Learning like lichen: in constant collaboration
What is our model of learning? (With audio voiceover)
Next month we’re starting a new course called Mycelial Commons (book a place here!). Our idea with this course was to offer a chance for people to think through the relationship of queerness to the wider ecology. We’re seeing more demonisation and dehumanisation of queer and trans lives, with attacks that often run along the lines that our lives aren’t ‘natural’. While it may be fun for us to look at ‘queer’ behaviour in other species, there’s something more fundamental we need to get to the root of. What if queerness isn’t something we need to see reflected in other species in order to feel valid, but a reflection of our enmeshed nature in a wider ecology. What if constant change and fluid existences are ecological principles? What would that mean for how we live and act? What responsibilities does that point us to?
This is a course with some big ideas. But we want that to be a portal, not a fence. We want the learning to be genuinely collaborative and accessible. So as part of that we’re trying to put our philosophy of learning (pedagogy) into writing. In this post Sølvi will introduce our principles and then look at some ideas from a foundational book in radical pedagogy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire.
What is learning for? In the early part of our lives, someone else usually answers that question for us: to prepare us for the ‘real’ world of work. To make sure we have a secure future. To give us the life skills to help us survive. As children and young people, we rarely get a chance to express any agency over the terms of this learning. We may get tasked to choose a special topic, or ask for a specific need to be met, but the vast majority of our learning is structured according to someone else’s opinion about what learning is for.
This, for me, is the main difference between learning and education. ‘Learning’ is one of the most fundamental aspects of being alive - the continual process of engagement with the rest of the world. This process is arguably fundamental to the definition of all life. ‘Education’ is the way in which learning is channelled into the needs of a specific society, and therefore reflects the contradictions of that society. One good example that we can all relate to is the way in which education gradually erodes curiosity by valuing learning primarily in terms of labour. It's a kind of alienation so fundamental to growing up that we often just give into it. How many times have we found ourselves feeling uncomfortable or irritated with an educator who actually gives us the freedom to explore ideas, because we’re so stressed about knowing what will actually be ‘in the test’. I’ve been both the educator and the educated in that situation and I can tell you with complete certainty, it’s not that either are worse than they used to be. It’s the educational system that’s become worse.
Over the last year, we’ve started referring to ourselves as an ecology education co-op. If I got my way we would instead talk about ourselves as an ecology learning co-op, for the reasons outlined above. The thing is, education sounds more ‘real’ to people than ‘learning’. So perhaps it’s good I didn’t get my way. But why have we done this? It’s partly because we realised that we didn’t want to operate primarily as a growing business anymore, because it was hard to make work and also because we didn’t think it was the main thing we wanted to share with the world. More crucially, though, we’ve realised that learning about the rest of ecology is one of the most fundamental tasks for our society in this time in history, and that everyone deserves the right to access that.
We use the agroecological principles in how we orient our learning. Agroecology, as a movement, is the simple belief that we cannot feed ourselves, or do any of the things that food is essential for, without building a just society and a symbiotic relationship with the rest of ecology. So we aren’t learning simply to gain a qualification and a job, although sometimes that is necessary. We aren’t learning simply to accumulate facts, as fun as that can be. We’re learning in order to deepen and strengthen our relationships with the other people, human and more-than-human, with whom we share our home. Agroecological justice isn’t defined by national boundaries but by the quality of interactions in a particular place, a specific biome. And so we make home in that place through relation, ecology and community.
To develop our relationships, then, is about coming into a more full sense of being. And relationships cannot develop without the willingness and desire to learn more about our different ways of living. We can start to sense how the channelling of learning into education takes something that is a life-long dialogue and turns it into time-bound, stressful monologues. Education, arguably, exiles us from the most important function of learning: to engage with the living world.
Paulo Freire knew exile intimately. After the 1964 right-wing military coup d'état in Brazil he was forced to flee to Bolivia, Chile and then the US. The experience helped him develop the ideas that became Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I should be clear, from the outset, that Freire was devoted to the revolutionary transformation of society, was deeply influenced by the political economy of Marx and the decolonial philosophy of Frantz Fanon. While the nature of capitalism, imperialism and class society half a century later are different, we’re still presented with the stark necessity to steer through a genocidal, self-immolating fossil fascism towards an ecologically lush and socially liberated future. That’s why this book remains so relevant.
One of the most influential ideas in the book is a critique of what Freire calls the ‘banking model’ of education, the idea that learners are mere buckets to be filled up with knowledge. That this critique seems quite commonplace these days is largely due to Freire’s work.
‘Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being … ; he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.’ p48
I like this quote from Pedagogy of the Oppressed because it perceptively explains what’s dysfunctional with education. Studying concepts by rote in order to demonstrate understanding in test conditions is so profoundly removed from the world, existing in some abstract plane that has more to do with demonstrating an employable skill than genuine learning.
