Post 118.

An Ecoliterate Philosophy for Life

Today’s blog post is a little different. I’m not sure I’ve thought about these things the whole way through yet, and so I am just going to allow the words to wrest themselves form my mind, as imperfect as they are, and see what comes of them. What I am thinking about today is eco-literacy as more than a philosophy for schools, more than a philosophy for teaching and learning, but also as a philosophy for life. That is, I suspect ecoliteracy can give us insight into all aspects of living. And so today I’m thinking about our culture, or our society, and it’s guiding message to people. That message is that we, each “individual self,” is, in various ways and to varied extents, worthless, irrelevant, and not needed. Every teacher and every student receives this message—as well as every cashier, carpenter, lawyer, truck driver, doctor, salesperson, stay-at-home parent, and out-of-work or homeless person. Everybody, regardless of what they are doing, how successful or unsuccessful, how much they’re paid, gets this message through the structure of our work, our government, our media. And if you are told over and over that you are worthless, irrelevant, not needed, eventually you will begin to accept that message.

            Can ecoliteracy as a guiding philosophy for teaching, learning, and, more importantly, living, counteract that message that I and so many people receive? With all things experienced psychologically, cause and effect are often difficult to disentangle. Ecoliteracy seems to place emphasis on descriptive, rather than predictive, analysis. Do we feel worthless, irrelevant, not needed because we have been explicitly told that message? Because we have failed to accomplish in our culture, at work, in our families, what we hoped? Or do we feel this way and then later fail to succeed? Do we lose confidence, experience depression and angry, feel detached and discarded because our work and family lives, and everything we see on television and social media steals our confidence, makes us depressed and angry, detached and discarded; or do we feel these things and then only see television and social media that reinforces our ineffectiveness? Do so many of us abuse drugs to numb this message, or do we use drugs, and then this message leads to our suffering? Does order of operation really matter? From an ecoliterate perspective, it doesn’t. Both are happening. We experience both.

            I tend to think about ecoliteracy as more than a philosophy for just schools, and more of a philosophy for life. Rather than focusing on the individual as a detached thing that can be dissected, measured, and fully reduced to yet-to-be-determined laws of physics (the traditional scientific process), ecoliteracy draws our attention to ecology and literacy—that is the “web of life” (ecology) and then analyzing, understanding, and loving (a different sort of literacy than most reductionists would agree with, I suppose) ourselves and our interdependence with others and nature, the web of life of which we can be a sustainable member.

            You are not worthless. You are not irrelevant. You are needed. So am I. An ecoliterate philosophy of life may open our eyes and ears, our skin and noses to the largest and smallest lifeforms, each with unique ways contributing to a living Mother Earth. If the worm’s contribution is different than the whale’s; the sunflower’s different than the snake; and the rose bush’s different than the redwood’s; the river’s different than the rainstorm, that is to be expected and celebrated—each diverse system expressing its diversity with kindness and respect for difference.

            Even while using terms like “respect” and “kindness” more than ever, schools seem to have moved further away from cultivating respect and kindness, because both require teaching and learning and ongoing effort to cultivate both. Both require the rejection of simple reduction, of technologized fixes, and of answers that can be offered using multiple-choice. It begins by respecting everybody as having worth, relevance, and being needed. It requires holding people to supporting each other’s worth, relevance, and being needed. And it requires opening the sphere of worth, relevance, and being needed to all non-human creation. But schools cannot accomplish this without grassroots effort—community-specific effort to hold schools accountable for supporting students who are worthy, relevant, and needed; respectful and kind. Without the grassroots effort of a local community, respect and kindness are reduced in schools to something horrible, standardized, technologized, and neither respectful nor kind to the web of life, including the people in the school building, the community, and non-human animal life and bioregions in which teaching and learning take place. Because schools are always talked to by the government, by curricular industry. The only possible counterbalance to that influence, which is too general to be respectful or kind, is local pressure.

What do you think? Am I on or off with this line of thinking?

DS

Post 117.

Elementary General Music: An Ecological Approach

This week I’m substitute teaching elementary general music at a school where I subbed two months ago. I began today's lesson with a song I taught the children last time, as an intro—Sarah Pirtle’s “My Roots Go Down,” in which students choose plants and their ‘nature’ to make up verses. Examples students created today include, “oak tree, tall and strong,” “sunflower, bending with the sun,” “rose bush, I have thorns,” and “palm tree, relaxing on the beach.” These student-generated verses are probably one of the students’ favorite parts of singing this song, and we then talked about what plants they were most like. Some people are tall and strong, and others bend with the sun. Still others a beautiful but have thorns, and others are chill, relaxing as if on a beach.

