[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:17] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. We have a special episode today. We are co-sponsoring a global project called Educating for the World We Want with three partners, Agustya International Foundation in India, Center for Artistry and Scholarship in Argentina, and Thinking with You in Spain and globally.
The speakers at our second Saturday salon were Sherry Johnson, education director of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Tribe in South Dakota, Deepak Ramola of Project Fuel in India, and Charlotte Hankin of Coconut Thinking and the Green School in Bali. We’re delighted to share their brief presentations with you. The first voice you’ll hear will be that of Dr. David Penberg, who will introduce the speakers.
[00:01:08] David P: Before we listen to our guests, I think it’s important to know that we shared with them three guiding questions and distilled those three questions to the following: What kinds of learning invite children and teachers into direct relationships with living beings and their habitats, relationships that cultivate empathy, reciprocity, and a sense of the worth of all living things? So with that, I asked each of our speakers from their own particular perspective to try to respond to that and the guiding questions through the lens of stories, particularly because we know that storytelling is a bridge between ancient traditions and there are also entry points into our shared exploration and understanding of nature place and the purpose of education. Sherry, to you.
[00:02:10] Sherry J: So I just want to take a few moments and say thank you for the invite this morning. I come to you really to just share a few things with you and, and listen and be a part of the group. And I am Native American. I am the education director, and I’ll go ahead and formally weave through some of my introduction there.
Dr. Sherry Johnson, Tawacin Waste Win, demiye, that’s who I am. My grandfather named me, and so I’ll start off with those stories right away. My grandfather named me the “woman that uses her brain to think.” It’s that thinking part, to help people. And so he named me Tawacin Waste Win, in a good way, I come from the Eastman tiwahe (family). My ate (father) is Wayne Eastman. He’s no longer here. My Ina (mother) is Lois Formes. And so I come from family who live long lives. My grandmother passed on a few years ago, so I was lucky to have her and she was seven days shy of 110. So a lot of history there. As you can see, I have a picture up there and, and that’s my office. My, actually my office door is right there.
I come to you from the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in northeast corner of South Dakota in the USA. I am from the people of the Sisseton-Wahpeton lands. We are the Plains Indians from the Dakota Nation, so I help a little bit there. From my lens, I have a tribal education lens, I was a teacher for 10 years, mostly middle school science instruction. 15 years as a superintendent at a school, and now 12 years I’ve been the education director. So my discussion today is from that education lens.
This is our flag. It represents our reservation, our Lake Traverse Indian reservation. And on there you can see the seven teepees. Those are our seven political districts of our tribe, and they are geographically zoned there. When they were putting the native people on reservations, they stood at a point in the lands of South Dakota stood at a point and spread their arms in a V and they said, these are lands are yours. And that’s how our reservation became that triangle shaped.
We are a treaty tribe. So not all tribes are actually treaty tribes. And so for us, that’s huge, to have that government to government relationship where sovereignty is, is huge for us. We’re asserting our sovereignty, but sometimes in this day and age, right now, it’s just okay to be laying low. So really our whole world is, it was experiential. We experienced everything. It’s always through stories. When they asked me about this, I thought about, what stories we would have and what we would do.
And as a teacher, and reflecting back on how I used that to teach and we have in our world education world, we have education standards that are mandated. So you’re figuring out how your instruction, your teaching goals can really match what needs to be taught. Our histories are rich histories and they’re place-based.
I think about that, because our reservation wasn’t always here. Some of our people were actually in Minnesota and pushed. Then in this Damakota, I am Dakota, we were pushed up to, we’ve got pockets of Dakota people that are up in Canada, in Spirit Lake, across South Dakota, up in North Dakota. So our experiences, our stories, are a little bit different on occasion, but that’s okay.
