Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Classroom Ecologies That (Re)Claim a Democratic Commons: Value Creation and Creative Coexistence in Application

Sun, April 19, 8:15 to 10:15am, Virtual Room

Abstract

Martusewicz, Edmundson & Lupinacci (2015) argue that the ecological crisis we face today “is really a cultural crisis – that is, a crisis in the way people have learned to think and thus behave in relation to larger life systems and toward each other” (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015, p. 10). They suggest that a Western cultural mindset of hierarchized dualisms structure “relationships that reproduce domination” (p. 69), in contrast with the type of sustainable, just communities that share environmental and cultural resources through face-to-face relationships of “reciprocity, mutual care, and sharing” (p. 257).
One challenge in the classroom is to find a way to go beyond merely calling attention to the hierarchical mindset to practice relational ways of knowing and being, given that conventional schools are structured in adult-child, teacher-student, principal-teacher hierarchies. Although the US possesses a cultural history of living together relationally and making decisions in a democratic commons (Nelson, 2016), with the absence in schools of individual rights, student voice in decision making, and an opportunity for all to succeed, some reformers identify the US education system as the most un-American of the country’s institutions (Gray, 2013).
Seeking a way to (re)claim a democratic commons with their students, the authors of this study, one a K-8 urban teacher, and the other a staff member at a democratically run Sudbury school, have applied Daisaku Ikeda’s (b. 1928) perspective of creative coexistence and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s (1871-1944) philosophy of value-creating pedagogy to foster collaborative school communities. Structured around and embedded in the local community as a site for student direct observation and apperception of causal relations, Makiguchi’s value-creating pedagogy is a praxis of social and “epistemological empowerment” (Goulah & Gebert, 2009, p. 127) whereby children transform from dependent to independent to interdependent contributors of value. Makiguchi’s pedagogy embodies an ethos of “creative coexistence” (Ikeda, 2003), a spirit of mutuality that enables students to participate in and contribute to a democratic commons.
In this paper, we employed dialogic inquiry based on Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of value-creative dialogue (Goulah, 2012) as a research methodology to investigate the tension between relational pedagogies and the pragmatic realities of school communities embedded in a neoliberal society. Our dialogic approach to research makes both of our perspectives explicit, defining us as co-participants of meaning-making instead of the researcher and researched. In this way, we opened the research process to a bidirectional, nonhierarchical exploration of education theory and teacher practice. Our dialogues are not presented verbatim but rather are curated and presented thematically based on a collaborative editing process.
In this study, we articulated specific classroom practices that foster a democratic cultural commons through shared aims based Makiguchi’s value of good and further, we discussed how such practices function to resist the logic of domination through relationships of respect. Additionally, we considered ways teachers in any setting can apply these ideas to their classrooms. Such considerations inform curriculum studies by providing examples of connectivity and collaboration with the most important stakeholders - the students - in educational problem-solving.

Authors