In Ecology, Spirituality and Education, Elaine Riley-Taylor claims that the crises we face–from environmental on a global scale, to identity and purpose on a personal scale–can be traced to how we have been trained to think–and not to think. Taking her cue from Foucault, who she says, warns us that “any discourse, no matter how appealing, can become dangerous when held naively as unproblematic and thus beyond doubt” (p. 38), Riley-Taylor draws on a variety of critiques to help her outline, then problematize the dominant modes of Western thought apparent in our approaches to environmental issues, education, and personal, social and political decision making. The alternative approach she has crafted, “ecospiritual praxis” has an eclectic pedigree, which includes the theoretical and ethical underpinnings of her problematizing referents along with those of other worldviews.

But rather than look at the compelling case she builds against common thought processes, and for alternative ones, I would like to focus on the most elemental issue she raises and its implications for education. Riley-Taylor’s claim that our problems stem from the ways in which we think intrigues me because it is aligned with my fascination with the ways in which we make meaning in and of our world. Like Riley-Taylor, I believe that we can be trapped by how we think, and that these traps can lead to destructive practices on personal and broader levels. My own recognition of the potential for being trapped by one’s own thinking began years ago with a conversation.

Sitting on the curb

I am sitting on the curb outside our suburban home. It’s late, the evening is cool, our voices are low. I’m told about the ways, subtle and otherwise, my companion’s father made her feel stupid, and therefore somehow unworthy. How his dismissal left this child, now an adult, constantly looking for validation. How it led her to construct a hierarchy of values with intelligence at the top that leaves her vulnerable to experts and prone to worship those she considers “intelligent.” It is a belief that broaches no logic or proof, and one that she has clung to for years with great determination–at great personal cost. Her experience has shaped her worldview in profound ways she cannot or will not shake.

What we experience shapes how we think.

In the course of conversation she poses a problem. I offer a range of alternative perspectives for looking at it. She fends them off, in the process revealing a framework to which she appeals to understand events, and about which she seems completely oblivious. It seems that the invisible girders of her framework limit what she can see, and colour what she does see.

How we think reciprocally shapes what we experience, learn, know, and understand.

Humans are creatures who seek structure and meaning, so creating structures to organize our thinking is an inevitable process, but not, as Riley-Taylor points out, a necessarily benign one. In Riley-Taylor’s terms, the box created by conventional Western modes of thinking sees the world in terms of separations and dualisms. This kind of thinking supports other problematic conceptual girders that orient us towards: power-over relations; impenetrable subject-object boundaries; valuations measured in terms of instrumental, largely economic, potential; and differences viewed as hierarchical yardsticks. Western modes of thought also value, almost exclusively, a “rational” and detached mind separated from its spiritual and sensual counterparts, and, therefore, the information and insights available from them. Finally, Western modes of thought tend to ignore the interrelatedness of all life, and so miss the potential for connectivity with others and with the contexts in which we live those lives.

The result? According to Riley-Taylor, these Western ways of thinking have led to practices which are destroying the environment and have demeaned, ignored or oppressed countless human, and other living beings. Given its destructive power, why have these modes of thinking held such sway for so long?

At my teacher’s feet

A bell rings signaling the end of our Grade 13 scholarship English class. The course has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced. The course has introduced me to the existentialism and absurdism of Sartre, Camus, Kafka and Beckett, the stream of consciousness of Faulkner, the dense prose of Conrad, and the driven attempts of D. H. Lawrence to pierce our separatenesses. We’ve explored each author and their works in the context of their time and circumstances, explored literary conventions and innovations, and been challenged to try to see through the eyes and think through the understandings of others. The recognition of and flirtation with differing orientations to life has been exhilarating. I’m understandably shocked, therefore, when I stop as I’m leaving to query the teacher about a conceptual point he has argued with particular vehemence and he offers as explanation, “We spend our lives digging the ditches in which we can most comfortably live.”

People tend to be comfortable with, and in their comfort, largely unaware of or reluctant to challenge the ways they think. They become comfortable in the ditches they have dug.

Further, the investment of time, energy and identity that individuals and societies make in the construction of their conceptual boxes offers an explanation for why those boxes are so fiercely defended. Committed to preserving the integrity of our boxes, it is easy to remain oblivious to them as constructed and constricting entities; to surrender decision-making responsibility to their dictates. Recognizing, let alone challenging, these structures seems to risk one’s definition of self. So the potential of these structures as tools is subjugated to their power as a self-protecting lens.

