The Significance of Myth for Environmental Education

Philosophers of education have argued that in order for Environmental Education's goals to succeed, students must form bonds and place attachments with nature. Some argue that immersive experiences in nature will be sufficient to form such attachments. However, this may not be enough, requiring other means of motivating them for environmental stewardship. Here, I explore the role the imagination could play for helping (re)enchant students’ perception of themselves‐in‐relationship‐with nature which could support the work these educators are already doing. I explore philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical domains to begin developing a holistic vision of what imagination could contribute for human‐environmental flourishing. Philosophically, I build from Martha Nussbaum's work that stories imaginatively shape our understanding of ourselves and the world, arguing that story—namely, myth—may have a unique power to enchant student's moral and ethical imaginations. I attempt to synthesise Michael Bonnett's rich ‘primordial’ phenomenology with what some mythologists identify as ‘implicit myth’—both of which are drawing attention to the human‐environmental interrelationship. Psychologically, I posit that if myth of this kind can develop a human‐environmental imagination in students, it may serve to create conditions to motivate students to act for environmental stewardship. Pedagogically, I close by identifying authors who seem to embody this primordial and mythic way of being in the world, arguing that studying their writings may help educators and students cultivate this human‐environmental imagination. I draw particular attention to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry for exemplary inspiration and guidance.     

Reconciling ourselves to reality: Arendt,education and the challenge of being at home in the world

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the educational significance of the work of Hannah Arendt through reflections on four papers that constitute this special issue. I focus on the challenge of reconciling ourselves to reality, that is, of being at home in the world. Although Arendt's idea of being at home in the world is connected to her explorations of understanding, such understanding should not be approached as a matter of sense making, but in terms of ‘eccentric judgement’. For judgement to be eccentric, we must expose ourselves to otherness, which has to do with friendship if we understand friendship as a public rather than an entirely private matter. While political judgement requires a ‘being in the presence of others’ Arendt's views on thinking and its role in moral judgement indicate the necessity of solitude, of being alone with oneself. Rather than seeing this a process through which one calls oneself into question, I highlight the importance of the experience of being called into question, which I understand as the experience of ‘being taught’. I conclude that the educational significance of Arendt's work particularly lies in this link with teaching, and less so in notions of learning, reflection and sense making.     

Our Public and Private Selves: Fostering dialogism and student perspective taking

This article considers a site of practice that fosters dialogic consciousness, which I suggest is necessary to teaching social justice and diversity of thought in all sites of practice, including schools. Consciousness of one's own perspective taking and the dialogism necessary to foster voice development are grounded in a growing awareness of our own multiple perspectives or understandings of the world and ourselves. This multiplicity is grounded in how we see the world and how we think the world sees us. Such multiplicity is dynamic in that what we know about ourselves and what we think others know about us are woven through a constant interaction of public and private selves. It is in this interaction that teachers can begin to explore voice and perspective taking with students. In this article, I present how teenagers in a community‐based theater ensemble used movement and writing to define their private and public selves, and conclude with possibilities for classroom practice.     

Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?

The metaphysical ethics of Levinas appeals to many philosophers of education because it seems to promise ethics and social justice without recourse to moral norms, ‘totalising’ political systems or religious belief. However, the notion that the subject can be detached from its worldly being—that one can posit a primordial metaphysical pre‐conscious pre‐phenomenal self which stands in ethical relation to a primordial metaphysical pre‐conscious pre‐phenomenal Other—is highly questionable. From an empirical perspective, our experience of the world and of ourselves can only be conceived in social, cultural and linguistic terms; the self‐referential lexicon Levinas employs to depict the relation between the transcendental subject and the Other ‘in his alterity’ renders his metaphysical assertions impossible to evaluate or give determinate form. From a transcendental perspective, Levinas's metaphysical abstractions simply do not have the power to motivate people to behave ethically. Instead of contributing toward the transformation of education and society envisaged by many philosophers of education, the ‘ethics of the Other’ merely generates an esoteric discourse.     