When I read it I think of the debates currently raging in the sciences about non-human will and agency, and the limits of reductionism, i.e. reducing everything into neat parts in order to understand it. In what some are calling the ‘Enlivenment’ (as a complement to the Enlightenment), there is a growing movement to work on the assumption that agency, far from just a human skill, is found in all life. For quantum physicist Karen Barad, this agency is fundamental to all matter1.
I don’t think it is a question of whether these philosophers and scientists are right or not, I think its an evident aspect of truth to the universe. Its a truth that Indigenous science and wisdom has asserted for generations2. That doesn’t mean that reductionist science has no utility, but that our lives can have more meaning if we realise that we have limited ourselves by letting that concept dominate so heavily in the modern era3.
In an ecological education then, we learn through building relation, by sensing the world and other life directly. By touching and smelling and watching, reflecting, and then trying again.
During a recent meeting in the Hate Out Of Farming organising group, someone mentioned that the etymology of conversation means ‘living together’. It feels appropriate that the act we’ve become deprived of - conversation - is rooted in a recognition of different needs, in a society where the forces that isolate from each other are also the forces undermining our relationship with the rest of nature.
Following that line of thought, Freire talks about the centrality of dialogue to learning. He lists six qualities required of educators and learners for effective communication, for them to become ‘critical co-investigators’. They are:
love
humility
faith
trust
hope
critical thinking
Notice how just by writing these down as with bullet points, I’ve reduced them to a kind of checklist. And yet the cultivation of each of these qualities is a life-long learning process. I’ve barely scratched the surface of knowing how to love my partner, my daughter. Indeed, it’s not the kind of knowledge that can ever be complete, and that’s what makes our approach to it so important. That’s why we will always need each other: to investigate it together. How could we ever finish learning about the ecology, the rest of the world, when we are all in the process of becoming something different with each interaction?
‘If I do not love life - if I do not love people - I cannot enter into dialogue.’
I try to imagine any of the teachers at my high school being bold or empowered enough to teach in this way, imagine how the boys would react . One of them would probably shout ‘GAY’. But maybe he wouldn’t be far off. There is something a bit queer about this emotional sincerity. In a culture where the tech giant algorithms increasingly boost selfish and cruel behaviours, the patient practice of empathy and a tender commitment to community represent radical tactics.
It’s no coincidence to me that the forces giving us that algorithm culture are the same forces trying to make us dependent on AI. There are, without doubt, useful and necessary applications of AI. But one fundamental problem lies with the elimination of process in favour of result. And really, this isn’t something new with capitalism. Our whole economic system has become defined by the product (the commodity) with no respect or care for the process (the labour) and the people who do it. Learning is a process too. When we are stressed and afraid of learning, the temptation to obtain the result without the process is powerful. Indeed, I would say that our education system incentivises it. What is cramming for exams if not the result of the system prioritising output over process?
How do we get to a place where we can feel safe in the process? This is the power of in-person and group learning, where the process is the goal, rather than a PDF qualification with your name in calligraphic font. I feel, increasingly, that supporting each other to learn, to feel safe in not-knowing, is an essential tactic in the struggle to keep showing up for our communities, for the land, for justice and liberation.
I’ve only paddled in the shallows of what this small book offers. If I’ve not included something its out of wanting to make this an accessible and relevant introduction than a disagreement with Freire. If it interests you I’d encourage you to try it. There’s some jargon, and in places it can be challenging. But Freire is also perceptive and plain-speaking when he needs to be. You don’t have to understand a book entirely on the first read. You don’t have to read every sentence. By starting you are building a new relationship with someone else’s point of view, a dialogue you may continue for years, and that’s powerful in and of itself.
Freire motivates me to be a constant learner, to see every Myco course as an opportunity to learn something new from, and with, the people who attend. He reminds me that everything starts with listening. He reminds me that learning is not a pass/fail judgment on our worth, but a blossoming, fractal, unending process. I think people deserve that in their life and I want Myco to help them get a chance to feel it.
What’s your relationship with learning? What would you like it to be? How would you like it to feel? For me, the feeling of learning is like the wind in the grass. You can see a hundred thousand individual leaves and flowers and buds all dancing, each identifiable by their own particular rhythm. And yet, also, when you let your focus shift, they’re all just one green wave.
Karen Barad - ‘On touching the alterity within.’ Youtube video
Darcia Narvaez and Wahinkpe Topa - Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth
I realise that I’m making big generalisations here out of respect for the word count. Let me know if this interests/enrages you and I’ll try and make my case better in a future post.