There are stories, our ceremonies are really in seven directions. So if you think about that seven. So the term place-based is more appropriate for us. What are our four directions and what are the other three directions? Think about that. Make that connections. Land is really physical, but it’s also spiritual. The indigenous perspective only helps expand your worldview if you truly listen with mind, body, and soul. So as native people and as instructors and and knowledge carriers, we go out and we dig medicines, we offer tobacco and those prayers and give thanks to the medicine that we are about to gather our harvest, that it will do what it needs to do and help our bodies be as healthy as we can be.
So, offering that thanks to these, all these directions, the seven directions, and as indigenous people, we lived in harmony of the land and we took care of it. And as education, as teaching, we have to get back to that place-based and respectful teaching. Think about those seven directions teaching in those ways. Our education system slid way far to one side when we had No Child Left Behind, placing so much rigor on math and reading instruction that we lost this part of it. And so I’m very happy that we are coming back to that. So our teachers work, when we work with our teachers, they work hard at including and in that inclusion of our own narrative, our native narrative.
But they’re also creating place-based teaching lessons, which brings us to our Grow Your Own Teachers. So we are a cultivating our own teachers from our community who best tell our story. And I want to really talk about one of the stories. As an instance, when you go through South Dakota, Minnesota, and North Dakota, you see all these names of places in they’re Dakota, and some are Ojibwe, things like that.
But here’s a story about Token Noua. This is one of our schools and Token Noua na yahweh. It’s the place where they go to learn. And it’s really Enemy Swim day school, and it’s named after a local lake. The lake is Enemy Swim. The school derives its name from a legend. So one day there was a local battle between the Dakota and the rivals, and some of the stories say it was Ojibwe. Some of the stories will say different people. But it all goes back to the Dakota forced their attackers to swim to the safety of an island in the lake. So thus the name and many of the roads in our area are have indigenous names.
Then just to leave with one more story is another place-based story is about the beautiful woman that all the young men died for, but she waited for one young man and he was traveling far away. And so the local young men were getting restless. They wanted her to choose and they were bothering around about her making that selection. And finally, she just said she would choose the one who could throw the rock the farthest in the lake. And they tried over and over again, and pretty soon there was a mound of rocks. And pretty soon it, it was forming a little island out there. And they couldn’t tell which one was the furthest. Then they realized that she probably tricked them and they grew angry, and they took her and they put her on the island out in the middle. Well, they figured that she would be out there and she would choose one of them because there’s no food or no water.
Well, a pelican came by and saw what was going on, so every day he would feed her. Fish and berries, he’d bring fish and berries to her. And so eventually the men all still waited, but one that she was waiting for came back and he saw what was going on. He took her from the island there, and that island became known as Lake Kampeska. And that’s another Dakota word. And there’s also Lake Pelican up there. And they all have stories about this, this one going through.
So we learn history through stories, but we also learn through our life ways, our lessons. Thank you for allowing me in the space with you all on this beautiful Saturday morning. The sun is now up. I am waiting to, after this is done, I’m going to go back to the ice castle and go fishing with my husband.
[00:11:12] David P: So Sherry, thank you very much. So, to our next speaker. Deepak, to you.
[00:11:20] Deepak R: Thank you, David, and thank you, Sherry, for sharing your beautiful stories. Such an honor to be here. Everyone, lovely to meet you.
And because the intention and the anchoring is in stories, let me start with one, too. My grandmother, when she was married, which was very early, around the age of 13, on the first week in her life in her new family’s home, her father-in-law performed a ritual that many men would perform when a new bride would enter the home. And the ritual was they would take the young bride out to the courtyard and point to the mango trees that were growing. And the promise of the ritual was that this young bride, this young custodian of this new home, would never sell the mangoes and never stop anyone from plucking it. It was for the community. The reason for that was that my grandmother shared with me is that in Indian mythology and in the cultural essence of being mangoes, she believed were fruits that were created to remind men of the debt they owe to womanhood and the mango. In the shape and its essence represented, a woman’s breast. And before anyone could celebrate the harvest every summer season, young boys and men were gathered together and were offered the first mango of the season, and they had to think which woman in the community they want to offer their gratitude to.
