Curriculum, Environment, and the Work of C. A. Bowers

Ecological and Cultural Perspectives

Audrey Dentith, David Flinders, John Lupinacci, Jennifer Thom, Audrey M. Dentith, David Flinders, John Lupinacci, Jennifer S. Thom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Curricula nella didattica

This edited volume extends ecological approaches to curriculum theory by recognizing and building on the contributions of the late Chet A. Bowers to curriculum and ecological studies globally.

Chapters provide in-depth explanation of Bowers' central contributions to the field, including his identification of the linguistic roots of ecological degradation; the need for school curricula to support sustainability; and the principles of cultural commons, eco-justice, and ecological intelligence. Building on these ideas and emphasizing the links between curriculum studies, social justice, and environmental education, the text illustrates how Bowers' ideas must now inform future approaches to schooling, teacher education, research, and Indigenous communities to guard against the global ecological crises we now face.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in curriculum studies, sustainability education, and environmental studies in particular. Those interested in the sociology of education, educational change, and school reform will also benefit from the book.

1 An Introduction to the Curriculum and Environmental Scholarship of C. A. (Chet) Bowers

David J. Flinders

The touchstone of this volume is the educational and environmental scholarship of C. A. (Chet) Bowers (1935–2017). Bowers was a prolific writer across topics ranging from curriculum theory and school reform to ecological literacy, the cultural roots of modernity, sustainability, and the uses of digital technologies. Across his career, Bowers authored 27 books and close to 200 journal articles and book chapters. His work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. In addition, Bowers served on international commissions and actively promoted his work through extensive speaking engagements. He spoke at the invitation of 42 universities across the United States, and 41 universities in other parts of the world, including England, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland, China, South America, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. As a consequence, Bower’s pioneering contributions to curriculum and ecological studies have inspired other scholars and continue to hold far-reaching significance in these fields. As Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) put this, “Bowers’ scholarship is significant, and careful, respectful attention to it by the curriculum field is long overdue” (p. 271).

The power of Bowers’ scholarship is found in its overall coherence and cogency by which he brought together perspectives from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and social criticism. While its expanse makes this work difficult to summarize in any brief format, the broad contours of his work, the ideas that animated Bowers’ labor, can be traced back to his graduate studies in the intellectual traditions of Western thought. With the Enlightenment as a salient point of departure, Bowers painstakingly established clear through-lines from writers such as Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Johannes Kepler to the ecological crises we now face in the 21st Century. Drawing from this history, Bowers critiques cultural frameworks and patterns of belief that have propelled the human degradation of the earth’s natural systems.

From Enlightenment thought, Bowers identified a network of root metaphors that today persist as cultural anchors. Root metaphors are words or phrases that bring with them patterns of thought established in the past. These metaphors include change as progress, individuals as autonomous, nature as a machine, technology as neutral, and language as an ahistorical tool. Change as progress, for example, assumes the ascent of modernity as promised by the scientific revolution. In most Western cultures, this ascent is represented by mass consumption and today’s rapid depletion of natural resources.

Individuals as autonomous is another example of a root metaphor that holds far-reaching implications. Here individuals are represented as the nucleus of reflective thought and independent actions. Bowers rejected this metaphor on the basis that it removes individuals from the powerful but often unrecognized influence of both language and culture. Bower was not alone in his critique. Rather, the autonomous individual has been questioned in ongoing scholarship by feminist writers as an illusion that legitimates patriarchy, by behavioral economists as a poor predictor of human action, and by cognitive scientists as neglecting assumed patterns of thought inherited from the past. Such ongoing work signals the possibility of cultural change.

Environmentalism

Across his career, Bowers thinking became increasingly focused on the cultural dimensions of today’s ecological crisis. In the 1970s he drew on the sociology of knowledge, a field that made the concepts of culture and socialization central to understanding the social construction of reality and the influence of prevailing ideas on social institutions. For Bowers, culture represented the templates of shared knowledge, skills, values, understandings of time and space, traditions, and material objects of a group. In developing this cultural perspective, Bowers drew on anthropologists and particularly Gregory Bateson’s (1972) book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. While we often think of natural ecologies as comprising land, plants, animals, and insects, Bateson’s ecology of mind is populated by relationships, cultural norms, shared ideas, traditions, and language. Such cultural ecologies, again like natural ecologies, are primarily characterized by looped systems of information exchange and transformation. Ecologies are environments rich in information; so rich that it becomes impossible to separate off components or “individuals” from the systems of which they are a part. By way of contrast, traditions in psychotherapy have sought to extend our understandings of the mind inwards by delving into subconscious systems such as the id, ego, and super-ego. Bateson, a semiotic anthropologist, extended the mind outward as interdependent and fully integrated with natural, cultural, and social environments.

