working “down on the farm.”
At other times, our gatekeepers prevent curious but ill-informed guests from casually visiting. Doing this work provides a layer of protection for the community to grow, take root, and create its own culture. This act of separating and protecting the ecologizing project from the mainstream is also a political recognition that often these nascent communities are under threat and aren’t completely viable as separate entities yet. They need time to build resistance, and they need beings willing to stand up for them. We have found that doing this work of protector and translator for developing extended community awareness mitigates the extent to which the school and its more immediate community has had to deal with potential aggression, violence, and suspicions of the general culture.
The community-focused ecologizing educator also facilitates new traditions to signify and orient members toward different priorities. To make our change goal explicit, it is important that we consider how chosen traditions reify and glorify particular acts and ways of being. In other words, we must ask ourselves what traditions, ceremonies, and celebrations best align with who we as a community are wanting to be and become? For example, graduating students have offered gifts of care and a plant to each incoming kindergartener. They have even started to transfer “friend-tree” relationships, such that the leaving student who has had a deep connection with a particular tree/microsite in the area invites an incoming student into that community.
Community-based forums have been created so that students can share their learnings with the larger community while also educating the community itself about the education that is happening at these schools. Having students explain the differences between raptors, accipiters, and strigiformes while standing beneath full-sized artistic models of these birds of prey makes the learnings at these “different” schools concrete and explicit in important ways. Additionally, Elders have been invited to lead ceremonies, helping establish and give significance to new/old traditions that orient these communities toward Land and local beings in different ways. These acts of cultural resurgence support ways of being and knowing that have been backgrounded and disavowed by the mainstream. They have also provided important epistemological and cosmological inspiration for our schools as they seek to separate themselves from troublesome norms.
Our research suggests that alternative schools and communities that overlook these deeper, cultural implications of traditions sometimes struggle to maintain their meaningful and hard-fought changes. Partly, this is because without these traditions they don’t have something to lean on when the “perfectly reasonable” mainstream—in the form of a superintendent, a concerned parent, or even that little doubting voice in one’s head—comes calling. When it comes to durable, transformative change, keeping the status quo at bay can be an unending challenge. Deeper meaning, sustained by thoughtful traditions and celebrations, can assist a community through challenging times. But we offer one final piece of advice: new traditions should be created with caution, for once offered, they can be difficult to undo. Do a thing twice, and it can become the “way things are done.”
Another part of the community educator’s work involves including more diversity. On the farm, we might think of nutrients, minerals, and a full range of detritivores and species in order to respond to disease. But we would also want to consider genetics and the diversity of that “library of the possible.” After all, the more diverse the genes, the more options the garden has. In some ways, this takes us back to idea of old-growthing, which is at the core of what we do. For community educators, diversity is about involving and listening to different voices and experiences within the membership—and not the merely human. Just as one might expand the number of volumes in a library, this is about having the widest range of ideas, imaginations, and possibilities included.
Of course, community is not a static end point. It is not some thing that can be reached. “Community” is a process, a verb, rather than an entity, a noun. Community (or perhaps, more accurately, “communitying”) requires diverse membership, divergent ideas, challenging voices, trickster energies—only then will it continue to flourish. It is an ongoing, imperfect, ever-learning, and incomplete educational project at its very heart, and the community educator needs to be able to lean in, roll with the seasons, and add care, heat, or pruning when needed. These capacities of building relationship, of cultivating space for diversity, of knowing when to plant and when to prune, of acting to protect from and translate for the mainstream and its threats, of leaning into change and the rich humus of possibility—all of these are going to be truly necessary for people going forward in our changing and uncertain world.
