Place, Being, Resonance: A Critical Ecohermeneutic Approach to Education (Critical Qualitative Research) - Softcover

Derby, Michael W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 143312730X ISBN 13: 9781433127304

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2015

Synopsis

How do we begin to move beyond a use-relation with «natural resources» towards resonance with a deeply interrelated ecology? Place, Being, Resonance brings insights from the hermeneutic tradition, ecopoetics and indigenous epistemologies of place to bear on education in a world of ecological emergency. An ecohermeneutic pedagogy draws on both critical and lyrical ways of thinking to make a free space for encountering the more-than-human other. The conventional school system has long sat at the vanguard of an ecologically exploitative worldview and something more is called for than retrofitting current practices while reinforcing the substructure of modernity. As educators we walk an existentially trying path of attending to what needs to be called into question and for what presses questions upon us. What presuppositions shape our relation with the natural world? How might we work at the level of metaphor to generate the critical distance required for analysis, while keeping hearts and minds open to encounters that might heal our estrangement? How do we learn to both read place and recognize that we are read? Utilizing fungal mycelium as a way of thinking, this inquiry inoculates the fragmented landscape of education in order to bring learning into resonance with being. Here, along the path, the attentive mind finds little bell-shaped fungi scattering the forest floor, calling us home and provoking our thinking to be deeply imaginative when it needs to be.

About this title

About the Author

Michael w. Derby is a teacher, a researcher and occasionally a poet. He works with the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Fraser University. His research explores ecocritical pedagogies that inspire caring relationships with the more-than-human world. He also likes long walks in the forest.

Review

«Place, Being, Resonance reminds me of David Abram’s astonishing phenomenological breakthroughs in The Spell of the Sensuous. Yet Michael W. Derby’s prose is edgier, and his form reaches for and achieves a strikingly satisfying blend of poetry and philosophy. This book woke me up. It makes us remember parts of our wholeness and connection to the world that we are always in danger of losing. The ecopedagogy movement needs poets. Derby’s fresh vision rekindles my hope for an environmental education that brings us closer to our experience of the world as we work to transform it by being fully awake in it, as it.»
(David Greenwood, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Education, Lakehead University)
«How to teach in ways that honor life? This is the pressing educational question of the twenty-first century, one that goes to the heart of what it means to teach, and live, in an age of ecological (and therefore intellectual and spiritual) crisis. In this brilliant, unsettling, questing book, Michael W. Derby invites us to follow the mycelial threads of ecopoetics and ecohermeneutics as they begin to dissolve the crystalline orthodoxies of the modern imagination.»
(Mark Fettes, Associate Professor of Education, Simon Fraser University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 143312730X
• ISBN 13: 9781433127304
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 154