Drawing from Bateson’s work, Bowers relied on the fundamental principle that all of the components of information exchange that from an ecology dependent on one another. To put this another way, none of the components of an ecology (natural or cultural) is capable of exercising unilateral control over any of the ecology’s other components. Thus, an ecological framework asks that we learn to understand causality as circular rather than linear. A wall-mounted thermostat in a house, to take a simple and commonplace example, is part of a system that typically includes a furnace (or AC) as well as other components. Yet we describe the function of thermostats in revealing ways. We say that the thermostat controls the furnace, which in turn controls the temperature inside the house. From an ecological framework of complex looped systems, the temperature “controls” the thermostat, which controls the furnace, which “controls” the temperature. I put the words control in quotation marks because no component of an ecology has unilateral control over the system as a whole. That is, the components of an ecology are not so much controlling as they are responsive and interdependent.

Moreover, we can add other systems to the thermostat-furnace-temperature loop. We can extend the circuit be including the self or the power plant that supplies energy. Individual people and power plants are also systems, dependent on other systems. When we include individuals in the system, they too are typically responsive. If the temperature in a room becomes too hot or too cold, the occupant is likely to get up and adjust the thermostat.

Bowers was further influenced by a range of environmental writers. Key figures include deep ecologists such as Wendel Berry and Aldo Leopold as well as ecojustice authors such as Vandana Shiva and Gary Snyder. Such writers have persistently stressed the interdependence of natural and cultural systems. Like Bateson, moreover, ecojustice authors embrace this interdependence not simply as a biological principle, but as an ideological and moral stance. When an individual or a group acts on the basis of self-interest, that which concerns me or my particular group, they enclose themselves as separate and cut off from other systems. They decide to rid their waste in ways that degrade natural systems of which we are a part. Bateson (1972) puts this principle in epistemological terms: “… while I can know nothing about any individual thing by itself, I can know something about the relations between things” (p. 157).

Language and Thought

One of Bowers’ central concerns was that ecological thinking is largely put out of focus or undermined by the very language of Western cultures. Bowers (2018) referred to the influence of language as the linguistic roots of the ecological crisis, noting that, “There is, in short, no area of the curriculum that does not rely upon the language systems of the culture, or that of other cultures” (p. 43). In everyday circumstances, we often think of language as a highly flexible tool, a conduit for transmitting ideas among groups and individuals. This conduit view of language is deceptively simplistic because it suggests that our thoughts influence what we say, but not vice versa. Bowers’ position holds that words are neither neutral nor passive in their relationship with thought processes. On the contrary, because words have a history, they reproduce distinct cultural patterns of thought from the past. As Bowers (2018) puts it, “… acquiring the language of one’s community also involves being dependent upon ways of thinking about issues and problems that were unknown in earlier times” (p. 47). As we speak language, language speaks us (Heidegger (1927/1962).

In large part, this influence is achieved through the metaphorical nature of language. The word metaphor comes from the Greek, metaphora, meaning “to carry over.” That is, metaphorical language is a way of understanding something in terms of something else. Analogic metaphors typically include a source domain based on familiar experiences and a target domain representing something that is new or unfamiliar. While such metaphors bring into focus the similarities between their source and target domains, they do so only by putting out of focus the domains’ differences. By bringing forward certain characteristics of an experience but not others, metaphors express an inherent point of view. As the poet Robert Frost counseled: “All metaphor breaks down somewhere…. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know where it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield” (Cox & Lathem, 1968, p. 33).

Bowers’ interest in metaphorical language is cultural rather than poetic, and cultural metaphors are pervasive throughout our everyday speech and writing. That is, metaphors do not simply adorn language, but are ways of understanding the new in terms of the familiar. In education alone we speak of tracking, kindergarten and high school, covering curriculum content, homework, motivation, educational aims, individual achievement, school boards, accountability, constructivism, block scheduling, achievement gaps, and benchmarks—examples that only begin a long list of common metaphors that we rely upon when speaking and writing about school experiences.

Curricular subject areas are also rife with metaphorical language. Science teachers talk about genetic engineering, DNA codes, and how genes “behave.” Again, such metaphors do more than describe; they also reproduce points of view. An American history teacher or text, to take another example, may devote lessons to the topic of “Westward Expansion.” The familiarity with the concept of expansion is assumed; balloons expand, waistbands expand, and so on. Nevertheless, Westward Expansion makes sense for describing the experience of certain groups but not others. If you happen to be on the eastern side of this frontier, one’s field of experience and action is expanding. Yet those on the western side do not experience expansion; they experience contraction or encroachment. This is one place where, as Frost put it, the metaphor “breaks down.”

