In Search of the Eco-Teacher

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

Abstract

The vision of the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project (MRESP) is not only to offer the provincial curriculum using more experiential and place-based pedagogies, but to impact upon the culture of ‘school’ and, potentially, the wider societal culture. Thus, the research project rests on a deep mandate of cultural change towards ecological flourishing.

David Orr (2004, p. 174) states that bringing dominant western culture into balance with ecological realities requires “nothing less than the recalibration of human intentions with the way the world works as a physical system (p.174).” Implementing cultural change in education is complex and challenging on a number of levels (Sarason, 1996). Disputing the largely unquestioned values of modernism that infuse conventional public education across the globe and exploring the possibilities for a new, as yet ill-defined, conceptualisation of teaching and learning rooted in a deep relationality with the more-than-human world (Abram, 1997) poses challenges of a greater magnitude still.

When considering the public education system as a site of cultural change it goes without saying that the role of teacher is pivotal in mediating school culture as it struggles towards a more ecological worldview. It is this aspect of the project of cultural change within education and, by implication, society writ large that forms the basis of this paper. Teachers are at the heart of any educational initiative and so a crucial question, inspired by the research at MRESP, arises: What are the orientations, dispositions, and capabilities necessary to teach in a place-based, community-based, emergent, experiential, ecological public school comprised of multi-age groupings?

The author explores six key insights that have appeared in response to the above question and result from two years of interviews, observations, and discussions at the school. Most of the insights have arisen as a result of observations of what the teachers at the school are already doing together with questions about what might be missing in current practice, questions which may be asked at any moment in the day-to-day activities of the school. The emerging characteristics that are explored are contextual and particular to this research project. They are not offered as universal generalizations, although it is likely that most environmental, placed-based, experiential educators working in the public education systems of the north and west will readily identify with them. The six points of discussion are: laterality of mind; deep reflection and reflexivity; mediating decolonization and reinhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003); anticipatory spontaneity; structuring learning through pedagogical rhythmicality; attentive engagement.

Author

• Sean Blenkinsop, Simon Fraser University