I love that story because it talks about feminism from the metaphor of the mango, and my grandmother, who grew up in 1940s and 1950s and luckily is still with us, uses that as her anchor and her compass to navigate the world we live in. Every summer season, she said she was able to use that mango to educate her boys about not only women, but the natural world and what it symbolizes. The harvest was the lesson, the land was the teacher, and these relationships that we negotiated with each other, were very much rooted in the gratitude of that large classroom, and were practiced at the kitchen table, in the field, in the rhythm of the seasons.
We have to learn, as my grandmother says, and relearn over and over again with every changing season, that nature isn’t something you go out and experience on a holiday. It is who you are, where you are. And it is in that flavor of the mango, it is in the dice of that papaya, it is in plucking that strawberry that we realize we are carrying all of these stories and these relationships and these metaphors that nature affords.
From the same region, there’s a proverb in Garhwali, the language spoken by my people in the foothills of the Himalayas and in the upper regions of the Himalayas. And the proverb is “Jab paani me aag laagdi, tab kakh dwali”, which means “when water catches fire, what will you douse it down with,” and what happens when the thing that was meant to save you becomes the crisis itself? I think we are living that proverb now. Our rivers are polluted. Our forests are drowning in smoke. Our cities are drowning in smoke. The systems we have built to protect us are threatening our very survival. But the striking part in that in that, backed wisdom, is that our ancestors saw this coming. They encoded ecological wisdom into language, into ritual, into everyday life. Because culture and ecology were never meant to be separate. The songs we sang, the gods we worshiped, the land we prayed to, the way we organized our lives. Its functionality and its sentimentality, all grew from the soil beneath our feet, and the trees towering over us.
And so the reason of our becoming is very much present around us. We lend ourselves and we borrow from the ecology that we call our culture. For the 17 years that we’ve been running Project FUEL, my team and I have been documenting life lessons of ordinary people, fishermen, midwives, sex workers, street vendors, farmers, refugees, people who never went to a formal university, but who carry knowledge that universities don’t recognize. It’s the knowledge of lived experience. And so what we do at the center of our work in Project FUEL is honoring the wisdom, the practical wisdom of everyday people. And in our investigation, in our research, we have recognized that nature is a language that people use.
My grandmother used patience, not just as an idea or a virtue, but pointed to the water carving stone. It wasn’t her way of being poetic. It was her being of showing where patience lives tangibly. And she was teaching me to see these relationships in this intergenerational, contractual way that was both symbolic and layered and credible.
If we want our children to learn this way, we have to create something more specific in our schools, in our learning ecosystem, we have to systemically build space, and space, not just as a notion of a room or a structure, which unfortunately what it has become codified as in the modern world. It’s like we need a new space, which means basically we need a new lab and a new building and an air conditioned auditorium.
But the Sanskrit word for it, it is believed in the Indian myth, universe that. Lord Brahma from whose name Brahman is derived, is the creator of the world. And Brama, before creating the world, had to create something more. In the Western world, the word brahman often translates to the universe.
In Sanskrit, it actually means space, which means before any creation to take place, you have to create the space in which that creation exists, so that if there were asteroids colliding, if there was a big bang. The universe had the space to evolve and turn the big ship on a small deck, and there was room for people to wonder and imagine and create newer possibilities.
We are so busy filling the curriculums, the lives of our children, with knowledge, with more information, and it is in this space that we will transition from just building our children’s future towards a living and evolve towards building a life. We need to create conditions where it is not only new knowledge that greets them. It is the wisdom of the old world, and it is the wisdom of their own lives.
