Transgressing Ecological Conditioning

TtT

I am reading Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks. I also recently completed my first formal Permaculture Design Course, and so in the spirit of the author, I will do my best to balance her introduced content with my own experience. I notice a lot of similarities and will write from a comparative stance, bridging the ecological and social discourses.

"There are times when I walk into classrooms overflowing with students who feel terribly wounded in their psyches (many of them see therapists), yet I do not think that they want therapy from me. They do want an education that is healing to the uninformed, unknowing spirit. They do want knowledge that is meaningful. They rightfully expect that my colleagues and I will not offer them information without addressing the connection between what they are learning and their overall life experiences."(18)

From entirely different discourses (pedagogical theory, feminism, multiculturalism), hooks applies David Holmgren's 12 permaculture principles  to the ecology of the classroom and the self. Her table of Contents (to be linked to other blog entries once I discuss them):

Introduction (teaching to transgress)
1. Engaged pedagogy
2. A Revolution of Values
3. Embracing Change
4. Paolo Freire
5. Theory as Liberatory Practice
6. Essentialism and Experience
7. Holding my Sister's Hand
8. Feminist Thinking
9. Feminist Scholarship
10. Building a Teaching Community
11. Language
12. Confronting Class in the Classroom
13. Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process
14. Ecstasy

If I were to create aesthetic, arbitrary groups (subject to change), as if movements of a symphony:
I - (1, 2, 3) - Exposition
II - (4, 5, 6) - Philosophical Elaboration
III - (7, 8, 9) - Identity
IV - (10) - Social Oikos
V - (11, 12) - Economic Oikos
VI - (13, 14) - Liking School Again

The combination of the PDC and TtT have been more healing in concert than I imagine they would have been individually. The PDC offered tools to heal my relationship with Earth, and hooks offered tools to heal my relationship with myself and others.

OK. ONTO CONTENT, DUDE:

Transgress: (From Merriam-Webster)

1. intransitive verb

2. 1:  to violate a command or law :  sin
3. 2:  to go beyond a boundary or limit

4. transitive verb

5. 1:  to go beyond limits set or prescribed by :  violate transgress divine law
6. 2:  to pass beyond or go over (a limit or boundary)

Says hooks, "I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions--a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom." My most valuable learning experiences were those that taught me to teach myself, not just to memorize information. One of the goals of permaculture is to design systems that self-organize, aligned with the energetic and material flows of nature rather than opposed to them. Similarly, self-managed classrooms operate on permaculture principles: zonal frequencies of user (designer, teacher) interaction, sectors of spatial activities, scalar and temporal hierarchies of elements that can be more or less readily manipulated. I believe, and am beginning to observe that when students can understand what rules are governing their learning (metaknowledge), they can be empowered to interact with those rules in an increasingly sophisticated manner, to the point that they ultimately can self-educate, and self-regulate. To transgress these rules is to disregard them, and to begin to engage in the process of defining a new set of rules. Maybe this is what Lao Tse means when he says "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Maybe this is the same truth touched on by Einstein, who observes "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." or the truth of Bruce Lee: "Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns." George Monbiot advocates that we "rewild the child"--that a radical freedom and active appreciation of it can be instilled in children with no scaffold and structure but nature itself. It is as if coming into contact with the deep, fractal, organizing energies of nature begins to spin the wheels of primal feedback loops of information deep within the evolutionary legacy of our brains. Before we were primates, before we knew what language was, before we were vertebrates, or even multicellular life, we needed to learn, to adapt, to creatively use and respond to change. Teaching ourselves to transgress (we are all students) is a first step in that direction. Laments Monbiot: 

"When children are demonised by the newspapers, they are often described as feral. But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people’s property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law."

Let's make the classroom a place where they (and we, teachers) can exercise their (and our) evolutionary birthright to defy and transcend constraints, to become empowered participants in their relationships to the planet, and to each other.

Loosen up, Mr. Chang.

Thank you for your time and attention.
#rewild

Note to self, (or enthusiastic readers/commenters) consider the following: 

-How can rotational grazing be a metaphor for the ways we might construct productive, interactive boundaries in our classroom ecosystems? How do cows behave with different modes and degrees of human intervention? How are we like cows (or not)?
-Do you agree that we should always integrate rather than segregate? i.e. how useful is the metaphorical "cage" Bruce Lee suggests we can improve? 
-What is freedom? Can we be free of all "cages" or preconceptions?