At the deepest level, the community educator is working toward belonging, inclusion, and shared purpose (that is, mutually beneficial flourishing), as these appear to be integral to both individual well-being and community vitality. Ecologizing communities are likely going to need to create and learn the values, skills, and rituals that foster and further their goals. At these schools, the best learning happens when the spaces are safe, diverse, open, with less direction by the human teacher or other centralized authority. By safe, we are not suggesting that these spaces should be passive, quiet, or strife-free or that all community members are assumed to be “on the same page.” Those kinds of spaces often just ignore diversity for the sake of an artifice of harmony. Rather, these are places where work happens; where there is a commitment to each other and the process; where there is comfort in and celebration of diversity and discomfort; where mistakes can be made and biases expressed, discovered, named, and examined; and where the goal is never for some overarching homogeneity. Our farm doesn’t want the beans to try to become adequate cucumbers but to be the best beans they can be. This is the community educator’s challenge too—to not be the center, the expert, the singular being on whom the enterprise depends—for who knows being a bean better than a bean? Instead, the community educator is an important facilitator, supporter, and skilled communicator, who can create and protect these spaces and challenge the community to see their own vision and to acknowledge their ongoing problematic assumptions.
The Critically Engaged Ecologizing Educator
Most small-scale farms are filled with questions, experiments, and ongoing challenges. Why is the orchard dropping flowers just as they set fruit? Why are none of the brassicas growing well? The skills and orientations to the world that are involved in making these assessments parallel those of the critical educator—among them humility, curiosity, a willingness to ask questions and include oneself in the problems, and a desire to change and make the space fruitful for all. And yet many microfarms are also asking deeper questions, critiquing the accepted norms of agriculture, and positioning themselves as being different from mainstream ways of doing agriculture, land care, and even life. It is here, then, that the real parallel to the critically engaged ecologizing educator emerges.
As we have already discussed, to establish a safe, inclusive, and cohesive community in which culturally, racially, ethnically, and ecologically diverse people and beings can successfully work and grow, we need to acknowledge many unique histories, experiences, needs, voices, and contributions.5 But we also need ask questions about the overall system, identify oppressions and marginalizations of various forms, and acknowledge the resulting violences and exclusions. Ecologizing educators are making decisions about how to be in the world, but this includes, as on the microfarm, deciding what not to be and how and why one is choosing to be different.
These “different” (that is, ecologizing) communities must find ways to name, bear witness to, and seek responses to eco-socio-historical-political issues, both past and present, which are impacting people and the more-than-human world. Furthermore, they must seek to do this without perpetuating the violences of systemic racism, instrumental resourcism, hyperactive capitalism, competitive, hierarchical isolationism, or any number of other systemic injustices—and without getting knocked offtrack by blind spots or obfuscatory strategies such as confrontation, anger, defensiveness, denial, or guilt.6 After all, it doesn’t really help to blame the broccoli, a brassica, if it doesn’t grow. Instead, we need to figure out what is happening in the larger community that makes it impossible for the brassicas to thrive. Issues facing community members often have deep historical roots, and daily oppression thrives in judgment, silence, and invisibility.7 This critical conversation also extends into human/more-than-human relations, especially in reference to modernity’s coloniality.8
The bedrock of oppression is power inequity, which can be experienced at multiple levels. For example, society has constructed stories, or dominant cultural narratives, about disadvantaged or inferior groups.9 This process of “othering,” or objectifying, people and the natural world serves to maintain power imbalances. Often, these stories help those with more power and privilege to rationalize their position. These stories also become the status quo and the imaginative tools of future generations (as our “forts” example illustrates), which makes the work of the critical educator twofold: their task is not only to identify and name the challenges but also to offer other options to replace the problematic norms and narratives. After all, it isn’t enough to just stand back and critique.
Listening to, acknowledging, and understanding stories, therefore, is a first step in repairing the damaging narratives that society has created about those who are “different” (read: lesser than). If we are truly looking through a critical lens, though, we will also notice that listening itself can be problematized. Who is being heard? How is listening happening? What is prioritized by any particular listener? Are the interpretations themselves layered in uncritical cultural problematics? Eco-social change and ecologizing education, then, often begins with empowerment, that is, addressing unjust psychological, sociopolitical, and structural circumstances through understanding, awareness, action—and getting out of the way.10
Ecologizing educators must then also consider how to do this across the species divide. What does it mean to listen to, acknowledge, and better understand the stories of Apple, Cabbage, Honeybee, Wren, and Earthworm? What work needs to be done to hear through to those stories from beyond the colonial narrative that positions humans as “better than” and nature as voiceless/rights-less? When individuals and collectives reclaim and recreate their history and continue to challenge destructive stories that serve to divide, communities can better understand and appreciate the resistance, resilience, and strengths of their members. Such reflexive and critical awarenesses and the work needed to teach and foster them are necessary in order for individuals to recognize the pathways of privilege, to shift the inertia of apathy, and to support communities in a move toward more just, respectful, and equitable relationships.
