A Pedagogy of Responsibility

Wendell Berry for EcoJustice Education

Rebecca A. Martusewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317334903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Drawing on the theories of author and conservationist Wendell Berry for the field of EcoJustice Education, this book articulates a pedagogy of responsibility as a three-pronged approach grounded in the recognition that our planet balances an essential and fragile interdependence between all living creatures. Examining the deep cultural roots of social and ecological problems perpetuated by schools and institutions, Martusewicz identifies practices, relationships, beliefs, and traditions that contribute to healthier communities. She calls for imaginative re-thinking of education as an ethical process based in a vision of healthy, just, and sustainable communities. Using a critical analytical process, Martusewicz reveals how values of exploitation, mastery, and dispossession of land and people have taken hold in our educational system and communities, and employs Berry's philosophy and wisdom to interrogate and develop a "pedagogy of responsibility" as an antidote to such harmful ideologies, structures, and patterns. Berry's critical work and the author's relatable storytelling challenge taken-for-granted perspectives and open new ways of thinking about teaching for democratic and sustainable communities.

1

Introduction: Toward a Pedagogy of Responsibility

The Arrival

Like a tide it comes in,

wave after wave of foliage and fruit,

The nurtured and the wild,

out of the light to this shore.

In its extravagance we shape

the strenuous outline of enough.

(Wendell Berry, 1984)

We are living within a vastly beautiful, diverse, and dangerous world, a sensual, dynamic, “extravagant” world where interactions and connections, cycles and transformations continue to give us a bounty of possibility for life, even while the bling of our consumerist habits blind us to that truth. Those habits—the addiction to buying more and more things, the individualism that produces our greedy consumption, the belief in Eurocentric superiority over the rest of the world, and the inherent “progress” of ever-expanding technologies—are produced within a colonizing industrial legacy that has brought us to great peril. All across this planet, living communities—human and more-than-human—are displaced or destroyed by shortsightedness, greed, and violence. And yet, every day we witness acts of kindness and care on large and small scales. And though it seems to be more and more attenuated, we know at least on some level the connective power of care and affection; we know how to put aside selfish wants in favor of kindness, empathy, compassion, and joy. How do we strengthen those desires for affection and care, those connective ways of being that are at the heart of happiness and collective well-being? How do we identify and challenge the processes and forces that ignore our responsibility to “the strenuous outline of enough”?

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and conservationist, has spent the last 50 years writing between the poles of abundance and restraint, grief and love. In a personal letter to me, he proclaims himself “old-fashioned,” a “traditionalist” who prefers to emphasize concepts of forgiveness, kindness, mercy, and affection over rationalist notions of justice that lead us down the path of retribution and a reproduction of hierarchized structures of violence. His life-long study of the historical roots and erosion of virtues, dispositions, and practices that protect the communities and living systems we depend upon trace the roots of our cultural history and our own psyches as saturated with both exploitation and care.

The terms exploitation and nurture … describe a division not only between persons but within persons. We are all to some extent, the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp … the standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. (Berry, 1996, p. 7)

While industrial societies have been built largely on practices and beliefs that define love and care as weak or secondary, often associated with what women do (Martusewicz & Johnson, 2016), I argue with Berry that the relationships, skills and attitudes creating care, affection and mutuality are our most important sources of strength. Throughout this book, using Berry’s stories, poems and essays as primary sources of wisdom, my contributors and I examine how values of exploitation, mastery, and dispossession of land and people have become dominant modes of being in an extractive economic and politically subservient system. Berry challenges the inevitability of these systems by arguing for the identification, cultivation and internalization of ways of being based on primary intangible virtues—gratitude, humility, faith, kindness, forbearance. Relationships built on these intangibles have, he tells us, important tangible effects that mitigate against the violence of selfish individualism, hyper consumerism, and the brutality of profit driven market fundamentalism. But these virtues do not simply appear on their own. They must be part of a community’s commitments and desires for itself, and thus part of intentional and strategic educational processes that actively engage the imagination toward responsibility and the creation of a robust and sustainable alternative. We name this approach EcoJustice Education.

EcoJustice Education

The two basic strands that define the theoretical and pedagogical tasks of this work are: 1) the development of a critical analysis of the cultural foundations of the ecological and social crises we face globally; 2) a recognition and identification of the existing and ancient relationships, attitudes, beliefs and practices needed for mutual caretaking of each other and the planet, in short, an ethics for a sustainable future within the limited carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which we live (Martusewicz, Edmundson & Lupinacci, 2015).

