Reciprocal Learning: Unleashing Teachers’ Cultural Imagination to Educate for Sustainability

• In Event: Rethinking education: diversity, mindfulness, and movement

Proposal

This narrative inquiry grows out of my practical action of supporting a Toronto-based teacher, Ann Barton, in developing inter-school reciprocal learning relationships with a group of Shanghai teachers, under a Canadian-government funded Partnership Grant project entitled “Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China” (Xu & Connelly, 2017). Ann Barton is an elementary school teacher who has been a longtime contributor to a Sister School project developed between her school in Toronto — Bay Street School — and a primary school in Shanghai — Green Lotus School. Starting in 2014 under the support of the Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership project, I have been frequenting Ann’s classroom to learn about her life as a teacher, in order to better assist her in communicating and forging reciprocal-learning partnerships with teachers teaching in Shanghai Green Lotus School.
The longer I dwelled in Ann’s classroom and supported her in her virtual and cross-cultural communication with her Sister School colleagues in Shanghai, the more I was drawn to Ann’s way of developing partnerships with them, and of engaging her students in her inter-school reciprocal learning journey. Following my interest in Ann’s reciprocal learning approaches, I invited her to join me in a collaborative research endeavour where narrative inquiry was used as theory and methods to document, study and co-construct her reciprocal-learning experiences in the Bay Street-Green Lotus Sister School setting.
In this paper, I will present a narrative from Ann’s Canada-China reciprocal learning experience, focusing on an episode where she decided to reorient her classroom towards educating for sustainability through learning from a Green Lotus School’s sustainability education initiative. Specifically, I will inquire into Ann’s story of engaging her students in learning from Green Lotus School’s water-culture curriculum while co-creating a shared water culture in their classroom. By re-storying Ann’s narrative and shedding light on it from an eclectic combination of theoretical standpoints (Schwab, 1971), I hope to provide educators with new perspectives to think about, carry out and advance education for sustainability within school settings in an interconnected multicultural world.

Narrative Inquiry Theory and Methods
In a few words, narrative inquiry is “people in relation studying people in relation” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 189). It is based on the insight that humans, individually and socially, lead storied lives (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006); that as humans, we understand, give meanings to and shape ourselves and the world through living and telling, reliving and retelling stories individually and with others (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, 2006). In a narrative inquiry, human experience is the focus of study and reflection, and human experience can be reflected backward and forward with a sense of past, present and future, as well as inward and outward taking into account interactions between humans (including their thoughts, feelings, aspirations, intentions etc) and the environment (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Craig, 2009). In my narrative inquiry with Ann, I have adopted ethnographic school-based fieldwork methods (Xu & Connelly, 2010) to understand Ann’s experience of interacting with her Sister School colleagues and making water curriculum with her students over a period of two years (2014-2016). Field texts gathered in the forms of participant-observation field notes, conversation/interview transcripts, journal writing and pictures have allowed me to reconstruct Ann’s stories for my current study.
When analyzing my field texts, a narrative inquiry process called “broadening” and “burrowing” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) was used. “Broadening” urges me to contextualize Ann’s developing experience and knowledge to educate for water sustainability in the ongoing changes and difficulties of the teaching profession, and the broader socio-political-cultural context. “Burrowing,” on the other hand, involves a more up-close look at particular curriculum-making experiences that Ann has lived and told, relived and retold on her Sister School landscape.

Findings
By broadening and burrowing (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) into Ann’s narrative alongside the engagement of different theoretical perspectives, I illustrate how certain elements on the Bay Street-Green Lotus Sister School landscape — the imagery of water, the presence of narrative researchers who conduct school-based research from the lens of the practical, the use of story-telling methods — have managed to spark and sustain Ann’s commitment to educating for sustainability in a global and multicultural world. I argue that when teachers’ cross-cultural reciprocal learning (Xu & Connelly, 2017) is informed by practical narrative inquiry approaches aimed at contributing to a shared global vision such as education for sustainability, it could potentially give rise to culturally-imaginative spaces in teachers’ professional settings that sustain their mind and spirit in educating for sustainability (Clandinin, Downey & Huber, 2009). These spaces are important because they allow teachers to engage in core reflections on their own cultural meanings and identity (Korthagen, Kim & Greene, 2010; Tisdell, 2006), and to retell and relive their story of educating for sustainability with creativity and cosmopolitan sensibility from the ground-up (Hansen, 2010). Yet the continuous lack of these spaces in teachers’ life and professional settings demands our attention and concern.

Educational Importance of the Study
In recent years, the idea of education for sustainability has been widely introduced to teachers, often from a top-down manner through educational policies, policy directives, standards and guidelines. While teachers are encouraged to reorient their teaching towards the goal of sustainability, not all teachers receive the support needed to shift their practice. By showing how a culture of sustainability can be cultivated in school settings through inter-school inter-cultural professional reciprocal learning and narrative inquiry practices that are directed towards teacher inner well-being and growth, my study hopes to remind educators, policy makers and researchers that there are unearthed wisdoms around sustainability embedded in the narrative of diverse teachers and diverse schools around the world. If we can find ways to provide spaces for schools and teachers to connect, share, learn from each other and reflect deeply together, we can unleash individuals’ cultural imagination to educate for sustainability.

Author

• Yishin Khoo, University of Windsor