This kind of criticality is understood to be an important component of ecologizing education. Privileges and injustices need to be named, problematic assumptions explored, and diverse voices, ways of being, and doing sought out. Much of our critical work relates to issues of power, marginalization, and colonization, along with a commitment to finding ways to not recapitulate those forms. We understand power as operating at varying levels and as being embedded within language; this challenges us to think carefully before speaking and to notice how often seemingly comfortable pathways of speech are deeply anti-social and anti-ecological.
This is complex work, where we are prone to blind spots because—as we came to understand—epistemological, ontological, and even cosmological positions themselves are cultural creations. This, in turn, led us to seek insight from other-than-Western-knowing traditions and to engage with the global scholarship around issues of cognitive justice and the colonization of knowledge and knowing, writ large.11 Perhaps this step is obvious now, but it was a specific blind spot in our seemingly radical design.
Our point here is that adopting criticality does not mean simply picking up a single critical discourse and assuming that it covers all of the community’s needs. Individual communities might, because of their particular makeup or training, be better prepared to be critical in some areas, such as in matters of gender and class, and less prepared in others, say, ecological and global matters. For example, an eco-school might look to ecofeminists as it seeks to develop deep environmental commitments, robust language, practices, policies, and awarenesses regarding the more-than-human world and gender—yet, that theorizing might be less useful in examining issues relating to economic privilege, race, and Indigeneity.
Part of the work of the critically engaged ecologizing educator, then, is to help create internal, approved ways to extend the critical work of the community, while at the same time discovering their own, and the community’s, under-examined areas. This can be done, for example, by seeking systems of team-building, inviting in diversity facilitators, or creating internal policies that might support the community to improve in myriad areas.
We see three important roles for the critically engaged ecologizing educator within the community. First, critical educators can help communities perceive themselves as incomplete and ever-in-process. For example, at Maple Ridge we saw ongoing educative experiences as essential because of our belief in human possibility, the assumption of fallibility, and a sense that this work is, by nature, never complete. Our experience also suggests that this process of employing the critical in order to change is not simply to be applied at the group, community, or institutional level. An active, vibrant, mutually influencing back and forth exists between community and the individual, and amongst individuals. Consequently, change at the community level might cause, inspire, or force change for individuals, and those shifts might, in turn, lead to reconceptualizations and further changes at the community level. Second, critical educators are involved in the creation of systems for ongoing critical self-examination because, based on our experience, there is a tendency toward complacency, stasis, and stability. As such, we need to create formal processes to allow criticality to thrive. And third, critical educators are involved in discovering, suggesting, and supporting the implementation of different ways of being, different systems of language, and different, more equitable, options for the community going forward. Just to critique is not enough. Communities need implementable options if they are really going to change.
This work also requires a recognition that intention and action are not mutually synonymous and that both are needed if change is actually to happen. We can offer one of our own experiences to illustrate this: We had committed to undoing the anthropocentrism and species elitism of Western epistemology and in the public school system. Teachers, staff, and community members held gatherings to explore this positioning of nature as co-teacher, then worked to define their goals, change their linguistic ways, evaluate their practices, and review their progress in light of this professed goal. But this process of critical self-reflection with the expressed purpose of “checking oneself and one’s community” and “walking the talk” tended to vary quite a bit in terms of formality, consistency, and accuracy. Often there was little translation into practice even after good thoughts were shared in the gatherings. Thus, in order to move from good intentions to actions we sought out people who were to be responsible for holding us all to account. Finding ways to incorporate ongoing criticality into active official processes and procedures is important and requires a good facilitator, that is, a good critical ecologizing educator, or two, or three.
