Kindle Notes & Highlights
or put in different terms, to develop the deep relational ontologics required to acknowledge “place as a co-teacher” (Blenkinsop & Beeman, 2010; Blenkinsop & Piersol, 2013)—it will invariably confront the more fundamental problem of what comprises language?
Ecohermeneutics means imploying language and attentive disciplines in education to remediate our “hyperseparation” (Plumwood, 2002) from nourishing interconnections with the rest of life on the planet.
Everything is ontologically robust. To keep our thinking fluid by breaking out beyond the confines of a narrowly conceived ontology premised solely on anthropic agency into the pitter-patter of a living earthen interbeing of which the disciplines of schooling are a part, not an exception (Jardine, 1998).
Or, in another sense, it is something like attuning thinking to the polyphony of interbeing, and joining in, rather than drowning out.
Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena.
Beings eat one another. This is the fundamental business of the world. It is the whole, not any of its parts, that must prevail, and this whole is always changing. There is no indispensable species, and no indispensable culture. Especially not a culture that dreams of eating without being eaten, and that offers the gods not even the guts or the crumbs.
Now consider knowledge as an interwoven mass of branching, thread-like networks that course and ramify predominantly beneath our everyday awareness.
I hold the very simpleminded view that everything is related to everything else—and that every one is related to everyone else,
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry.
If you think that way and teach at the same time, wisdom gets in your teachings. If students hear you, it gets in their hearts. If you think that way and teach with place, then pedagogy resonates with ecology. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