I want to share a few examples with you of the work we’ve been doing, and I want to anchor that in the work of the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold. Tim Ingold beautifully mentions that the idea of conquering a new future advancing towards the unknown, is a very modern idea. It is really a 50-, 60-year-old idea of “we are going to be the first people unleashing the possibility of what the newness is.” The truth is, for the longest time in history since the beginning of civilization, the idea was we have ancestors and those ancestors go into the future, and they are the ones leading our path. And that belief system, Tim says, allowed us to have a moral accountability and a cognitive value system that drove us continuously, that we have received this land, this world from someone, and we are going to give it to someone. And that relationship, that accountability and that sense of ownership with the ancestors, with history, with culture, now has become almost a pop culture thing of the past, not of the future. We believe the future is where we are headed and how we are going to discover it, and I think there has to be a shift to that. When we move into communities, we realize that in our work, so apparently and so visibly, that children inhabit the world in which these stories are not only spoken, but they are experienced.
In the state I grew up in and I call home, called Uttarakhand, in India, we have a huge migration problem. We have about 1700 ghost villages. And people have migrated due to economic and climate challenges. The image you see on your screen is of one such a village. It’s a 600-year-old village where, at one point of time, about 200 families lived, but now only 12 were left behind. Back in 2017, when we collaborated with the village, we started documenting with the 12 families the wisdom of their own culture, but also tracing the 200 families wherever they lived in the world. We conducted deep ethnographies and we brought those stories back to the village. And then with the children and the adults, we trained them as artists and ethnographers of these stories, and hand painted these stories on the walls of these abandoned homes. These villages became one of world’s first village of life lessons. You could walk from any corridor to any corridor, any alley, to any lane, and read the stories of the people.
This was also done to honor the space, which people have only seen in the news as a ghost village. These are places and lands of 600-year-old lives live together and we wanted to honor that relationship with ecology.
The image you see on your screen is a beautiful folk tale and a ritual that this village practices. People in this village, when it hasn’t rained for a long time, I was told, walk up to the temple in the village and pray for several days from the gods to grant and give them rain. I asked them, has there ever been a time that the god didn’t listen and you didn’t get the rain? And this old woman in the village says, oh, there was one time. And I said, so what happened? And she said, oh, we stayed there and there’s a small stone that covers the idol of the god. We removed the stone. And we sort of fought with god and said, now you get scorched in the sun as much as we are.
And it, it made me chuckle because that relationship tells us that they are not fearful of god or religion or any entity they call their own. It is this friendship that they have. And she also said that we fight, we ask for gifts because we feel this land is our family. We have to care for our family. We don’t live outside of it. We live inside of it and in relation with it. That small anecdote got painted onto that wall of people singing and calling the clouds home and singing. And it was painted with the kids of the village, in essence, to also remind them of the stories and the practices.
Here’s another village on the foothills of a glacier called the Pindari, the majestic glaciers and mountains of Uttarakhand. It’s the remotest village. No road, no electricity, no internet. When we first went there, it takes about three days to just get to this village and you cannot hear a car honk for miles. You cannot feel electricity on your cornea for weeks with the village and the kids, we were able to again, turn the village into that form of classroom and celebrate the stories that live in the intangible ways and paint those stories out with the community and the kids. The reason I point to this is because that method has traveled all around the world.
This is the Maasai in Tanzania, where we’ve been working for last six years, documenting the wisdom of the Maasai, but not just as an exercise of expression and creativity, but as an exercise to solve on ground challenges. In fact, these communities, particularly the Maasai, walk nine hours for water every day, nine hours, and this is today. So with the community and young children from around the world, these are two boys, Han and Raj from California, who went to the community with us in 2021, and they have raised about $200,000 with their schools, with their communities to build 500 water harvesting units in the community, saving 15,000 Maasai women and children that nine hours, you know, strenuous walk.
Which brings me to the second point, that we have to start honoring the wisdom of children. When we think about education, when we think about place, when we think about nature, ask yourself, who’s the first face that comes to you as the guardian? It’s probably someone older. And who comes as the people who it needs to be saved for? It is somebody younger. The truth or the insight, rather, that our research has shown us that wisdom is not passed down. It’s passed around. And so it is in this collaboration with the young that we have to recognize a new blueprint for, for the world we want to inhabit. It’s the wisdom of these young people in Tanzania. It’s the young people in California coming together to solve challenges that we face in the world, primarily because of climate change. It is through this lens when we start looking.