The first strand includes a willingness to examine the complexities of Western industrial culture, as it has developed historically via a set of hierarchized modernist assumptions, deeply imbedded discourses that rationalize specific economic and social policies, as well as day-to-day interactions and psychological conditions that define our sense of the world and our lives together (Martusewicz et al., 2015; Bowers, 1993, 1997, 2012; Martusewicz & Johnson, 2016; Lupinacci & Happel, 2015). EcoJustice Education asks students and teachers to examine the ways a powerful group of historically created assumptions, formed, internalized and exchanged as “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 31), come together to create, rationalize, and maintain these patterns of belief and behavior. Discourses are a closely woven tapestry of exchanged and internalized meanings that are constructed through language and all sorts of other symbolic systems passed on inter-generationally via our institutions and relationships. They have a deeply embedded history in space and time, and function to create and recreate organizing ideas (conceptual maps) via metaphor as a kind of glue for any culture.

Our imaginations—the ways we think, how we see the world and ourselves in it—are scripted according to multiple lines of discursive logic. Thus, our abilities to see differently, to imagine who we are or might be in the world are limited by defined subject positions—by race, class, gender, geography, ability, sexuality and so on—in a logic that rationalizes possession of property and mastery of people and other creatures. Further, we “moderns” believe so fully in our superior knowledge, technology, economic and financial systems that we insist on it being spread to others across the world, whether through religion, capitalism, schooling or a combination of these. As Berry puts it:

… We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world—to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity—our own capacity for life—that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. (Berry, 2012a, p. 220; emphasis added)

In this part of the work, we insist that if we are to address the crises sweeping the planet and destroying our local communities, we must examine our own capture in the assumptions, ideologies, practices and institutions that create these problems. We must understand that we ourselves are shaped by, and thus complicit in, these processes. Thus, we must examine our own mindsets, and work to shift our relationships, behaviors and the metaphors we use to construct their meaning. This is not a matter of assigning blame; it is, rather, a matter of understanding how the complex symbolic processes of culture work on us, and thus of accepting the responsibility to change ourselves and the systems and relationships by which we live.

The second strand of EcoJustice Education asks us to reclaim and revitalize the cultural and environmental “commons,” particularly those practices, relations, traditions and beliefs that support mutual aid among humans and between humans and the more-than-human world. In this strand, we work to identify practices in our own day-to-day lives, as well as traditional practices among diverse cultures across the world that are specifically aimed at caretaking, however demeaned they are in our modernist conceptions (Martusewicz & Johnson, 2016; Bowers & Martusewicz, 2006; Bowers, 2012; Esteva & Prakash, 1998). This includes the ideas about who we are in relation to the more-than-human world and what we ought to learn from other creatures if we are to survive. Intersecting with the first strand, it requires that we interrupt those logics of domination, which privilege and prioritize one thing at the expense of another and correspondingly degrade the necessary work of caretaking, which is essential for the flourishing of life.

As I have continued to read and think about the particular influences of Berry’s work on this field, a third important strand emerged, also intersecting with the first two in important ways. This third strand requires that we learn to imagine the places where we dwell, what is needed in those places, what is demanded of us by those communities and the living world with whom we share this planet. As educators, we keep at the forefront of our work the question: What is education for? Whom should we be serving, and towards what end? Our questions, as Berry puts it, should lead us to a kindly and orderly world where creation can flourish. To imagine our role in creating healthy communities is to take responsibility, to actively and carefully respond to the needs expressed in the singularity of a particular place.

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong to a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination, we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. (Berry, 2012b, p. 14)

This third strand circulates through the preceding two as a double responsibility: to recognize the damages that we are perpetuating, understanding our complicity, and to identify the good: those practices, values, and relationships within the living world around us that exist as gifts to our communities. “Imagination is a particularizing and a local force, native to the ground underfoot” and “placing the world and its creatures within a context of sanctity in which their worth is absolute and incalculable” (Berry, 2010b, p. 32).

Pedagogies of Responsibility

As we approach the tasks required by each of these intersecting strands in the EcoJustice framework, we bring specific questions that seek to expose and articulate the particular responsibilities we have as members of this industrial culture. Who are we and how have we been shaped by the primary assumptions organizing our society? What mistakes have we made and continue to make that are rationalized by those assumptions? To whom are we ethically responsible? And as part of this last question: What is to be conserved in our traditions, practices, relationships and beliefs that could help us to contribute to the protection and care of a living planet, and what should be changed? That is, what do we need to learn about ourselves, our places and the larger context in order to live well together (Bowers, 2001, 2006; Martusewicz & Edmundson, 2005)?

