Essay by PhD student Daniel Kelly
In face of negative headlines to the contrary, the social and ecological eutopias of sustainability can be hard to imagine, let alone enact. However, for those with interest, time and fortitude, a myriad of alternatives are percolating away below mainstream attention. They are shining new light on old practices and bringing plenty of innovation, inspiration and healing too.
Over eight monthly seminars, the Ngā Ara Whetū-supported project, Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable World has heard from educators all around the globe – including here in Aotearoa New Zealand. These teachers have shared their framing, teaching strategies and tricks as they work to encourage social change; not just challenging ‘what is’, but opening a different space for ‘what could be’ as well.
In this article, I reflect on intersections between the final two seminars in the series: one from the University of British Columbia’s Sharon Stein on her work with artist-academic collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures; and one from the University of Technology Sydney’s Transdisciplinary School, presented by Dr Susanne Pratt and Giedre Kligyte.
Image from https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/mini-zine-house-mycelium/
The end of the world (as we know it)?
A member of the artist-academic collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Dr. Sharon Stein’s seminar offered listeners an unorthodox take on today’s insufficient climate action. Drawing on a range of indigenous scholarship, Dr Stein explained how the collective goes beyond analyses which locate inaction in a lack of knowledge or morality, instead arguing that the core issue is one of denial: a tricky multi-layered phenomenon maintained at both a population level as well as our individual heads.
More specifically, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures argue that people in countries like New Zealand are in denial about the unsustainability of our way of life – not just the well discussed environmental impacts of Western consumption, but the social harms central to its privileges too. Denial here isn’t just a refusal to acknowledge the harms or our complicity, but also includes deeper layers: where people accept the critique and even complicity but refuse its full implications. As Dr Stein argued, to genuinely address colonial harms requires the end of the world as we know it; not as an apocalyptic conclusion, but the start of something new in intellectual, affective, and relational spheres.
At heart, this is a critique that calls people to face our complicity in this system and the magnitude and complexity of the challenges that changing involves. Because of the depth of our conditioning, and the various ways in which society continues to reinforce ways of living that are demonstrably harmful, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures advocates for a patient and long term process. It asks, ‘what kind of education is needed to meet unsustainability? As Dr Stein unpacked, their answer involves efforts to interrupt and unlearn problematic habits while also expanding our capacity and stamina to respond – not just facing what ‘we want to face’, but facing ‘what actually is’ with all of its complexity, colonial baggage, and pain.
In order to help facilitate this transition and the ongoing inquiry that it involves, Stein and the collective’s work involves a number of what they describe as ‘technologies for inquiry’. These ‘technologies’ use different pedagogical approaches to highlight, challenge and ultimately work to replace the deep-seated assumptions that they argue lie at the root of the climate crisis; in short, how we think, feel, and relate to others.
One such technology is called “The Bus within us”. Dr Stein explained how this involves a guided exercise where students are invited to look inward and consider the different layers that make up the self, imagining themselves as a bus full of different people. Some of these people are more familiar and perhaps ‘drive’ the bus for the majority of the time; others are less familiar and only take control in moments of anger or fear. What are these people saying, thinking, feeling? Why are they acting in this way? Sometimes the bus tracks familiar routes; on other occasions the road is foggy, the destination unknown. As Dr Stein explained, while simple, this exercise is crucial for challenging colonial assumptions of a singular self that is always in control. Instead, the bus metaphor allows students to conceptualise and relate – through their own experience – to a reality that is more multiple, entangled and complex: a crucial shift in orientation for deepening this work.
Dr Stein also discussed their use of ‘The House That Modernity Built’, a physical metaphor helping to teach the superstructure of today’s unsustainable order; and the Huni Kui University of the Forest’s use of guided forest walks to step outside of intellectual understanding and into an embodied physical realm.
Across all of these approaches, Dr Stein stressed that their work seeks to support students to deepen their own understanding of not only the issues but also their own complicity, inviting them to notice their own patterns (and the responses that highlighting these facts produce in them). In the end, Dr Stein explained that their aspiration is to foster “compassion without complacency” and “accountability without accusation” – elements only possible when we begin to un-numb to the interconnection that underpins all life.
Getting out of the box
In the final seminar of the series, we heard from members of the University of Technology Sydney’s Transdisciplinary School: Dr Susanne Pratt and Dr Giedre Kligyte. The seminar began with a history of the Transdisciplinary School, its context and the various iterations it’s gone through leading up to today. Born out of efforts to step beyond the very limitations the previous seminar discussed, we learned about some of the different courses and degrees the School offers, and its strong emphasis on social and environmental justice alongside innovation, creativity and addressing real world problems.
Drs Pratt and Kligyte outlined both practices utilised in teaching at the School, and the various capacities they seek to build as part of their overall aspiration for social change. For example, one important capacity is the ability to consider multiple perspectives, and Dr Pratt explained how a practice called the Perspective Relay helps to support this. In a Perspective Relay, students move around a different physical circuit where, at every ‘lap’ they are prompted to consider the same problem from different disciplinary perspectives before coming together to discuss and work on their data collaboratively. In a similar creative vein, Dr Pratt described how the School has a strong emphasis on futures thinking, setting assignments where students must imagine then exhibit different future scenarios as well as also ‘back-casting’ – taking those desired futures and working backwards to sketch out how they might come to pass.
Another important capacity celebrated at the Transdisciplinary School is the ability to collaborate across difference, and Dr Kligyte explained how this is facilitated by working on real world problems with various industry and community partners – as in the Transdisciplinary School’s collaboration with Red Cross, with Dr Pratt describing one project where students worked to support emergency responses to situations of extreme heat. As Dr Kligyte explained, learning here is often a two-way street, where the fresh eyes of students and the multi-disciplinary problem-solving approach have helped these established groups see old issues anew. Example outcomes here include changing physical workspaces as well as how these groups work internally, their prioritised targets and strategy and so on – with these outcomes themselves part of the School’s larger theory of change, where supporting students and connecting them starts to ripple out and effect larger and larger groups.
Working well with others
In ways that resonated with Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures’ emphasis on interconnection and the quality of relationships as a key aspect of change, Drs Pratt and Kligyte’s seminar provided a tantalising overview of an institution geared towards supporting this work, as well as a number of specific practices that might be further explored. As always, there is much more to learn and do. While the complexity of historical events and their continuing legacy constrains much, Dr Stein explained that she finds hope in the quality of relationships, crystallising a key overlap for me. At heart, work here is not just about what we’re teaching, but how it is being taught. In this sense, the promise of a better world lies not just in our critique, scheming and/or reflections, but the paths made as we walk – as teachers, as students, as fellow humans – inviting us all into action, each in our different ways. So it is that we must go on.
You can watch the seminars online at https://www.ngaarawhetu.org/teaching-and-learning-for-a-sustainable-world/#Seminar%20Series. If you want to hear about any future seminars, you can join the Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable World email list by emailing dkel042@aucklanduni.ac.nz
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