Imagination and Decolonization: Toward a Critical Eco-Hermeneutic Pedagogy

• In Event: Researching Ecological Relationality and the Prospect of Cultural Change Within the Public School System

Abstract

In order to explore the educational value of experience, language, and imagination with respect to ecological education and decolonization, this paper will address the problematic nature of the ‘standardized’ educational experience today. This experience might be described, generally speaking, as that of the classroom and only the classroom; a primarily mechanical, unimaginative, language-driven experience which is often technologically mediated. This inside-the-box experience marginalizes more direct experiences of the natural world and has threatened, as Fettes claims (2013) to put primary experience “at risk of becoming a dwindling resource.” With this statement Fettes echoes many contemporary voices attempting to invoke “direct” or “primary” sensory experience as a fundamentally important dimension of learning.

What then, if we were to remove the walls completely? Drawing upon research at the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project, in which classes are primarily held outdoors, I will explore the equally problematic threat of a faith-like, neo-romantic belief in the educational value of primary experience. This belief tends to be characterized by an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the fluid, culturally mediated, linguified, or hermeneutic reciprocity that whirls between world, word, and meaning.

The central inquiry here seeks to ask: are particular varieties of experience more essential for inciting cultural change and contributing to decolonization? As Fettes (2013) has explored, the standardized, modern school experience not only privileges linguistic and logico-mathematical representation, it tends to deliberately prescribe cultural norms of what should be experienced. This state of affairs differs radically, for example, from Indigenous cultures, which place greater emphasis on learning from the world itself both through observation and through practical and imaginative (or what might be called ‘spiritual’) engagement. This paper will explore the critical and political dimensions of imagination as inextricably bound up in our systems of sense-making. In particular, the ways in which the marginalization of both primary experience and a richer imaginative engagement works to reinforce a fundamentally colonial logic in our education system.

To this end, I will conceive of a critical ecohermeneutic approach to pedagogy as a kind of resonant encounter with the world informed by immersion in the more-than-human world and thoughtful imaginative mediation. Ecohermeneutic inquiry aims to inspire an ecological ethos by eliciting attention to our participatory reciprocity with the world through imaginative engagement. Drawing upon the hermeneutic tradition, I will address the cultural-linguistic historicity informing our being-in-the-world and consider the role of metaphor in provoking ontological attention and cultural transformation. I will conclude by reiterating the need to conceive of an ecohermeneutic approach as a return to a critical, yet lyrical place-based consciousness that necessarily entails decolonization and ethical relationality.

Author

• Michael W. Derby, Simon Fraser University