Fishing in Puddles: Place and Space in Performance Research

This article examines the significance of place and space from a Performance Studies and Social Studies perspective. In terms of the social sciences, I draw upon the formal, symbolic and marginal articulation of place. Hetherington suggests that certain places act as focal point for the establishment of social identities, citing city‐centre landmarks and shopping malls. Similarly, children attach all kinds of values to the formal spaces they occupy. As one example of this point, I examine the child's relationship to the school hall. From the perspective of performance, I examine a project under taken at a junior school in Stoke‐on‐Trent, inspired by the site work of Wrights & Sites. As a critical lens, I adopt Boal's understanding of the oneiric dimension. The oneiric dimension is particularly relevant in performance work as these are the moments when we (as performers and spectators) are pulled into the action. In these instances, the physical space simply disappears, imagination replaces actuality and the desire to believe outweighs the reality of the present.     

Nietzsche,Eternal Recurrence and Education: The Role of the Great Cultivating Thought in the Art of Self‐Cultivation (Bildung)

In this essay, I briefly outline Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence that has implications for education, and life in general; and, lastly, I argue that from an educational point of view, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence is best viewed as the great cultivating thought that has radical ramifications for any project of character education. Indeed, Nietzsche's concern with self‐cultivation (Bildung) to a large degree brings together the central tenets of his thinking to emphasise an ethics of character that is meant to serve as an alternative approach to cultivating character or the self in such a way that it reveals ‘what one is’ now (being), and who they could become (becoming). In order to bring this about, Nietzsche does not conceive the eternal recurrence as a theoretical doctrine, but as an exercise that we incorporate into our lives as a habitual practice, vis‐à‐vis, through repeated and prolonged meditation, reflection, thought and dialogue on the significance of the idea in such a way that it transforms the individual for the better. Subsequently, the idea of the eternal recurrence only becomes cultivating and truly educational if it transforms our lives in such a way that we come to revalue the self as a work of art to a point where we are able to educate ourselves against our age.     

Sociology and Music Education: a further response to Swanwick

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's further critique of our sociological perspective on music education. We argue that criticisms made in relation to our positions on referenlialism, the ability of people to appreciate music cross‐culturally, and the various analytic categories of Meyer, Chester and Keil are all grounded in a desire to isolate the essence of ‘music’ from social and cultural processes. We further argue that the difficulties perceived with our positions do not follow from a belief in the culture‐specific significance of different musics per se, but rather from overly rigid and sometimes mistaken interpretation of our perspective. Finally, we point to the danger of assuming a cross‐cultural category, ‘music’, when many cultures have no equivalent word and use what we understand as ‘music’ in ways vastly different to ourselves.     

Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media

Results of the Boston University Mellon Sawyer seminar 2016–2019 ( www.mellophilemerge.com ) reveal that social and philosophical drives are increasingly central to our uses of technology, including AI. This raises critical challenges for democracy, especially in a hyper‐connected world where social media shapes human conduct in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. A history of the mutual impact of Turing and Wittgenstein on one another points to the contemporary foundational significance of our artful capacity to embed everyday words in forms of life. Wittgenstein's mature focus on forms of life, interlocutory drift, and rule‐following, with its play between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, was an informed critical response to Turing's idea of a ‘Turing machine’, his analysis of the very idea of taking a ‘step’ in a formal system. Wittgenstein's characterisations of our drive to evade a responsibility in speech, especially by appealing to ‘machines’ or ‘algorithms’ as pure mathematical objects, are invaluable warnings for us. The enduring importance of mutually‐attuned ‘phraseology’ to education may be formulated as a humanistic challenge to the very ideas of ‘computational foundations’ and ‘Big Data’ in our hyper‐connected world.     