Finally, dominant modes of Western thought tend to make it easy “to take things for granted.” A conscious and continuing effort is required to be awake in the world and to the world and to ourselves in the world. But the separation of ourselves from our broader contexts and connections, and the separation of dimensions of ourselves from our own meaning-making processes, has enabled us to sink, as individuals, and as a society, into a state of apathy and indifference. This separation has cut us off from our ability to recognize and value all our ways of interacting with and making sense of the world. It has cut us off from deeper connections with each other, and with the world. Unfortunately, the absence of connections also tends to result in the careless dismissal of the wider implications of choices and actions, and, therefore, to cause or condone actual harm.

It is tempting to cling to familiar, potentially damaging, thought patterns, but must we?

By my students’ side

I began my teaching career in small towns along Ontario’s major East-West artery, Highway 401. I watched as students experienced the same kind of epiphanies I had had in secondary school through which new concepts or new ways of thinking seemed literally to switch on and suddenly become living pieces of a thinking tool kit. The moments of true teaching joy occurred when a light would go on for a student, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, and when I could actually witness students employ new modes of meaning making to the concepts and challenges of the world around them. Each time I saw these shifts in meaning making occur, I relived what it was like to play with a new understanding that opened the world a little wider; that turned books into literature; that transformed “me” into a thread in a social fabric; that made mathematics yield rhythms and patterns that were truly beautiful. 

My teacher’s thinking was limited. There is nothing permanent, immutable, or inevitable about our boxes. People can learn to think differently.

Riley-Taylor calls on educators to make our schools into places dedicated to the breeching of separations and dualisms that characterize current thinking. She challenges educators to make schools sites where separations are critiqued, habits of thinking and existing assumptions are surfaced and problematized, and where new ways of thinking, connecting, and understanding are offered and explored.

Can we create these sites given existing public school curriculum? The curriculum we have is, after all, a product of the way we think: its subject boundaries and reliance on facts, its worship of scientific method, objectivity and measurability are a function of that thinking. But existing curriculum is also a reflection of what society values, and teachers lack the permission required to simply abandon it. They can, however, learn to treat it, not as a straight jacket or a formula, but as a tool and an opportunity; to work within the social contract while enabling students to disrupt, question, explore and reconstruct that contract.

As educators, we can choose to use existing curriculum as a wedge to open up new conceptions, understandings, questions, and directions. Both the intended content of the curriculum, and the curriculum as an intention can become potential sites for disruption and exploration, for re- and co-creation, for weaving personal and group biography into the intended curriculum as it unfolds.

At the head of the stairs–the green painting

As a teenager I met a painting that hung on the wall of an art gallery in Chicago. A simple composition of red on green, it hung for years in my mind as a persistent, largely unexplored, question about the making of meaning that is the coin of all exchanges.

The painting caught my attention because it was so big and green and hung in an art gallery and was, therefore, considered art. I wondered what made it “art,” made it “worthy” of inclusion in the gallery’s collection. I wondered if it was only with the viewer’s response that the art was completed. The potential of the viewer to be co-creator of meaning was a foreign concept. To that point I’d seen the artist as the holder of meaning and the viewer as the seeker of that meaning. But this painting didn’t force nor offer any interpretation of its own. There was no treatise pasted by it, no Barnett Newman-esque assertion that if people understood the artist’s work world peace would surely follow.

This painting awakened within me questions of my role as image reader in the creation of art. I queried the interpretation of object, action, and interaction. I extrapolated from this experience to consider the creation of sense and the motivation for action when faced with the chaos of unlimited potential connections, interactions and interpretations of our world.

These questions recently bubbled back to the surface to be examined in earnest when a painting was placed at the front of our university classroom, and offered as a curricular exploration by the professor. For two and a half hours we discussed it, sculpted interpretive images of it with our bodies, animated its elements with sound and movement, represented meanings we saw in it, imagined and performed its genesis, and talked about it and our responses to it.

My thinking about the painting, and about my thinking, was challenged, opened and expanded through active engagement with others. And that is the promise of every classroom. Each classroom constitutes a unique constellation of life experiences, learning styles, interests, desires which can be used to broaden, deepen and challenge individual and collective understandings.

The green painting became my portal into unfolding vistas, but curricular portals can be virtually anything: poems, musical compositions, periods of history or scientific theories. Transformative potential does not reside in “objects” nor “facts” per se, but in the resonances they create, the questions they raise, and the connections that come with open and active exploration of them.

Riley-Taylor’s challenge to educators is to take advantage of the latent potential of our classrooms to provoke and engage, to build bridges, to challenge and expand understandings, to find ways of revealing our boxes and make us a little less comfortable in our ditches. Her lesson to us is that we don’t have to, and we certainly can’t afford to, let the ways in which we have thought limit the ways in which we can.