The last example I would like to share with you is the space. In an urban context, we saw what it looks like in a rural, in a more grassroots landscape. A few years ago, we started a project called the Wisdom Corridor Project, and the project started with the inspiration that when you walk on a school campus, you really see these big, beautiful quotes by inspiring people like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Once I stopped the kid to ask them, what does that quote mean to you? And he said, it’s really nice, but I have follow-up questions and I cannot ask Mother Teresa. And so he just zoomed past and it revealed that sometimes the wisdom that we do offer our children is at an arm’s distance. It is also farther out, rooted in history, we have to make it more contemporary. We have to ask ourselves what are the stories available to them now? What are the stories available to us now? And it was of the teachers, who were only seen as knowledge dispensers of math and science, and I know Sherry was referring this earlier, like that this focus on just academic understanding has seeped in.
So we train students in this particular project as ethnographers, as data documentarians, as researchers, and they interview their community, their educators, and then create a physical Wisdom Corridor in their school, which represents the knowledge and the wisdom of the people who live around and this relationship building, this sense of change and this posturing with the space that we inhabit, not as just a problem making or a problem investigating space, but as a solution space.
This is from Pittsburgh. We’ve been working with about 40 schools over the last four years there, and these stories emerge and show what classrooms can look like because it shows not only this top down knowledge, but this collaborative constellation knowledge that brings all of us in. And it’s only when in these space we learn can we pay attention to what stories we want to tell.
This is from Iraqw community in Babati. The children have never had a children’s book. Never had a children’s book. And so I told them, but you all love stories. You all tell stories. Where do you learn these? And they said, well, we have a ritual that a grandparent or the older person in the house around the fire, as the dinner is being made, has to tell a story every night. And so collaborating with these children and with our friends at an organization called Story Fave, we used AI, where children documented the folktales of their grandparents. And using AI, we created these physical books that became their stories, and it has continued with other educators.
In India, we like to believe that we live in a world that is rich with the wisdom of the now, the wisdom of our own people. And it’s only when we celebrate that. It’s only when we acknowledge it, not maximize it sometimes, but honor it, can we come into being with each other. We can become each other’s teachers, not just in the school context, but in the life context.
And so I leave you with these three things. The first is we need intergenerational sharing. We need intergenerational wisdom because only in that exchange we’ll be able to, not as a token learning, pass on elders, teach patience, children teach presence, but we are able to cross pollinate. The second thing is we have to create deep respect for the wisdom of children. We need schools that treat their perspective as necessary, not as cute. They’re not inheriting the future. They’re already living in it. And the last, the question that keeps me awake at night is what stories are we leaving behind? What stories are we birthing that our children will come to call their folktales because in a hundred years they will have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I wonder what they will say. What are the proverbs we create now? How we live, how we protect, the effort has to be collaborative. It has to be mutual, and I invite you. In fact, the latest work that we are doing is called 1 million Ecological Voices of Women. We are collecting one million stories of ecology with school children across India, across the world, of the relationship women have with ecology, and I hope that you all can join and contribute with your wisdom to that.
Thank you so much for this invitation, and thank you for listening.
[00:31:04] David P: Deepak, thank you so very much. Charlotte.
[00:31:08] Charlotte H: Such great contributions so far and actually really overlapping so beautifully with some of the things that I’m going to speak to. It’s worth noting that I’m not speaking as an indigenous person to the place of my research.
I’m British. I live in Bali. I’m an international educator consultant, and I am researching with the University of Bath in the UK. And so what I want to share with you is some of my PhD research. So what I will share is a little bit more academic, which has some beautiful overlaps, but hopefully something a bit different too.