Ultimately, there is strength in difference. All rich and successful sustainable market gardens recognize this. Monocultures tend to destroy pollinators, overuse particular nutrients, and deaden the soil, whereas the self-sustaining market garden sees the value in the nitrogen fixer, the systems of pollinators, and in compost created from plants which might not have a direct role in human consumption, such as Borage or Yarrow. Microfarming\\s also tend to see the farm as a community, such that if something isn’t flourishing—such as broccoli—perhaps something is not quite right with the entire system. Those somethings need to be located, named, and, hopefully, addressed, because every being is better for having a healthy orchard and happy brassicas.
Since fostering diversity is important for the health of all, this means that the ability to bring groups together, to challenge them critically, and to leverage diversity is an increasingly essential skill.12 Diverse groups function better when they are differing but working together; that is, the focus is not on conformity but on leveraging the full talent or contributions of all their members: Earthworm, Green Mulch, Hoverfly, and Potassium. Individuals who are embedded in a network of supportive, authentic, and positive relationships are more likely to come into healing and also participate in political, social, and community life.13 When groups work toward enacting a more just vision while overcoming discrimination, the resulting transformation that benefits everyone is a dynamic, imperfect, ongoing process. Being reflexive, actively critical, and transparent about one’s actions is essential.
This brings us to one final point: in colonial Western society, a “neutral” stance simply doesn’t exist, and in some ways, that is the key insight for the critical ecologizing educator. We live in a society where people can benefit from oppression without being overtly oppressive themselves. Thus, as we have noted, we also need to be critically aware that, in our determination to help or change the world, we can also unwittingly cause harm through our “good intentions” and blind spots. Communities who engage in regular individual and group self-reflexive practices—supported criticality—are often the most aware about addressing this directly.
The Care-Based Ecologizing Educator
Caring teachers are crucial in any education setting, but “care” in the context of the ecologizing educator goes beyond the students in the classroom and is about learning how to build, sustain, and restore relationships with myriad diverse others. This notion of care extends to include the natural world and the well-being of the ecosystems that sustain and support learners and schools.
The care-based ecologizing educator seeks to prioritize the healthy wholeness of the learners and the community. A lot of psychic dissonance and trauma exists in the larger culture. Indeed, environmental educators highlight multiple compounding issues impacting students: lack of a sense of belonging, stressful familial situations, feeling alienated from place or people, and experiencing pressure to be someone other than themselves. Mainstream educational systems are also recognizing this and now offer mindfulness training, trauma-informed practices, social-emotional learning programs, and mentoring with regard to building relationships. Yet, those steps may not be enough without more substantive change. Indigenous scholars point directly at colonization and the ongoing trauma of schooling as problematic contributors; at the same time, they look toward community, ceremony, traditions, and reconnections to Land as ways into well-being.14
One of the most striking challenges we encountered in our ecologizing education work, once we peeled back the layers, has been the depth of the pain throughout our communities. Although Western medicine is useful in many situations, the way it has tended to biomedicalize, individualize, and position health as simply the absence of disease does not appear to deal well with the shared pains of alienation, eco-anxiety, and the feelings of loss related to the destruction of more-than-human friends, neighbors, and places. For the care-based ecologizing educator, the question becomes, What happens to ideas of health, well-being, and love if one assumes relationality? That is, if the goal is flourishing and not simply the absence of disease, and if individual health is inextricably linked to context and community, then where and how might one begin? And, given that these kinds of challenges are becoming a regular part of the education system, what knowledge, attributes, and abilities might be usefully developed by educators who seek to teach from the heart?
Intriguingly, well-being overlaps with other practices that are central to ecologizing education. The quality of our relationships significantly impacts our well-being. Reinforcing a connection with Land and more-than-humans, for instance, generates a felt sense of belonging, meaning, and being cared for. Our work in ecologizing education not only addresses isolation and alienation but seems to propel many individuals into a mutually reinforcing experience of reciprocity. As they become more mindful, thoughtful, and caring toward others, they are more likely to experience how much the beings around them are, in fact, caring for and gifting the humans. This is a reciprocity that can never be fully repaid, given the extent of the gifts offered to each of us by the natural world. But we can certainly do much better.
