It is common knowledge that our world is in crisis because we are facing huge environmental concerns. A part of school curriculum is to discuss these issues with children. Knowledge about these concerns is out there in society and has been for years, but are people making the critical changes in their lifestyles to drastically reduce the negative environmental impact that we are causing? Is knowledge enough to create change? How can schools become places of ethical practice and change? What are we missing in our efforts to create change? Tronto writes, “ethics of care as ‘a practice rather then a set of rules or principles... She defines caring as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so we can live in it as well as possible’ ... broadening the concept to include our relationship with the environment as well as with other people. She outlines a number of elements, or values, of an ethics of care including: attentiveness (to the needs of others), responsibility, competence and responsiveness.” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.74) How can we respond to environmental issues in our classrooms in the ways of caring that Tronto suggests?
How do we engage in environmental concerns with young children? The use of literature can invite these conversations with children. The author Dr. Seuss was one of the first authors to write stories for children that discussed very difficult world issues. One of his stories, The Lorax is a story line based on environmental issues and neoliberalism. Here are two images from the story.
How do we take our engagements with difficult social issues and create change within our classrooms? Is knowledge enough to create sustaining change? Do these environmental conditions desensitize people when theory is not put into action?
The event that I attended called Bringing Children and Nature Back Together, Ken Finch talked about this issue. He said that “knowledge is not enough because people act with their heart first and then their brain. Knowledge without love will not stick”. So this change must be a felt meaning, action that comes from our caring for nature. If we hope to create our schools as places for ethical practice then we must provide children with opportunities to engage with the natural world and the species that co-exist with us so they can develop relationships with nature. Levinas views, “ethics as strongly relational, being about how people relate to each other... the recognition that we are all in more or lesser degrees dependent on the care, attention and respect of others.” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.82) If we look at this quote through the frame of the “Other” as also being nature then nature requires our response through the ethics of care. It is through the relationships built between children and nature that create Levinas’s “ethics of an encounter” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.92). Children then have the knowledge of environmental concerns and the relationship between themselves and the natural world. It is with both the relationship and knowledge that create spaces for social change.
Literature is a great way to stimulate conversations of difficult issues but it shouldn’t end there. Making connections from our stories into conversations allows teachers and children to create meaning together. Taking our reciprocal thinking of these social issues and creating action through our response to this information, is where our responsibility to nature becomes a practice of ethics.
It is crucial for educators to reflect on how we introduce the natural world to children? Are we providing the environment and time for children to discover the wonders of nature? Imagine the feeling a child has when they discover insect species living in logs. Do our outdoor environments invite these experiences?
I leave you with this message from Dr. Seuss’s story The Lorax,
References:
Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Rouledge Farmer.
Hi Ashley,
ReplyDeleteYour blog has provoked me to ask how we can enter into conversations with nature. I think it is challenging, when we discuss the preservation of ecology, not to make it a moralizing discussion about either saving or destroying the planet, being indoors or outdoors. I think the video of the Lorax can be a provocation for disrupting these dichotomies when we think about the Lorax stating that he "speaks for the trees, [he] speaks for the trees for the trees have no tongues" (1972, 4:39). This statement has provoked me to ask how we can enter into conversations with nature rather than simply speaking for or about them. Ecology theory, as presented by educational theorist David Jardine (2002) and others, takes ideas from nature and ecology in order to question the dichotomies in education, thought and the world. In this way ecology is intertwined with education and thinking rather than simply something that we must rediscover out in nature or in past childhoods where summers were spent running wild in the woods.
Jardine presents a perspective of nature where voices intertwine. In this perspective “ecology [...] presents us with an image of our lives and the life of the Earth as involving a vast, vibrant, generative, ambiguous, multivocal, interweaving network of living interconnections” (p.6). In this quote ecology seems to be deeply connected with notions of community. This connection seems to be echoed in your description of the community of educators coming together to speak about their fears and the possibilities for exploring nature with children and with each other. This idea seems to break down some of the barriers that separate the classrooms of education from communities and the rest of the world, and the divisions between indoors and outdoors, by opening conversations. The Lorax(1972) says “the trees have no tongues” but ecology theory suggests that they have other ways of speaking. How do we listen to the voices of ecology? How do these voices speak to the implications of education and the implications of our actions in the world.
In this video (http://vimeo.com/8080927 between minute 8:30 and 13:00) Thomas King(2009) reinvents a story about birds hitting the skyscrapers in Toronto and falling in the street. When he first heard this story, the news broadcasters spoke about how the birds are cleared away before the tourists or the commuters can see them. Thomas King tells this story in a way that forces us to ask what is hidden or silenced in our society and our culture. How do we engage with the stories that have been silenced without mounting them on display in ways that are merely surface level, tourist approaches?
Jardine, D. (2002). Speaking with a Boneless Tongue. Bragg Creek: Makyo Press. Retrieved from http://people.exeter.ac.uk/PErnest/pome16/docs/jardine.pdf
King, T.(Speaker). (2009). Thomas King at the Museum of Anthropology [online video]. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/8080927
Pratt, H. (Director), & Seuss, Dr. (Writer). (1972). The Lorax [online video]. Retrieved from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6650219631867189375#
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