Malfunctioning Right in Our Backyards or The Strangeness of Ecological Awareness

• In Event: Postdigital Eco-Pedagogies Continued

Abstract

This paper is about ecological awareness. What we are after is a sensibility--one that remains open to the uncanny strangeness inherent in ‘being ecological’ and what this might mean for educational practice. This sensibility requires an examination of the aesthetic dimension, and more specifically how things continually mediate and malfunction. How getting to know a thing is strange business. Most of the time things (say insects) get to know other things (say plants) through strange and pleasurable modes of mediation. But here’s the catch: things always hold back. No mode of mediation, no way of knowing something, ever exhausts a thing. The way things mediate--ontologically and aesthetically speaking--is undervalued in educational philosophy, the learning sciences, environmental education, and, well, just about any other field of education. To get there we wade into the theory side of things, but also an experimental side. So this paper is also about educational philosophy and theoretical experimentation and exploration.
This paper is also about backyards, and in a few different ways. First, we’re literally going to talk about that small strip of pavement or lawn attached to our little homes. Second, we mean backyard as a kind of metaphor. Third, we mean backyard in an uncanny Anthropocenic sense: like a weird, personalized piece of capitalist infrastructure that simultaneously means very little and yet symbolizes the current social and ecological crises caused by capitalism and colonialism. Most people in education would agree land use (land theft) today is ‘crazy’ wrong. And if that’s true, backyards are perfect for pedagogies that are critical of the forces of Empire. We also talk about back yards as a way to understand that everything mediates and eventually malfunctions. If educators are serious about moving outside of Anthropocentrism, it will involve exploration of a richer and ‘flatter’ or more open ontology (whatever that might mean)
Our paper will begin by outlining the aesthetic-philosophical concepts of media and malfunctioning using the work of John Peters, Timothy Morton, and Brian Massumi. The overall aim of this first movement is to glimps a different kind of ecological awareness--or rather different coordinates for ecological awareness. To pursue a kind of transdisciplinary pedagogy; which is a must for education in times called the Anthropocene where the perspective of one discipline alone will not suffice. From here we descend into our backyards with all the strange encounters and Anthropocenic imagery that might involve (an we will include some images). The discussion about mediating, malfunctioning, and backyards is intended as a way point in trying to make sense of the problems of media, mediation, and malfunctioning introduced at the beginning of the paper. In a time of climate change and mass extinction educators must try to attend to how nonhuman actors and media (writ large) orient teachers and students. As a playful tool we employ an icon of the ‘jaws of life’ to signify some of the major rabbit holes that need to be pried open (so the hole is so much deeper).

Authors

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina

• Valerie Triggs, University of Regina