From the Saltmarsh and the Deershelter

When we think about approaches to teaching and learning in art and design education the diverse and complex role of the teacher soon becomes apparent. Teachers often find themselves working through situations which require them to shift between subject‐ and learner‐centred approaches, where they negotiate authority and freedom in their teaching relationships. On closer inspection the tensions found in these negotiations reveal contradictions for teachers, where they try to do one thing but cannot avoid doing another. The article explores these perplexing and contradictory experiences as possible encounters where we can speculate about ourselves as teachers and discover powerful opportunities for learning. It aims to do this through the critical lens of Tubbs's (2005) ‘Philosophy of the teacher’. Tubbs's analysis provides an opportunity to closely examine the tensions in teaching approaches, and proposes the possibility of their contradiction as educational. In addition, the article explores Henri Lefebvre's ‘moments of presence’, suggesting that encounters in our lives, which appear to exist at the intersection of one thing and another, where we find ourselves experiencing a contradiction, offer exciting possibilities for teaching and learning. The article builds its ideas around landscape encounters, from the saltmarsh and the deer‐shelter. It uses these encounters with landscapes to locate experiences of contradiction, and to work out how a teacher could respond.     

WHAT ROLE CAN BE FULFILLED BY AN EXTERNAL SUPPORT TEACHER TO MAINTAIN STUDENTS WHO PRESENT MAINSTREAM SCHOOLS WITH BEHAVIOUR MANAGEMENT DIFFICULTIES

In July 1989 the special school where I was head was closed down and I found myself appointed to run a small ‘behaviour support service’ which was to provide support to secondary schools in South Cambridgeshire and to make (or purchase from an external provider) a very small amount of ‘alternative provision’ at KS4 (maximum 10 places). The early days of the service were an unmitigated disaster. As I slowly began to understand what the service needed to provide, I wanted to study further the role which an external (to the school) support teacher might provide which would enable schools to work effectively with ‐ or, at least, not exclude ‐ potentially difficult to manage students. This article describes briefly a piece of research which I have carried out into ‘behaviour’ support work in secondary schools which looks at the role which is effective from a support teacher's view and also at that which heads/senior managers are willing to purchase ‐either directly or by endorsing the LEA's ‘top‐slicing’ of its potential schools budget.     

Learning in the outdoor environment: a missed opportunity?

In 2001, the Welsh Assembly Government announced proposals for a Foundation Phase for children aged three to seven years. The Foundation Phase framework promotes a play‐based approach to children's learning in both indoor and outdoor contexts and places children's well‐being and their personal and social development at its core. While the framework is currently being piloted across Wales, full implementation will not take place until 2010; for many schools, then, this is a time of transition. This paper discusses the findings of a research project that aimed to document the current use of the outdoors by a group of early years teachers working in South Wales. Drawing on data from interviews and observations conducted in four schools, it is suggested that the teachers missed many of the opportunities afforded by the outdoor environment to enhance children's learning. The paper considers the reasons why this might be the case and comments on the distinction, apparent in two schools, between what was seen as ‘normal’ and ‘special’ outdoor activity.     

Unsettling orthodoxies: education for the environment/for sustainability

In this paper I employ Foucault's notion of governmentality to reflect on a debate that occurred in the pages of this journal some 10 years ago. I argue that their exchanges indicate ways in which various positions are engaged in a struggle for dominance in this field, and how particular strategies are used to legitimate and maintain these positions. My purpose is not to propose a new orthodoxy – or even to critique those we have – but rather to raise questions about how the unquestioned ‘that‐which‐is’ of orthodoxies comes to be, and their effects. I also suggest that as environmental educators and researchers, we need to work harder to unsettle more often the taken‐for‐granted in environmental education so that we remain alert to our own easy acceptance of orthodoxies. Without this, we risk our exhortations to those we seek to educate – to think critically, to question assumptions, and so forth – becoming empty rhetoric if we are not practising these ourselves – examining our own, as well as others', assumptions and practices.     

From e‐learning space to e‐learning place

In this paper, it is argued that e‐learning environments are currently more like ‘buildings’, ie, learning spaces, rather than ‘schools’, ie, places for learning. The concepts originated from architecture and urban design, where they are used both to distinguish static spaces from inhabited places, and more importantly, as design objectives. The transformation from space to place is supported and enabled by social interactions between the (learning) community members. We argue that this distinction between the concepts explains some of the problems with current e‐learning systems and propose issues to consider when designing new systems. By acknowledging the importance and characteristics of a place, designers and researchers can justify the need and support for social interactions in learning space, consequently enabling social community building in e‐learning environments, and most importantly, supporting the development of a user‐friendly and motivating e‐learning place.     