Metaphors such as Westward Expansion and genetic engineering can be made explicit, as I have done briefly here, but doing so is an exception that proves the rule. In our everyday talk, we take such metaphors for granted, aware of their influence on thought only at an implicit level of understanding. As Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) puts it, “… language already hides in itself a developed way of conceiving” (p. 199). Metaphorical language, in short, constitutes cultural blinders of which we are unaware. This lack of awareness is due in large part to the ubiquitous nature of understanding the new in terms of the familiar. Much like culture at large, language is too much with us, or too much a part of us to be readily recognized.

Nevertheless, to make metaphors explicit, especially the root metaphors that concern Bowers, is fundamental to the teacher’s role in primary socialization and in mediating cultural patterns of thought. For Bowers, teaching includes a responsibility to help students better understand the metaphorical nature of language and how it reproduces cultural frameworks from the past. Yet he also wanted teachers to facilitate a heightened awareness of the implied patterns of understanding that connect us with one another and with the natural systems upon which we depend. These “patterns that connect” (Bateson, 1979, p. 8) are represented foremost in what Bowers called the “cultural commons.” The cultural commons include all of the shared community knowledge on which that community draws it functions and identity. This knowledge often includes arts and crafts, face-to-face mentoring, ways of growing and preparing foods, how to perform rituals or rear children, forms of recreation, and so on. The cultural commons will be discussed in detail later in this volume. My point here, however, is that throughout his career, Bowers was reform-minded and committed to finding ways forward.

Closely related to this responsibility, Bowers highly valued the knowledge of practitioners and others steeped in the practical affairs of K-12 public schooling. Without question, Bowers was foremost an academic, embracing and embraced by theory. But Bowers consistently reached out to classroom teachers and school administrators. I believe this is one reason that in 1989, Bowers invited me to co-author a book with him on the ecology of the classroom. I had recently joined the University of Oregon’s faculty as a classroom-based researcher, and like so many of the graduate students that Bower’s mentored, I was spending a lot of my time in public schools. Bowers welcomed and respected this side of my work as complementary to his own. Our collaboration yielded two books, and over the next 28 years, Bowers would serve as an extraordinary mentor and friend.

Overview of What is to Come

The purpose of this volume is to examine and build on Bowers’ ecological approaches to curriculum theory, design, and evaluation. Bowers advocated for school curriculum that supported sustainability, ecojustice, and ecological intelligence. In order to address these issues in depth, we have recruited authors from a pool of international scholars whose own work builds upon Bower’s ecological perspectives. Many of these authors also worked directly with Bowers as students or colleagues, offering insights into ecological thinking drawn from a range of perspectives. We have organized their chapters into three parts. Each part of the book includes three or four chapters and is introduced through excerpts drawn from Bowers’ previously published work. The excerpts for each part serve two functions. First, we wanted to bring Bowers’ voice directly into the book, and the excerpts from his previous work allow for his presence in word and spirit. Second, the excerpts serve to orient the chapters in each of the three parts. Early in the process of recruiting contributing authors, we provided each with the excerpts for their sections, and without didactic instruction, we simply asked authors to read, engage with, and where possible, integrate or build on ideas drawn from the excerpts.

Part I of this volume, Ecological Approaches to Curriculum Discourse, includes four chapters each examining ecological literacy in international settings. Each chapter reflects Bowers’ engagement with key theorists, picks up where their dialogues left off, and pushes further salient ideas to signal new perspectives. Part I begins with an excerpt from Bowers’ (1996) article, “The Cultural Dimensions of Ecological Literacy.” In this essay, Bowers grapples the central question of why it has been so difficult for modern societies to learn and practice ecological literacy. In response to this question, Bowers argues that the scope of environmental education be expanded from liberal ideologies to include cultural/bioconservatism. The term cultural/bioconservatism characterizes traditional cultures that have developed more sustainable knowledge and practices than have modern cultures. Bowers was fully aware of the dangers of romanticizing traditional cultures, but he also notes key lessons to be learned from such cultures in order to help modern societies become less individualistic, human-centered, and consumer-oriented. Moreover, cultural/bioconservatism holds far-reaching implications for reforming K-12 schools and higher education in ways that address today’s environmental challenges.

The first chapter of Part I is eco-scholar Jennifer Thom’s “Co/inspiriting Ecological Conversations with Chet A. Bowers (1935–2017) and Ted T. Aoki (1919–2012).” In this chapter, Thom focuses on imagined but potentially constructive exchanges between Bowers and Aoki. These deliberations are set within the context of print, data, and technology to reveal both similarities and differences in how Bowers and Aoki define ecological literacy and the primary role of language in cultural reproduction. In particular, Thom traces Bowers’ shift from cultural to ecological literacy back to the early 1970s. Bowers was not op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. An Introduction to the Curriculum and Environmental Scholarship of C. A. (Chet) Bowers
• PART I Ecological Approaches to Curriculum Discourse
• PART II Curriculum of the Commons
• PART III Ecojustice Curriculum
• Index