From these specific questions, an ethic of responsibility and care emerges that impacts our understanding of teaching and learning. A “pedagogy of responsibility” was first coined by Jeff Edmundson (2003) to distinguish this approach from other critical pedagogies that focus on “transformation” or “liberation” but often leave unexamined our relationship and unavoidable interdependence with the more-than-human world. Perspectives in critical pedagogy often overlook what we and other diverse cultures already know that could help us protect those important ecological and community relationships, edging, instead, toward what Derek Rasmussen (2005) identifies as “a rescuer mentality.” Our point is that many of the cultures purported to be in need of liberation or transformation by those who are supposedly “in the know” are already organized by rich cultural traditions and practices that understand what it means to be whole within the patterns of the natural world and larger cosmos. Identifying the skills, values and relationships that continue to exist in our own culture and day-to-day lives, albeit in severely attenuated ways, is an important piece of the EcoJustice approach.

Berry teaches us to look carefully at what works to create healthy living systems in our particular biospheres, regions and communities, reminding us that humans are a small but important part of that complex diverse world. Further, we see the task of transformation to be necessarily directed at ourselves as the members of modern cultures complicit in the systems and thus perpetrating these disasters and oppressions. And this means all of us, those benefitting and those being exploited, which is a mixed bag, for we are all multiple subjects of its representational and material processes. Our desires, assumptions, hopes, and imaginations are shaped and reshaped there.

EcoJustice Education and pedagogies of responsibility begin from the necessity to acknowledge the vast diversity creating both living systems and human cultures. We recognize the ways relationships are, in every way, generative processes. That is, when different elements in the world—biological, geological, or cultural—come into contact with each other, they create differences that make a difference (Bateson, 1972). As Martusewicz et al. (2015) put it

Diversity is the condition of difference created when there is a relationship between one thing or idea and anything else. When there is a relationship there is also a space of difference between the two things. And that space is very important when it comes to defining what anything means or what its value is in comparison to anything else. … In this sense, difference isn’t really a thing, or an object, but rather a creative, or generative condition created because of relationships among things. … Relationships are key to both democracy and sustainability. (p. 26)

As such, we also accept the responsibility of discerning together how to live in mutually supportive ways, even when those ways may not be clear or self-evident. This willingness to make ethical choices even in the face of all sorts of differences and uncertainty is at the heart of what it means to become educated (Martusewicz & Edmundson, 2005; Martusewicz, 2001). With Berry, we see this as requiring attention to our local places and communities first, aiming our work there specifically, even as we work to analyze the larger globalizing economic, political and cultural forces impinging on us and other creatures.

Thus, we begin from a position that defines education as a concept distinct from, although at times present in, schooling. While we work toward schooling that could contain these possibilities, education should be understood as a process that explicitly requires us to become ethical agents of healthy communities, and is therefore not necessarily located in institutionalized settings, or even formally named “education.” Our ethical choices—decisions made about what constitutes the “good” in our lives with and for others—are made as we bear witness to and respond in appropriate ways to both grief and joy, despair and flourishing. These are specific, sometimes paradoxical responsibilities that must be engaged in relations of teaching and learning wherever they take place.

Learning to acknowledge within our own bodies and souls the suffering of others and to use that particular corporal and spiritual experience to propel us into active expressions of mutuality and care is a necessary component of nurturing healthy relationships. Similarly, learning to embrace and rejoice in the happiness of others, allowing joy to bubble up as we witness their happiness and success helps to create the bonds of membership, a sense of belonging and mutuality that is necessary to life. Buddhists name this aspect of love “sympathetic joy.”

As we will lay out in the chapters that follow, these capacities—given shape by the development of specific skills and dispositions, practices and commitments—are what guide a pedagogy of responsibility. Berry insists that we will not address the problems that we face until we address the culture that we live in and contribute to. And this is our commitment as EcoJustice educators too. Our work must be about examining ourselves as deeply implicated members of our society’s symbolic, material and psychological processes. C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Toward a Pedagogy of Responsibility
• 2. Neoliberalism and the Dis-membering of Community
• 3. The Bonds of Love
• 4. Settler Colonialism and The Unsettling of America
• 5. Degraded Bodies, Degraded Earth
• 6. STEM Education and the Miracle of Life
• 7. Health as Holism
• 8. Re-membering “the Room of Love”
• 9. What is Education For?
• Index