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? 

obligatory 'blogging about blogging' post

y u blog tho?

I haven't known what to blog about. People blog what they're passionate about. I'll admit, I'm not super passionate about being a slave driver or a slave in an institution of public education, partaking in a monocultural, mass-produced, arbitrary academic exercise. 

So let's start a blog during your one-month required education class! Great idea!

The anti-cynic in me saw the opportunity to stack the UNM requirements with the Permaculture Design Course I attended during the week I was supposed to be blogging, where I found the title to the blog. I am a teacher because I believe the classroom can be a place of healing, of personal growth, and a fertile ground to plant seeds of knowledge for a future our kids actually want to live in. I confess I don't like school anymore...

...like many, and maybe most--(maybe)--of your students...

...or think that they (schools) are necessarily a good thing for people, their health, or their communities. I'm not an expert at what any of those things mean. The school environment, from the point I began taking ADHD medication for behavioral issues, split my personality between a manic, testosterone-driven, competitive, obsessive-compulsive monster while medicated, and an emotional, sensitive, self-loathing, and impulsive drug addict in early stages of withdrawal. This was not great for my mental health, or the way I related to others. And. Ritalin probably kept me out of trouble. 

Wubba lubba dub dub!

What's with the title?

Underneath my initial irritation about being shuttled into a university human CAFO activity I found disappointment in myself that I had not yet found something I cared enough about writing to share with the world though many have suggested I start a blog. Since like 2010. So instead of reacting in course- or self-deprecation, I reflected. 

I care about knowledge and the values embedded therein. I care about sharing the spirit and utility of that knowledge with others. I care about the earth. I care about the future. I care about living in a way that reflects my values. For me, becoming a teacher was part of a new path of self-actualization, away from my PhD program, balancing the eastern and western, modern and ancient wisdom I encountered in my theoretical research and life praxis. 

a brief tangent: about when I decided to become a teacher

I miraculously snuck Dr. Greg Cajete's NATV460 Native Science class onto my schedule, unbeknownst to the Biology graduate advisor, who blocked me from taking PENP130 Kung Fu because it wasn't a graduate level biology class. 

Because the kinesthetic mimicry of mantids, tigers, cranes, monkeys, or eagles is irrelevant to biology...

The most important thing I learned from Cajete was nonverbal: when he discussed the relationship between Native Science and Western Science, he began by bumping his fists together, elbows out, forearms in a line, wrists rotated at right angles to each other, so the knuckles didn't line up.

"This is how it is for a lot of native students." 

Then he would align his wrists, and splay his fingers, gently sliding them together to interlock, adding:

"...but it doesn't have to be that way."

As a teacher, I have found my experience seeking harmony from the dissonant duality within myself helps to bridge, to connect people and their ideas--to heal--to stitch together the fragmentation of self we all experience through the rougher chapters of life. 

"Because we separate / like ripples on a blank shore / in rainbows"

back to souls and soils

I saw the fertilizer-monocultural specialization mentality that had brought me success was eroding my mental health. I was shocked and disturbed to lose a friend to suicide as he was quitting his ADHD medication, which kicked me awake to the dangers of the neural alchemy I was engaged in. When I deferred admission to the PhD program to buy a herd of sheep and flock of turkeys, I took a big step away from the fertilizer fossil fuel pharmaceutical frame of mind that had brought me to where I was in life: 23, M.S. in-hand, full of skills whose utility I worried would be limited in a rapidly changing world. From the straight and narrow, I hurtled myself into the fractal backcountry of re-tooling. At the permaculture design course (PDC) I attended, (hosted by my ecology TA from the beginning of that new chapter, who encouraged me to take a break---

--He still hasn't gone back--

--from graduate school and try out farming.) One of my design teammates (Seth Peterson, @permaculturechef) coined the phrase: "healing souls and soils" and I really liked it. Our design plan included a school, with lodging and an ecological/evolutionary succession of projects for interns and students to take on that would interact with each other and increase the synergistic feedbacks on the whole landscape. 

What should we expect?

Since I ultimately don't want to be shouting streams of data "into the ether(net cable)", I checked a couple tips on blogging. 

Here are a couple tips I like:

⁃ Link your posts to each other. (my friends at Mastodon Valley Farm do a stellar job of this.) Interweave them in a branching narrative. In permaculture, this is often referred to as "stacking functions" where a single element has many functions, and a single function concerns many elements. In this way, knowledge can be conveyed and practiced in the context of indirectly-related content. 

⁃ Be yourself and write for yourself before your audience. That way the people who read your work and appreciate your work already love you and want to read your most authentic voice. "Why am I trying to kill this thing that wants to live?" and "Why do I want to keep this thing alive that wants to die?" are common questions permaculture practitioners ask themselves as we observe and interact with the environment and the things living in it (here, readers). 

Maybe "be yourselves"...cultivating a diverse ecosystem of perspectives

⁃ Give away your knowledge through recipes, lesson plans, music, or experiential wisdom. Cool. Assuming readers read to obtain a yield. For me, the yield is a repository, a practice of production. If the state is going to pay me to interact with young/open minds and lead them to knowledge, I anticipate the content I can generate on a blog serves to attract the pollinators of ideas, and the value they offer to me: to do the work of reproducing and spreading the wisdom (I hope) I can provide here. 

Here are tips I'm probably going to ignore or challenge (transgress? (not yet. next post.)):

⁃ Post regularly! Keep it short! Whore yourself out for reader traffic! As you can probably tell by now, I don't write short snippets. But you're still reading, (I hope), because you're enjoying what I have to say and the means I use to do so. I don't operate on regular timelines. I am allergic to regularity for its own sake, which I anticipate the people who will enjoy my writing will appreciate. Animals, plants, I can deal with. I don't want to be on a computer everyday and I don't want my readers on a computer everyday either. Writing is hard. When the inspiration flows, it flows. When I write I am damaging my brain by looking at a screen. Sometimes I close my eyes to write, to avoid looking. I find the three-dimensional world more engaging and am attracted to bloggers (stanley donwood, jayrosen, vinay, Paul Kingsnorth) who eschew the model of regularity, or have found ways around it (e.g. 538: inviting new, talented authors)--mostly by being exceptional writers. Sure, I'll admit I haven't read the pope's entire essay on climate change, but I think there's a happy medium between Laudato Si and facilitating the shallow interactions with ideas and people that I felt I was doing when I had a facebook. Becoming an adult in a world with attention and validation channels less personal than real life led me to juvenile attention-seeking behavior patterns. I deleted my facebook in 2014, sick of arguments, getting my jimmies all rustled and trying to rustle other people's jimmies, too, chuckling maniacally behind a keyboard about the butthurt revenge I was exacting on my intellectual foes. 

On Facebook, one has strange conversations with friends. On Twitter, one has friendly conversations with strangers. 

Thanks for your time and attention.

p.s. other blogs I like:

https://foodshednomad.com/ << Bruce really doesn't care how long you take to read something. He rocks.

https://carbonpilgrim.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/land-literacy/