            I followed this song with another, David Mellet's "The Garden Song," which is a folk song about gardening, reflecting on crows, rain, dreams, and praying for the magical growth that all gardeners experience each year. After talking with students about plants, I play piano in a Dalcroze-inspired dance based on the growth of a seed. Students begin by being a seed, safe beneath the autumn leaves, and the ice and snow not touching the warmth below. When the March rains begin, they sprout, slowly and cautiously; grow leaves and eventually a bud, which flowers. I ask them to imagine the pedals without saying the color—yellow or orange, a light blue or dark purple, a deep red or a gentle pink. Any color really; and then their neighbors can guess the pedal colors. They can correct their friend, and then the students dance as flowers in the summer sun. But every year summer ends, and as chilly autumn winds come, the flowers drop one pedal at a time, and eventually drops seeds, which are covered by autumn leaves beneath the winter chill, windy snows and warmer weeks. This is where the song began. I go through two years so students have an opportunity to grow twice; and to choose two different colors for their pedals.

            After this, we did a song called “The Willow,” which is in the old MacMillan book, The Spectrum of Music (I'm singing this one because I cannot find it on the internet). It’s written by Daisy Ward-Steinman. The Willow has a haunting melody with descending, chromatics echoing the shape of a willow tree’s branches. Rather than representing what it’s like to be a willow, which we experienced in “My Roots Go Down” and in the improvised seed dance, The Willow invites students to reflect on a relationship between a specific willow and the human singer resting beneath it on a summer day.
            “I love the weeping willow where I spend my summer days.
            Its thirsty roots my pillow. Its roof a leafy maze.
            With feathery arms entwining, it bends to touch its toes.
            A moving picture tracing on the carpet where it grows.”
I love doing this song in January because it helps students who are like me and have challenges with seasonal affective disorder, seasonal melancholy; and benefit from imagining themselves in warmer, brighter, less-test-focused, summery days.

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Link to the image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Willow.jpg/640px-Willow.jpg

Post 116.
 
Place-conscious educational theory made its way into music education scholarship through the work of Sandy Stauffer and Vince Bates. Both draw extensively form Gruenewald’s critical place-conscious scholarship, but both have meaningful differences from one another. These differences might emerge in what is emphasized by each, and what is de-emphasized or even ignored. Stauffer’s place-conscious theory focuses the social, highlighting especially aspects of human narrative. Places become places through storytelling. This is true.

            In contrast, Bates’s place theory emphasizes land. Places are both social and geographical. This also is true. This line of thinking has opened space for more ecological discourse in music education scholarship, including my own—listening for not just human stories, but also the experiences of non-human animals, as well as non-biogenic elements of place, such as weather, land-formations, and waterways.

            Gruenewald’s seminal theory isn’t the first word on place-conscious education. It drew on a large body of scholarship emerging in various fields; scholars that were already analyzing “place,” including those identifying with various scholarly fields: democratic education, outdoor education, indigenous knowledge systems, environmental education, and critical pedagogy. It is easy to see how Stauffer’s emphasis on storytelling synchronizes well with the traditions of democratic education, indigenous knowledge systems, and critical pedagogy. In comparison, Bates’s emphasis on land synchronizes well with outdoor education, indigenous knowledge system, and environmental education. Some fields, like critical pedagogy, have historically been resistant to ecological elements; but have done better in recent years. For instance, “A People’s Curriculum for the Earth” draws on indigenous knowledge system scholars like Vandana Shiva and others to present a ecological-critical pedagogy. These fields aren’t naturally separated into boxes. Disciplines are social constructions, made for our ease of use. Not natural. But in the 1980s, 90s (and early 2000s) when indigenous scholars called on Paulo Friere to recognize the ecological elements of oppression, he may not have done so, but some of his disciplines, students and students’ students have.

            So, what does this mean for music educators and music education scholars? For me, it means that both storytelling and land need to emphasized in critical place-conscious teaching and learning. For instance, both can be used as ways to cross the school-community border, inviting elders of local cultures into the classroom, inviting in the musics of non-human life, taking students to natural areas, and dealing with the real oppressions experienced today—many of which have ecological implications and roots.

Both/and, and not either/or.
 
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