If we think further about how we as humans co-exist with nature we need to question our actions and the impact that they cause on the natural world. How much thought do we put into questioning our actions and the impact that they may cause when we bring the natural environment into our classrooms? I’m not saying whether it is wrong or right but it deserves critical thinking. For example: A part of the elementary school system’s curriculum is to bring salmon eggs into the classroom so that children can learn about the life cycle of salmon. This creates incredible opportunities to learn about ecology and to build a relationship with wildlife however, what about the impact we create when we remove a species from it’s natural environment? What rights do these fish have? and are their rights even thought of? Is this an act of respect for salmon or an action made through ignorance? Has this hierarchy become so naturalized that we don’t question are actions when we bring the natural environment and animals into our classrooms? It seems that ethics is lost in our desire to learn and teach about ecology when we bring it into our classrooms to make it easier and more assessable to us. We can take this even further to think about the messages it sends to children when we bring pinecones, rocks, sticks, leaves etc. into our classroom. Is this respecting nature? It certainly brings an aesthetic appeal to our classrooms. Just because we can move it does it give us ownership? This relates to the educational boarders that our school buildings create and how we allow these walls to maintain our teaching and learning within a classroom. Why can’t we engage more with the world around us? Living in North Vancouver we are close to many forests, rivers, and ecology centres that we can learn about nature through nature.
“For Levinas, in the face-to-face relation the Other is absolutely other. This is an Other which I cannot represent and classify into a category - and hence not totalise. The face-to-face encounter ruptures my ego, eludes thematisations and formalisations and dissolves the capacity to possess and master the Other. Instead of grasping, I have to take responsibility for the Other: and this relation is one of welcoming, a welcoming of the other as stranger” (2005, p. 80). If we think with Levinas, we can imagine our relationship with the natural world as being the Other and in this way we take responsibility for the wellbeing of the other. It is this ethical responsibility and respect for the other that can bring hope and possibilities to better care for our natural environment and the species that co-exist with us. Instead of a sense of ownership of natural materials perhaps we can engage in feelings of responsibility toward the rights of the natural world. Levinas ideas of ‘the face’ can also help us to think about ethics and our relationship with nature. “The demand of ‘the one who needs you, who is counting on you’. The face in the ethical sense invoked by Levinas is ‘a notion through which man comes to me via a human act different from knowing’...An act which is fundamentally and originally ethical: that for Levinas is the relation to the other” (2005, p.80). It is our ethical responsibility to the other (nature) to make ethical decisions in our engagement with the natural world. As Levinas suggests the ethical response is “different then knowing” (2005, p.80), as we know that nature needs our care and it becomes our response to that knowing.
Santos, “Connects responsibility with care, and extends responsibility to cover not only other humans but other species and the environment we share: Postmodern knowledge cannot build solidarity in the technological age except by developing a new ethics, an ethics not colonized by science and technology, like liberal ethics, but, rather, based on a new principle. In my view this new principle is the principle of responsibility... The new principle of responsibility resides in Sorge, the caring that puts us at the centre of all that happens, and renders us responsible for the other, whether human beings and social groups, or objects, animals, nature, and so on...” (2005, p.82) Ethics is crucial in our work as teachers if we hope to model a caring relationship with nature to our students. This requires us to question our work continuously as Santo suggests it is our responsibility to others.
References:
Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Rouledge Farmer.
Hi Ashley,
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in your provocation to respond to the call of nature as an ethical responsibility to the Other. I think this connects to the idea of dichotomies and divisions you mention in your previous blog and the critique of neo-liberalism that threads throughout your posts. I have been thinking about these three concepts with Sharon Todd(2009a) and Arendt(Biesta, 2007; Todd, 2009b) as they question the privatization of public space and the ethics of cosmopolitanism. Todd(2009b) challenges how ethics can not just be about striving to reach essential values like peace and harmony that are suggested in Suzuki's speech. She points, instead, to the origins of a subject- the moments where a subject comes into being and choses to speak- where the tensions of listening and speaking, taking up roles and submitting to others already put the pre-originary subject in conflict (Todd, 2009a). For Todd and others, many of the ethics of conflict and diversity speak highly of cosmopolitanism where people and difference bump up against each other in ways that force us to thought. These ideas have lead me to question the urban/rural divide.
I wonder how your idea of nature as a face in the face-to-face encounter that Levinas (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005) speaks of can disrupt the dichotomy of this division. I also wonder how nature can be invited into urban spaces in ways that remain 'natural.' If- as you suggest- we do something to nature by bringing it indoors- what then do we do to nature when we landscape, genetically-modify and limit it in urban environments? How do we disrupt this dichotomy? When I think about these questions and when I read about your history with nature, I thought about my own childhood growing up in a rural community. I remember the summers where the community would gather at the beach on hot afternoons; I remember natural spaces as our public spaces for coming together. I think neo-liberalism changes this as the rural area where I grew up has slowly morphed into a more suburban setting with hierarchies and housing prices that perhaps do exclude difference. I guess my question to you is - what about classrooms that don't border wilderness like those on the North Shore- how do we bring the diversity of the natural world into our diverse human (and urban) relationships? How do we bring the diversity of the human experience into ecological education?
Biesta, G. (2007). Education and the democratic person: Towards a political conception of democratic education. Teachers College Record, 109 (3), 740-769.
Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Todd, S. (2009a). Can there be pluralism without conflict? Ingesting the indigestible in democratic education. Journal of Philosophy of Education Annual Conference, 1-11. Great Britain. Retrieved from http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/conferences/pdfs/Todd.pdf
Todd, S. (2009b). Toward an imperfect education: Facing humanity, rethinking cosmopolitanism. Boulder, CO, USA: Paradigm Publishers.