These relation-building skills can be seen powerfully at work back on the microfarm. For example, the greenhouse at NEST has become a central hub for this kind of learning. In addition to lessons about planting, growing, and food, children learn to care for soil and seedlings, enjoying the gifts/fruits presented in return and experiencing the garden as a place of safety, respite, and refuge. The greenhouse has also become a source of fresh food for the larger community around the school. This connection between the social and the ecological appears to have supported some students into becoming stronger advocates for increased well-being and flourishing across the community. Those of us in ecologizing education believe that caring for and building relationships with others not only creates health and well-being, but also inspires a greater willingness to advocate and even fight for the natural world.
Change-Embracing Ecologizing Education
In some ways, our metaphor of the small sustainable farm is incomplete when we come to consider change-embracing ecologizing education. To make it work, we’ll have to back up a bit into the history of our little farm. We start with a small group of humans interested in living closer to the land, growing their own good food, and being differently in the world. They have been looking for an appropriate piece of property and finally, one day, a 7.5-acre chunk of land comes on the market. It has a bit of a swale in it and a small copse of evergreens near the road, and it’s been parceled off from a much larger property that has been farmed industrially for several generations. In the world of mass production, this little chunk of land is now considered marginal—it simply requires too much effort for too little return. The soil is tired and compacted from hard use. Some macro-nutrients are over-represented, while some micronutrients are limited because it has been monocultured all these years. Insect diversity is low due to reliance on pesticides. This Land has existed in one cultural way of doing farming for decades. Now, the project in front of those who are willing to hear the call is to cultivate a different culture, a heterogenous one—a more diverse, interconnected, interdependent, mutually beneficial and flourishing one.
Two of the most obvious, though at times under-acknowledged, challenges in moving toward an ecologizing education are these: (1) change tends not to be a central mandate for most formal education projects and (2) there is not much to work with. The soil fertility is gone, the lived and imaginative diversity is missing, and no one seems to know where to get water. The role of mass education—and, really, education in general—has been to bring the next generation into the norms, ways of being, structural systems, even cosmologies, of the dominant culture, or the culture that is designing the system as it currently stands. We might even make the case that North American public education is bringing its students into the culture as it used to exist; that is, we sometimes seem to be educating students for a 1950s version of the world, which hasn’t existed for a long time.
Public education is, by its very nature, then, quite monoculture-ish and conservative. This is evidenced not so much in its left or right political positioning as in its focus on conserving traditions, on single, mass-applied ways of doing things, and on an oddly outdated vision of where the world is and where it will be when these young people become adults. Public education is not usually a site for cultural progressiveness, radicality, or even change activism. And yet, as suggested throughout this book, cultural change is necessarily a profoundly educational project. If we are going to change the world, education and educators are going to do much of the heavy lifting. Contemporary education exists, then, within a sort of push and pull dynamic: the pull of the historical aims of public education and its desire to stay the same, and the push of the urgent needs of the planet and questions of justice at large.
This work is not easy, we know that. Individual educators experience rising pressures as class sizes increase, as recognition of and the desire to respond to the diversity of learners grows, and as responsibilities expand. For example, as funding disappears for various mental health programs, the responsibility of meeting these needs is downloaded to classrooms, whether or not educators are ready for them. And yet, if our metaphor still holds some use, healing the depleted land involves healing for all—Soil, Broccoli, Wasp, and Child. To some extent, the farm works because there is a vision, plus patience, plus the ability to act when the moment (or the fruit) is ripe. Timing is important. No point putting seeds into frozen ground, but if the neighbor has a pile of good manure they want rid of, today is the day to shovel it (image and metaphor chosen intentionally). This visioning and responding to the opportunities of the moment, then, is part of the work of the ecologizing change educator. Take risks, try things out, have multiple projects on the go at the same time because often you don’t know when, or even if, it will come together—until it does.
Change also calls for a creative energy—think of the trickster—as ecologizing educators are on the lookout for perspective-changing surprises from students or their more-than-human co-teachers. The forgotten compost produces abundant pumpkins, and the whole farm changes to align with what the orange gourd is asking and doing. Growing political diversity and polarization increasingly reveals that our efforts to maintain a “neutral” stance are problematic. It reveals more than that, though, because it also, importantly, exposes that assumed position of neutrality as the incongruous one it has always been.
