My eight year old asked me to tell him what I did everyday for my job. He knew I was a professor, but he wanted to know my schedule and he proceeded by modeling an answer to his own question for me. “I get up, I have breakfast, I go to school, I often have a second breakfast of waffles at school, but don’t worry, they’re only mini-waffles so it’s not too much sugar.” “Then in the classroom we do two songs together on the carpet before I start my work cycle, then it’s lunch, then I usually get a lesson from the teacher in the afternoon, then I come home…” He was curious because we were planning to move back to Canada and he wanted to know why we wanted to move. I told him that the jobs were better and that we wanted to be closer to family. Why were the jobs better, he asked. I told him they paid more and, in my case, offered me freedom to value my own work more. […]
[I’m thinking that my book could be called “Pedagogies for the Anthropocene,” and it would document and showcase a few key experiments I’ve engaged in as a scholar, activist, organizer, and professional, such as problem based learning, my work with Chispa AZ, my failures with Frente Colibrí, my experiences becoming a professional academic, while also relying on interview data with other individual change makers. The book would be a bit of a hodgepodge of theory (theorizing PBL, ecological consciousness and different ways of knowing, theorizing the stories of life), practice (showcasing the action-reflection processes and the PBL scenarios they have generated, sharing the failed attempts, talking about teaching and my efforts to establish myself at ASU), and examples (showcasing other people’s stories, such as Masavi from Chispa, Melissa Nelson’s arrival at ASU, Sarra Tekola’s scholar-activism, United Campus Workers efforts, Duvan’s efforts, Nancy and ASU). Describing a book as a hodgepodge is generally not a good idea. But in this case, I want to capture something about the messiness of life and efforts to intervene in it effectively across different institutional contexts, all tied back to learning how to train ourselves to do this work of confront climate change better. It would be partly pedagogical guide book, partly autobiographical, partly an exercise in engaging in theoretical debates about the ontological and epistemological challenges of ecological consciousness, and partly ethnographic storytelling — but on the whole the reader would come away with a sense of the different ways of framing the problem of preparing the next generation to confront climate change, as the book’s own form would offer a partial response to that question.
I would need to make some careful decisions about what to include and what to exclude, where to begin and how to organize it all — and the main argument would need to be clearly constructed through each of the chapters, showing some of the key elements of the problem: obduracy vs. transformation, collective confidence vs. individual isolation, self-destructiveness vs. new achievements… The interview process would be healing, and a chance to move well outside my own experiences. The theory would go into Leanne Simpson’s adventures in theorizing, the relevance of Walter Benjamin today, the value of peer learning and PBL, and the ontological and epistemological careerism and navel gazing that can be self-centering and boring, on the one hand, and so helpful on other, when opening space for learning new standpoints — it would allow me to advance the problem of not only interpreting the world, but changing it, through confronting the institutionalized power relations of the administrative logics that have become rationalized today in specific places: the university, the NGO world, the international collaboration networks, and the processes of families, workforces, and communities learning to organize themselves.
ecologicalconsciousnessdotorg 