"Becoming Teachers Together": Spider Stories and Knots Spun in the Garden

• In Event: 79.034 - Eco-Critical Education Research Toward a Different Global Order: Social Justice and Sustainability in Teacher Education

Abstract

“Becoming teachers together:” Spider stories and knots spun in the garden.
The familiar figure of the teacher, alone in front of a classroom and enclosed by four walls, pervades what is possible in teacher education. What if we could decentre anthropocentric teaching practices and ‘become teachers together’ with other human and nonhuman teachers? Could a garden become a teacher? A plant? A spider? This article engages with these possibilities by reflecting on some difficult knots during the third phase of a site-specific installation series that was part of an arts-based research project with student teachers at The Common Orchard Garden (pseudonym), a teaching and learning garden at the University. During this wintry phase of the project, the author spent three weeks in a basement student teachers’ lounge spinning the flax fibres sown and grown at the garden into linen thread. While spinning, the author began to recognize that togetherness, particularly in the context of interrelated systemic oppression that includes colonialism and speciesism, also necessitates engaging with solitude and failure. Through photographs, narratives of spinning linen with a wooden drop spindle, and conversations with student teachers at the installation, this article is a knotted métissage of solitary spider stories reflecting on urgent calls for multispecies social and environmental justice in teacher education, and how arts-based researchers, teacher educators, and environmental educators can grapple with togetherness both individually and collectively.

Author

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, Independent Scholar