So this is my place. This is Bali. This is where I live. I’ve lived there here for three years. You can see from these images that it is a beautifully vibrant and abundant place. This is an international school in a jungle in Bali. And my PhD research is exploring the relationships between animals and children in international schools.
And we’ve got dogs, cats, butterflies. It would be completely normal for a gecko to land on your desk in the middle of your maths lesson. There are no walls. There are no windows or doors. There are bamboo structures in a monsoon jungle. So when it rains, my goodness, it rains, and you can’t do a lot. You can’t hear a lot. It is a full-bodied sensory experience, learning in this particular place.
And I’ve been in education for 25 years now. I’ve taught from four year olds to 18 year olds. I’ve also been involved in lots of professional development of teachers and I was wanting to give up, I must say, on the profession, and I said to my husband, there’s only a couple of schools in the world that I would want to work in. And this was one of them. So this is a little bit of a taste of the Green School Bali. It is. I’m drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s such a magical place. So let me take you through my insights here.
First of all, I just want to say that I was really motivated to do this research because, first of all, I’m a huge animal lover, but also my research is in the backdrop of the Anthropocene. And some of these ideas have already been mentioned. We’re living in a human-dominated world, where human attitudes and behaviors are literally changing our world, and not in good ways. And so I started thinking about this and thinking, well, how can education respond to the challenges of life in the Anthropocene?
And I encountered another term. And it’s called the Necrocene, and this is from a researcher called Justin McBrien. He proposes the Necrocene as a challenge to the Anthropocene because what he argues is that we are living in times that are saturated with death. This is a bit gloomy, he would say. Considering the amount of species that are becoming extinct, considering the amount of biodiversity loss, breakdown of certain systems, climate induced disasters, spiraling, socioeconomic injustices all over the world, and of course the most vulnerable are suffering the most. And so the Necrocene is a response to this rampant death toll that we are all witnessing.
And how often do we actually consider that? So my research is in response to that, and I have been creating my own methodology in my time at the Green School Bali, and I’m calling them multispecies moments, and this fits beautifully with tonight’s focus on stories because what multispecies moments are, are tiny stories between animals and children in this particular international school.
So this is a relational methodology because conceptually, multi-species means that we’re not just interconnected with animals or more than humans. We are enmeshed, we are entangled with them and we actually co-produce one another. I heard on a podcast tonight that the oak tree in the UK is actually in reciprocal relationships with 2300 other life worlds, isn’t that phenomenal? 2300. And actually we as humans, when we consider the parasites that are living on our skin and the bacteria and the microbes, we are outnumbered. Our human cells are outnumbered. We are literally walking ecosystems. And so this idea that our skin is a boundary to others is nonsense. We are always entangled with a multitude of others, and that’s really what multi-species is all about.
So how are we responding to that? I’ve tried to conceptualize this into five rhizomatic threads. And I’m very inspired by the bamboo, which is just so tangled and and rhyzomatic. it really helps me to think, so my multi-species moments when I’m researching with children and animals, they are always attentional.
So we’re not thinking about our brain processing what’s happening and being curious and and asking questions. Quite often these multi-species moments are noticed before they’re even considered. And so there is a responsive, an alertness to the ways that we encounter others in our environments. Multi-species moments are co-produced and imminent.
Now I work and I research with Posthumanism, so just to explain a little bit there, that. I as the researcher, I’m also a participant, because I’m not standing aside from my research. I’m in the research with the children, with the animals, and together we are creating data. I’m not standing on the outside with a clipboard and writing down numbers and things that I observe. We produce the multi-species moments together. And not often in ways that we’re fully aware of at the time. Multi-species moments are temporal, fleeting, and mundane because they pass, linger, recur, and register within the ordinary and the everyday.
