Farewell....for now!
(After two weeks in Killarney Provincial Park sharing a tent with my sister!)
With this final entry, my official community placement comes to a close (although I will be continuing on in a volunteer capacity!). It’s helped to shape and guide some of my own principals and understandings around experiential and eco-justice education, while also presenting me with unique challenges that arose from our current global predicament, the nature of the placement, and my own biases and experiences.
Thank you for listening and reading, and I hope to e-see you again soon!
Valuing Experiential Learning in the Science Classroom
I do believe that experiential learning needs to hold a more principal role in education, as it fosters relevance, understanding, and connection within students to global sustainability issues.
This is particularly true with eco-justice and sustainability education in addressing eco-anxiety. If students relate to the topic through their own experiences instead of through the voice and beliefs of a single teacher, it can help to break down the power dynamics at play in eco-anxiety as well as create a sense of purpose and impact on their surroundings (Hickman, 2020).
As well, experiential learning can be an excellent way to foster peer support and discussion amongst students, which Pihkala (2020) discuss as being a very effective method of creating emotional resilience in students around eco-anxiety. This reminds me of both my Closets to Climate and Pigs blog posts, as they both gave space for students to explore a topic on their own and discuss the implications openly with their peers, including any emotional thoughts or reactions.
Eco-Justice and Empowerment through Community
I do believe that when students form connections with and understandings of their immediate surroundings and location, a deeper understanding of how their location relates to a larger global context becomes an easier extrapolation. Community engaged learning (CEL) is a way in which students can move from the local to the global context of eco-justice in ways that foster feelings of empowerment, positivity, and connectivity. The similar notion of how local and community engagement in sustainability and environment can foster a better understanding of the global impacts of climate change as well as a sense of empowerment are described in research conducted by Trott (2020).
I do feel that at times bureaucracy can get in the way of school initiatives focused on community engagement hat could greatly benefit students, and of course experiencing CEL during a global pandemic placed significant limitations on the activities and physical involvement with the community that I could implement. That being said, I feel that there are always ways to be creative and move outside of the confines of what we feel is entailed in the confines of the curriculum to encompass a more global competent, inclusive, and climate aware classroom.
Reflections for my future as an educator
I feel at times my learning goals for this placement and the needs of the placement were at conflict - I often played a supportive role in more general classroom needs such as marking, organizing, or taking over mid-class. I did find it difficult at times to balance my specific goals and the needs of the broader classroom and curriculum, and that became ever more intertwined and messy once I entered practicum in the same placement. It’s an interesting dilemma between having the continuity of classes and students, which can hugely benefit creativity and critical engagement in lessons, and separating placement and practicum needs. It is possible, and I feel with perhaps some better time management on my part I could have more easily separated the two and better met my placement goals.
That being said, I found that it takes a lot of energy and time to be creative, mindful, and reflective when creating material that engages students while authentically exploring social, political, and ecological topics. Because of this, it’s so easy to fall back onto the traditional Ontario curriculum when we’re crunched for time or feeling exhausted.
But I think it’s also important to remember that many of the topics I was exploring were centred around marginalized voices. I’ve seen quite a few black folks and folks of colour who use their social media platforms to centre ant-racist discourse in education and sustainability, speak to their exhaustion from decades and centuries of fighting their erasure, and frustration when a white person says that the effort to include marginalized voices, to centralize and fight for space for those voices, is tiring. It is far beyond the time for white folks, like myself, to take the burden of equity and space creation for their voices. I may feel tired and exhausted, but I don’t feel that it is an adequate excuse for letting decolonization or combatting eco-racism slip from our central tenets in our educational practices.
And perhaps this is the problem - they should be so central to our practice that engaging with them and growing from them shouldn’t be an exhaustive process. And the voices of marginalized populations, Indigenous ways of knowing should already be central in our discussions and listenings. And I feel that when white folks like myself feel that these inclusive efforts (although that term is starting to feel inadequate in describing the varying complexities and constantly progressing ideologies of inclusion) are exhaustive, that points to the integral and central position white supremacy and racism have taken in our minds, practices, and education as a whole, that it takes significant effort to create lesson of sustainability that don’t further marginalized or stereotype or tokenize Indigenous, Black, or people of colour.
So, fight the exhaustion so that you can fight for space for Black, Indigenous, and voices of colour in science classrooms, particular when discussing sustainability, eco-justice, and climate change.
What's Next
My time with the placement, but also the entire MT program, has come to a close. I'm moving forward into unknown territory - hopefully soon to become a full time classroom teacher with the TDSB, and eventually in the Kawarthas where I plan on practicing what I preach, and creating my own sustainable home filled with pollinator flowers, bee hives, composted vegetable gardens, renewable energy, and self sufficiency.
I'm already feeling the pull to be lazy for a time, to regenerate and recuperate, spend some time in the outdoors, and re-align myself with my own needs. I think we all need time and space for reconnection, particularly with our current global circumstances.
So as I say farewell, I think on my favourite quote from Lord of the Rings.
Not all who wander are lost.
To me this reaches beyond my aimless wandering in wooded forests into pointed intellectual wanderings. We have to wander and feel lost at times, feel messy, feel uncertain, and feel uncomfortable, to grow and expand our understanding of equity and continue the process of bettering our practice and ourselves.
References:
Hickman, C. (2020). We need to (find a way) to talk about… Eco-anxiety. Journal of Social
Work Practice, 34(4). Pp. 411-424
Pihkala, P. (2020). Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education. Sustainability, 12(23).
Trott, C.D. (2020). Children’s constructive climate change engagement: Empowering
awareness, agency, and action. Environmental Education Research, 26(4), pp.
532-554.
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