Tidal Volume
Morgan Reid
Tidal Volume is an invitation to conversation about
thinking and practice, over and in water—and about epistemological
and pedagogical paradigms in marine environmental education. Produced as
a response to David Jardine’s
(1998) essay “Immanuel Kant, Jean Piaget, and the Rage for Order: Ecological
Hints of the Colonial Spirit in Pedagogy, Tidal Volume and this
introduction are part of an ongoing inquiry into media-making as environmental
education.The video is, in part, a depiction of struggle for balance between
openness and fear. It is presented as exploratory research into some questions
teachers and teacher educators might consider when facilitating student-made
videos in the study of relationships with the ocean.
Setting aside questions of technique and technologies, my
focus here is on the issues that emerged most prominently in my reflection
on Jardine’s essay in the context of embodied experiences depicted in
the video. First,
we are being forced by the sometimes gentle, sometimes violent guidance of
the Earth, to reconsider what we understand ourselves to be, and what, therefore,
we wish our children to become. We are being forced back into questions that
form the core of pedagogy itself, and pedagogy, too, is being slipped back
into its element. (Jardine, 1998, 103)
This applies to environmental education directly, as a reminder
that Nature has its own forms of what we might call intuition, logic, rationality
and wisdom. It may be possible, with technology, to alter or defer what Nature
is or is to become, but we are increasingly reminded of limits. We are reminded
to pay attention and listen. To do so may require considerable re-forming of
educational thinking, if, as Jardine suggests, we have inherited from Descartes,
Kant, and Piaget a “belief that we might somehow live independently of
our Earthly inheritance” (Jardine, 1998, 105-7). Jardine challenges
Kantian categories of Reason and their reproduction, through Piaget’s
developmental psychology, into pedagogies of colonization in which we are colonizing
children “who are other than us,” and, further “raising our
children to become colonizers—ones destined to believe that they
give the Earth meaning through their activities” (117).
This is a
problem requiring educators’ efforts. Are we teaching students to colonize
the unknown of Nature into the realm of knowledge, with its illusions of control?
Near the ocean the presence of the unseen and unknown are immediate. Particularly
with the sea, the problem is provocative: How to explore and experience our
personal relationships with the oceans, beyond systematic data? Marine education
approaches through narratives, artifacts, and art provide cultural connections
and complement scientific studies, but can we facilitate more personal connections?
Can we and our students keep our thinking brains attuned, despite being surrounded
by the unknown? For me, in an ocean context, the problem is not trivial.
As comfortable as I like to think I am in the water, I also
recognize danger, and experience fear. The bodily situation of being in the
ocean, walking, floating, or immersed, triggers enough distraction that to
do other than gather samples and data presents a challenge. Because of my internal
tension between anxiety and appreciation, any plan for “education” immediately
tempts me back toward data, logic, and Reason. It is difficult to imagine or
invent a different approach. It is easier to look at samples and communicate
data than it is to experience, characterize, and share complex knowing of an
environment. However, while difficult, perhaps it is not impossible to create
and practice environmental education in ways that are
properly responsive to the place in which we find ourselves… and which
issue up out of a place as a considerate response to that place (i.e., a response
which somehow acts in accordance with the sustainability of that place)
(Jardine, 1998, 118).
The more immediate problem, then, seems to be “What
alternatives might be available to a Kantian approach of inquiry, not only
in the design of learning experiences themselves and in pedagogical practice
but, further, in the internal workings and external situation of an educator’s
mind and body engaged in environmental education?” Is it desirable, or
even possible, to contrive a situation that could lead to a sustainable design
of environmental education that can accept that our environment “becomes,
not an object displayed according to forms of human understanding, but a home
that embraces” (Jardine, 1998, 120)? And if it does not feel like
a home—though it is not in its own existence any more or less malevolent
than water—might we question why we feel fear, and from who or what that
fear grows?
If I can know the ocean as uncontrollable, is it not therefore
uncontaminated by the chaotic malevolence Kant might attribute to it? In
the ocean, I am readily presented with the adaptive option of humility. Whether
walking, floating, or immersed, there is much I cannot see or know. I am vividly,
immediately, and fluidly “connected to and dependent on what falls outside
of the sphere of knowing,” and “must act on the basis of ignorance” (Jardine,
1998, 119). If I cannot then proceed with the humble assumption of belonging
in an unknowable Nature, then I am in such a hostile environment that I must
either avoid it as enemy or conquer it totally. In this mind-set, it will be
difficult to gather data, let alone experience the environment as a part of
our whole shared existence. Whether the environment of interest is the ocean
or an urban block, would it not be worthwhile to let it move us, so that we
can know our responses, and from those for us to question our fear and its
true authors? From here, perhaps it is possible to move, not past fear, nor
without fear, but with an entire range of emotions that are calibrated to,
appropriate to, and emergent from the place, including fear as well as personal,
vivid, relational awareness.
Tidal Volume is an example of and an attempt to stimulate
further inquiry into practices of culturally—and personally—grounded rich,
experiential ways of learning about marine environments. I respectfully request
responses, comments, and possible collaboration, in the hope that we might
find more ways to communicate the richness of our experiences, and the circumstances
in which they occur, the better to bring them and environmental education together
more often.
References
Bowers, C. A. (1993). Critical essays on education, modernity, and the recovery
of the ecological imperative. New York: Teachers College Press.
Jardine, D. W. (1998). Immanuel Kant, Jean Piaget, and the rage for order:
Ecological hints of the colonial spirit in pedagogy. In D. Jardine, To dwell
with a boundless heart: Essays in curriculum theory, hermeneutics, and the
ecological imagination (103-121). New York: Peter Lang.
Affiliations
Morgan Reid, Masters Student
Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education
University of British Columbia