So when I mean multi-species moments, this is not like an event like going to a zoo or going to do conservation at the mangroves. They are bigger events. Multi-species moments are ordinary, typical happenstance encounters between children and animals, things that we might take for granted. And because they’re temporal, they might be in our memories, they might be in our stories and our hopes for the future. And they.re fleeting, which means they happen quickly and we have to be attentional to that. Multi-species moments are expressive and material because they involve an element of creativity in order to express, and they’re not reduced to human language. Clearly, animals don’t use the same language as we humans do, so therefore we have to think about how we are creating or how we are in these moments with animals, through images, through sounds, through movements and materials. They must go beyond linguistic or symbolic capture.
And I’m working with all sorts of interesting things like putting microphones into the soil and listening to all the life that is under our feet that we never even think twice about. Multi-species moments are world-opening because they create new relations, and that’s really what I’m interested in. If we are going to move into post-anthropocentric worlds, if we are going to address so many of the traumas and the destruction that we are witness to in these times of Necrocene, how are we noticing others? What new relations, what alternative relations are emerging? And what are these ethical openings? That question, how we are sensing our worlds, how we are inhabiting them and making them, and not thinking about tidying them up with closure and mastery. And it’s all done. We’re thinking about unfolding and opening.
So what I’m going to do now is read three multispecies moments, and I’m not going to analyze them, I’m just going to read them and I’ve put a few questions on the slides and I invite you to have a think. These were multispecies moments with animals and children, and this is the methodology in practice, if you like.
The first one is called Becoming with Dog. This was from my research journal. 6th of October, a small, young dog staggered onto campus. His skin was red, raw and blooded. His ears were down. His tail was down. His eyes were sad. I thought he was going to collapse and die right in front of me. I talked to him in a soft voice trying to beckon him over to me so that I might help him.
I was worried that the security officers might shoo him away or that the children might be, scared of his ragged appearance. He was untouchable, possibly traumatized by previous interactions with humans. I shared his image in one community whatsApp group, parents who I know are sympathetic to such causes because I know not everyone is.
The stray dog situation in Bali is a daily reminder of multi-species specters and being here on the school campus with him. Multi-species death felt close. 15th of October, we gave the dog a name, Kuat, which means strong in Bahasa, Indonesia. Kuat’s name gave him protection from death. We noticed him, which meant his life and death mattered. Between a group of parents, we tracked Kuat around the local area, sending videos and images with time and location as updates. Fortunately for us, this emaciated dog always made an appearance at lunchtimes, staying close to the scraps of sustenance generated by the campus. 24th of October after just 18 days of regular feeds, medication and love, Kuat’s ears and tails stand up proudly. Kuat now lives in the streets around school. He’s part of a pack that is fed daily by a local volunteer, and he now steps confidently on campus, allowing his chin to be stroked. Children and young people watch as adults care. How might caring for one life make a difference to an ecosystem, and how might we care when we think that no one is watching.
Becoming with Duck. In an instant, she knew exactly which animal she wanted to show the group. Hair flowing, arms powering, feet cluttering over the rocky footpath. She set off with urgency. I could see where she was heading, and I knew there was a pond inside that pen. I quickened my pace and called her name. No response. Without a moment’s hesitation, I watched as she disappeared into the pen. I caught up with her, hearing her relation before seeing it. Here is my favorite animal, she announced with pride. I saw that she was squatting on the other side of the pond, clutching a large white duck to her chest. Her face was sheer joy, which made me smile, fleetingly.
I looked a little closer at the duck. It was quacking, waddling its webbed, feet in midair, and trying so hard to flex its wings in her tight embrace. Struggling: An ethical research dilemma. I did not know whether I should intervene. The human child, the participant on my consent form was fine after all. Did that duck give you permission to hold it, I asked. Eyes widening, the smile dropped off her face, her mouth turning to a big O as she looked from me to the duck and back at me in slow motion. No, she murmured in quiet, contemplation. A moment later, she gently placed the duck on the ground, stood up and watched as it waddled away, still quacking. She made an ethical decision to release the duck. We crouched down together in the moist soil, watching, pointing, talking, giggling. Duck chose to remain nearby. This moment of becoming with Duck created the conditions for a richly meandering conversation about a far away life growing up in the Swiss Alps, we talked and we laughed. An unanticipated research moment for the girl Duck was tangled up with ideas, memories, feelings for home, grandma, childhood friendship, or complex issues for a third culture kid. And I questioned, who will care for duck on this campus? And how do our relations with animals trouble those perceived home school boundaries? Because for children, I’m sensing that there isn’t a boundary.