What (a) to do about ‘impact’: a Bourdieusian critique

This paper presents a research‐based, theoretically‐informed contribution to the debate on ‘impact’ in educational research, and specifically a response to Gardner's 2011 presidential address to the British Educational Research Association. It begins by discussing the development of the research ‘impact’ agenda as a global phenomenon, and reviews the current state of debate about ‘impact’ in the UK's Research Excellence Framework. It goes on to argue that a radical alternative perspective on this agenda is needed, and outlines Bourdieu's sociology—including his much‐neglected concept of illusio—as offering potential for generating critical insights into demands for ‘impact’. The term illusio in particular calls us to examine the ‘stakes’ that matter in the field of educational research: the objects of value that elicit commitment from players and are ‘worth the candle’. This framework is then applied first to analyse an account of how an ESRC‐funded project that I led was received by different research ‘users’ as we sought to generate impact for our findings. Second, it is used to show that the field of educational research has changed; that it has bifurcated between the field of research production and that of research reception; and that the former is being subordinated to the latter. The paper concludes by arguing that, despite many educational researchers' commitments to ‘make a difference’ in wider society, the research ‘impact’ imperative is one that encroaches on academic freedom; and that academics need to find collective ways in which to resist it.     

Socialisation for learning at a distance in a 3-D multi-user virtual environment

This paper reports findings of a pilot study that examined the pedagogical potential of Second Life (SL), a popular three‐dimensional multi‐user virtual environment (3‐D MUVE) developed by the Linden Lab. The study is part of a 1‐year research and development project titled ‘Modelling of Secondlife Environments’ ( http://www.le.ac.uk/moose ) funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee. The research question addressed in this paper is: how can learning activities that facilitate social presence and foster socialisation among distance learners for collaborative learning be developed in SL, a 3‐D MUVE? The study was carried out at the University of Leicester (UoL) within an undergraduate module on Archaeological Theory, where two tutors and four students took part in four learning activities designed to take place in SL within the UoL Media Zoo island. The learning activities and training in SL were based on Salmon's five‐stage model of online learning. Students’ engagement in SL was studied through interviews, observations and records of chat logs. The data analysis offers four key findings in relation to the nature and pattern of in‐world ‘socialisation’ and its impact on real‐world network building; the pattern of in‐world ‘socialisation’ stage in Salmon's 5‐stage model; perspectives on students’ progress in‐world through the first stage of the model—‘access and motivation’—and perspectives on their entry into, and progress through, the second stage of the model—‘socialisation’—and the role of identity presented through avatars in the process of socialisation. The paper offers implications for research and practice in the light of these findings.     

Mobility,place and affect in transnational teacher education graduates’ accounts of their first year teaching

In this article, we consider how mobility, immobility, embodiment and affect appeared in research with 13 beginning teachers who were ‘bonded’ graduates of a twinned (Malaysia-New Zealand) teacher education programme. We discuss the teachers' accounts of moving place, and being placed in new schools; ‘moving selves’, or experiencing a changed sense of self as new teachers; ‘moving students’, or seeing shifts in students' educational outcomes; and being moved by (responding affectively to) student learning and behaviour. Our study highlights the need in internationalised teacher (and higher) education to pre-empt challenges inherent in moving ‘home’ or to new places to work.     

Disadvantaging the Disadvantaged: Bangladeshis and education in Tower Hamlets

This article describes the way in which policies in a local education authority actually worked to disadvantage a group of children already suffering gross disadvantages. During the 1980's 1LEA was unable to provide sufficient school places for children in Tower Hamlets, 95% of the resulting ‘out‐of‐school’ children being of Bangladeshi origin. The article records the efforts of the Tower Hamlets Law Centre to register a complaint on behalf of the children, and the way in which the local and central education authorities avoided their responsibilities to these children. It is suggested that such a situation would never have been tolerated in a white, middle‐class area. The article represents a contribution to the sociology of disadvantage in that it indicates the tendency of policy‐makers to ignore the economic and social structures which create disadvantage, and to focus on individual or family ‘pathology’ as a major cause of disadvantage.