Indeed, teachers are being told by some parents that climate change does not exist, that Indigenization is religious education, that eco-education is propaganda, that real learning happens indoors, and that politics has no place in the classroom. Our work has made clear, though, that the role of the teacher is always political and that—no matter what position one takes in the classroom and with respect to curriculum, pedagogy, and content—“neutral” simply doesn’t exist. Educators are always inscribing ideas, priorities, and orientations to the world, even ways of being, on the lives of their students—no matter how neutral they may claim to be.
Maintaining the status quo reaffirms a commitment to “no change” and reinscribes systemic injustices and environmental problematics that are, at this point in history, untenable. If our little group of farmers tries to “use” the land in the way it has been used for the last fifty years, the whole project will fail. It is too expensive, it is not appropriate for the place and the times, and it won’t fill the needs and possibilities of all involved. As such, the ecologizing change educator is, by definition, thrust into the position of activist and advocate for the world they would like to see and to be a part of. They are striving toward allyship, standing with those they deem unjustly marginalized. They also are positioned, necessarily, in the role of educator for parents and caregivers and the larger community too so that everyone understands how education is changing, and what it is becoming.
At the level of the school, the district, and the larger system, the same challenges exist. These are conservative operations, slow or unwilling to change, and often behind the times and out of step with the uncertain future that is approaching. Here, based on our interviews and research, the question becomes one of how to create policies, institutional spaces, lines of communication, cultures of openness, and the educational and fiscal supports such that vibrant, rich possibilities are allowed to emerge and flourish. Our experience suggests that although partnerships need to be made with those systems, often change happens in clandestine spaces—on the margins, in the cracks between immovable edifices, on small pieces of land surrounded by larger mega-operations. Thus, advocates for change are pushed to find allies, to look for opportunities from within, and to gird themselves for a fight. This impression is furthered by assumptions of permanent scarcity—change costs money, after all—and the prospect of pushing the Sisyphean boulder up an ever-growing slope. These problematic metaphors were questioned and critiqued by many in ecologizing school communities who see them as undermining the abundance and emergence of possible change and the wonders that are springing up all over the schools—and as continuing to position the status quo.
Change educators understand the challenges they are up against, but they don’t see them as intractable. In fact, they actively seek ways to continually undo and redo. To have joy in the face of deep sadness. To see possibility rather than imaginative limits. To find abundance in the face of assumed scarcity. To notice emergence rather than hopelessness. And to let interdependence and diversity be the compost out of which their change pumpkins might arise.
Just like on the microfarm, ecologizing efforts can always go farther and do more. Admittedly, the work can be overwhelming at times. Sometimes the gardener leans on the fence—the not-yet-finished or starting-to-rot-out fence—to assess everything that needs doing. Ecologizing work is a verb, a process, filled with small, but still wonderful, successes. The pond holds water and the Muscovies produce a clutch. The three sisters—Corn, Bean, and Squash—have a banner year, and in so doing, declare their new home satisfactory and offer gifts to all. The diversity of songbirds increases. Garter Snake returns to the land and crosses the garden path.
We encourage readers to treasure the joys, the discoveries, the companionship, and the successes, however small, that appear in their efforts to change. Revel in children’s insights into imagining and reimagining with the land. Remember that no matter the size of the project, from community garden to school district overhaul, this work takes time and mistakes will be made. Diversity helps. This book begins a conversation, but it’s far from a final word. Our hope is that readers will keep the conversations, discoveries, and possibilities going. And let us know how things turn out.
Changing Times
At the end of this school year, Jodi, the most recent Maple Ridge principal, and one of their key educational assistants are retiring and leaving the school. With the fires, floods, and plagues this community has faced this year, it’s a stressful transition out of long and meaningful work in eco-justice. In truth, these knowledge keepers, along with the original principal, Clayton Maitland, are irreplaceable. Their relational understandings of place and people and their abilities as ecologizing educators simply cannot be quickly or easily understood by someone else.
On the other hand, more and more students are joining and graduating from Maple Ridge and NEST every year. We hope these young, new knowledge keepers will continue the work we have started—and likely in richer ways than we have yet envisioned. These are big visions and big challenges aided by courage, a desire to get started, and a commitment to place and beings. It is a celebration of life throughout.