Writing From the Heart-Mind: Cultivating Not-Knowing Toward an "Earth Pedagogy"

• In Event: 43.068 - Fostering Relational Pedagogy: Self-Study as Transformative Praxis

Abstract

The exploration of identity commonly implies a constant uncovering and journeying forward, a quest towards greater and greater knowledge of oneself, in the interests of mastering a profession, a relationship, a student, a life. However, identity may be experienced as a multiple, layered and relational (Smith, 1999) not-knowing, with each un-covering insight implying a covering or re-covering of something else beyond my limited understanding. When I recognize the world, and my own conception of identity, as always “greater than our knowledge of it” (Berry, 1983, p. 56), I may come up against the known and unrecognized limits of my “earthly identity as a member of a species that requires “a ground (Latin, humus < human), a connection, even in exile, to places on the earth” (Smith, 1997, p. 1). My self-recognition as a human being living in, depending on, and being responsible for particular places and communities requires a “healthy humility” (p. 1) towards my earthly relations, even, and perhaps especially, those beyond my known “realm of mastery.”
In this chapter, I engage in an ecohermeneutic life writing/poetic inquiry (Derby, 2014; Brady, 2009; Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) of an unfinished understanding of myself as a being-in-relation living, loving and suffering together-with others in the midst of our collective earthly trouble (Haraway, 2016). I wonder at how the multiple and woven arcs of social and cultural life, histories, geographies and ancestries, “families, practices, languages, roles both inherited and resisted, times, places, heartbreaks and joys” (Jardine, 2015, p. 1) may inhabit my earthly identity experienced as a “deeply local and embodied” (Somerville, 2012, p. 68) not-knowing of relational experience. I ask how I find myself identified–and called to account–by these layered and composting relations in and with my earthly places and beings-in-relation (Haraway, 2016). “It is precisely the difficulty of living in a specific place, with specific people, under specific conditions that inspires the need for reflection and a deepening of our understanding of what we truly need to live” (Smith, 1997, p. 1). I seek an opening of my “heart-mind” (Macy, 2014 par. 6) towards a multiple, layered and relational “earthly identity” of humility, which may be a source of more lively, generous, imperfect, careful, incomplete, loving and not-known relations: with myself, my students, the more-than-human (Abram, 1997), and our earthly limits.

Author

• Jodi Marie Latremouille, Thompson Rivers University