Third one. Brandon wanted to get a drink and trailed behind the rest of the group. From the corner of my eye, I watched Cassius run over towards him, and they started gesturing wildly with their arms and facial expressions. They noticed a huge spider and a huge web, but that was elegantly draped between a tree and a stall selling drinks. I looked at them and they beckoned me over to show me the animal they found. There was excitement and admiration because of its size. The other boys in the group gathered around to look as well. The girls carried on. Walking ahead, Brandon started wiggling and tugging at the web to get the spider to move.
I felt myself wincing. Camille and Cassius didn’t touch the web, but carried on watching. Cassius seemed knowledgeable. The female was there too, and she was smaller. Brandon had a lot of energy ripping through his body in this moment, and I became so worried that he might accidentally break the web or disturb the spider. Would the spider then jump on one of us? Would it end up getting trodden on? Is it poisonous?
I made the ethical decision to interview, to intervene. If you keep wiggling the cobweb, you might break it and that spider might have spent a long time making it. Brandon then stopped and said, oh yeah, and we all walked away.
So how might we as educators leverage experiential learning whilst at the same time maintaining our response abilities towards others? And what do these practices of caring invite for us all? So for educators, what might tiny moments on a school campus between animals and children show us about education moving forward? What I’m finding is that we need to do so much more tuning in. We need to think about how our bodies are responding, our emotions, how we are using our senses. We were born, we were designed with ears for a reason and a nose and skin. How is education allowing us to use these capacities in order to learn?
We need to look around more. Not looking ahead, not worrying about progress, not looking at grades and statistics and exam results and what we’re going to do for a job and which university we’re going to. We need to slow down and we need to look around a little bit more. A lot more. We need to really notice because once we’ve tuned in and looked around, how are we all meeting the worlds and futures right now?
Where are we meeting? And notice, I’ve plural allowed worlds and futures. We live in many worlds and we live in many futures right now. We need more art. We need to have more speculation. If we’re going to be addressing these big issues like climate change, like ecosystem ill health, we need our imaginative capacities to imagine how we might do things differently.
I’m going to be political here. We need less maths, less five-paragraph essays, and we need more art, more imagination, more speculation. Because what this does is this unfolds more relationships, more ways of doing things differently. We don’t need to cut our arts. We need slow pedagogies, slow learning, slow scholarship from our universities.
When I talk about some of these things, it feels really niche, and yet, as we’ve heard tonight, this isn’t really niche. This is what we already know. This is connecting our ancient wisdoms with what we are finding out now through areas such as quantum physics. Slow pedagogy, slow learning, slow noticing, slow scholarship.
And finally, and perhaps the most importantly here, we are saturated in ethical dilemmas. If we are noticing, if we are tuning in, so what? How are we caring? How are we caring differently? How might we care in alternative ways with the aliveness of this life? We don’t want to be in the Necrocene saturated with death. We want to be breathing in the aliveness of life, the aliveness of our worlds. So how are we going to do that? And maybe tiny multi-species moments, living and learning in the cracks are one way in which we might do this. Thank you.
[00:49:59] Jon M: We’ll hold the third salon on Nature, Place, and Education. On February 21st at 8:30 to 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, featuring other exciting speakers as well as a chance for extended discussion. The speakers will be Kerry Kirk Pflugh of the New Jersey School of Conservation, Tom Roderick. Author of Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education, and Deb L. Morrison, a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report Seven. The Salon will be pay what you wish. You can register through the website globalconversations.net, which you can also access through our ethicalschools.org website. And don’t forget to check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes.
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