Developing Pedagogical Witnessing and Community With Kin, on the Turbulent Edges of Teacher Education

• In Event: Canadian Perspectives on Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education: Establishing a Research Community

Abstract

In Authors C, we explored the ways environmental education (EE) remains marginal in teacher education. Since this publication, we continue to 'garden the margins of the academy', working alongside new teachers and our more-than-human Kin in the gardens, forests and tidal waters on the edges of our university campus, on the unceded, traditional, ancestral Lands of the Musqueam people. Our presentation will illuminate new insights through theoretical explorations and a performative narrative on environmental teacher education alongside Orcas, weeds and Old Growth giants using photography, poetry, music and movement.

We conceive of EE as pedagogical witnessing (Iseke 2013), engaging the Rs of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and telling stories (Archibald 2008; Kirkness & Barnhart 2001); countering the language of self-validating reduction (Weston 1996) which separates humans from the rest of the living world, to disastrous effect.

Following principles of permaculture in our research, we cultivate the edges and value the marginal, recognizing the interfaces between as valuable, diverse and productive (Holmgren 2011). Intertidal zones and other liminal spaces are where new life is generated. Swirling eddies and turbulence around the edges (of a creek or of a culture) bring upwelling, mixing, newness, and never-before-seen relationships. In today’s crisis of the Anthropocene, we cannot go about ‘business as usual’; we look to the turbulent edges’ promise as loci of creativity and survival.

As teacher educators and learners, we witness and share the stories of the more-than-human beings who live on the edge, often overlooked and devalued through human actions. Through pedagogical witnessing alongside our human and more-than-human colleagues, we aim to re-enchant relationships and community with the natural world, our ki and kin (Kimmerer 2015), in ethics embodying the Rs of Indigenous ways of knowing: Respect, Reciprocity, Relatedness, Responsibility, Rootedness, Reverence, Resilience (Archibald 2008; Kirkness & Barnhart 2001).

Authors C1’s work welcomes students to the margins of worlds through an exploration of Wonders. A marine educator of over 30 years, she has collected a precious cabinet of ocean curiosities: personal intertidal beach treasures including shark jaws, skate skeletons, seal skulls and sea stars. Students engage in conversation and relationship of/with a Wonder through drawing, story, and poetry. Wonder stories are shared within ways of knowing, being, doing, and healing through science, aesthetics, history, ethics, and action (Hart, Jickling & Kool 1999). The group explores Wonders in their intertidal home at the beach, further developing relationships, posing questions, and sharing stories.

Author C2’s and colleagues' work in the learning garden and forest margins engages new relationships with kin that has been devalued and made 'disposable' through self-validating reductive languaging: weeds, pests, creepy-crawlies, invasive species. Sustained observation practices of radical empathy through the arts (sit spots, ecopoetry, sketching, soundscaping, movement, storytelling) and sciences (permaculture, ecological science, respectful harvesting of food and fibre) begin to challenge mainstream practices of monoculture and extermination of 'abject' species. Reviving connections with ancient technologies (Kallis 2014) and contemporary knowledge as 'citizen scientists and artists' helps teachers learn skills for regeneration and resilience.

Authors

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, Independent Scholar

• Sandra Anne Scott, The University of British Columbia

• Susan Gerofsky, The University of British Columbia