The Struggle Over/for Teacher Education in the Age of the

Anthropocene

Marie Brennan

Keynote for presentation at the2016 SAERA ConferenceCape Town, ZA

Overview

Anthropocene/Capitalocene… and why educators need to pay attention

Challenges for the sciences, democracy, and modernist assumptions of progress

The practice turn

Struggles over control of teacher education

Action-oriented (teacher) education – beyond salvational illusions

Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Oligarchocene/Technocene?

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems. (IPCC2014-PM)

Warming of the climate system: . atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Extreme weather and climate events

Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems. Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development. - species mass extinction risk; food insecurity, migration

Many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases. .

Converging, co-produced crises

Capitalism has relied on the “four cheaps: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials” (Moore 2015: introduction).

Appropriation of the ‘cheaps’ via enclosures, destructive exploitation and colonialism characterise the Capitalocene (Moore 2013; 2015).

Capitalism relies on the Nature/Society dualism central to Enlightenment assumptions. Capitalism and nature have co-evolved in the “web of life” (Moore 2015), changing humans and the planet.

Now we are at the end of these four ‘cheaps’. There are few new ‘frontiers’ for capitalism to exploit and colonise to continue expansion. Our answers remain technological, continuing N/S dualism, and relying on market forces.

… catastrophising…

Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Jameson 2003)

Suspicion of catastrophising shouldn’t get in the way of acknowledging the rare times of a ‘sudden and massive shift in earth history’ (Semal 20115: 92). Tipping points can lead to fast and unpredictable shifts

Mainly seeking technical and market-oriented answers – tendency to concentrate on ‘nature’ and not on how social assumptions structure our relations with it (Hinkson 2013-2014: 79)

Separation of social-only and physical-sciences-only explanations –expecting ‘science as usual’ (Stengers 2015)

Good explanations of the problem do not translate to good ‘answers’ or recommendations for action

Technologically mediated social relations emphasise “absence and intense individualism” (Sharp 2002: 64).

The challenges to dominant narratives

The ‘grand narratives’ of the ‘modern’ world are being radically called into question:

- ‘Perfectability of man’

- Environment as limitless background for humans to use

- Faith in progress, especially through technology

- ‘business as usual’/capitalism can keep evolving and growing

- Education’s purpose is primarily for nation-building in competitive global markets

The challenge for teachers and educational institutions

Invested in hope – for future generations – when despair, expectation and disengagement are rife

Modern Education institutions built on split between humans and nature: anthropo-centric

Knowledge as ab-straction, decontextualised from place, relationships and action

Past Knowledge valued rather than past-present and prospective/future-invested

Knowledge as private and individually ‘owned’ rather than understood as co-constructed IN action.

Separated from other institutions and sites of action.

Policy-scape is hyperactive and past-oriented.

Struggling over the ‘soul’ of teacher education

The ongoing and escalating struggle for control of teacher education in countries around the world reflects the difficult and contested position of teacher education within what is experienced as a chaotic churn of reform … government has sought to constrain and ‘improve’ teacher education in the interests of competitive (inter)national struggles for economic power. Within the terms of this struggle between teacher education and the global state, we argue here that there is an urgent need for attention to the everyday work of teacher educators, their students and the school systems they serve – the practice of teacher education, which is to say, the ‘soul’ or animus that makes teacher education what it is.

Green, Reid & Brennan (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Press)

Policy decoupling from practice

an ongoing/escalating and multi-national struggle

the chaotic state of contemporary policy-making re Australian TE (‘speed policy’, etc.) – multiple sites of overlapping or diverse policies

regulation/control, accountability/efficiency, ‘standards’ performativity

Unfamiliarity between policy & practice – self-referentiality of policy hyperactivism

(Green, Reid, Brennan forthcoming)

Four main policy frenzy foci with which Aust. Teacher Ed is churned

1. Universities: standardised templates – removal of disciplinary specificities in teaching, research while reinstating separation of disciplines

2. Schools: national curriculum changing state-based infrastructure; school ‘autonomy’ discourses; vocationalism; high-stakes testing

3. Politics-media: funding lags; federal-state tensions; proliferation of QANGOS (e.g. AITSL); teacher registration; impact of teacher education on student learning

4. Teacher education: ageing workforce; low funding and scale of research; professional placement; multiple stakeholders; accreditation of programs.

The ‘practice turn’

Pragmatist view of knowledge:

“practice theory ‘decentres’ mind, texts and conversation. Simultaneously, it shifts bodily movements, things, practical knowledge and routine to the centre of its vocabulary” (Reckwitz, 2002:259).

practices as “embodied, materially interwoven” (Schatzki 2001: 12).

PRAXIS: Bringing together knowledge and action, conditions of knowledge production in action at different scales and sites, where knowledge is part of lived relations with other parts of the world

The Enigma of Capital and the crises of capitalism

Seven Activity Spheres (Harvey 2010: 123):

1. Technologies and organisational forms

2. Social relations

3. Institutional and administrative arrangements

4. Production and labour processes

5. Relations to nature

6. The reproduction of daily life and of the species

7. Mental conceptions of the world

Each sphere is inter-dependant and co-evolving through crises.

Focus action on repairing glitches in the infrastructure of the lifeworld

… at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. ….

Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation.

(Berlant 2016: 393

Curriculum design for political-educative action?

A double blockage exists: the lack of alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative” (Harvey 2010: 227)

To get beyond this blockage, we need to work on the evolution of both, ‘in a spiral’ (227), each feeding the other.

‘The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one sphere[of action] to another in mutually reinforcing ways’ (228)

…’all manner of experiments in social change in different places and at different geographical scales are both likely and potentially illuminating as ways to make (or not make) another world possible’ (229)

Stengers: “Care of the possible”

A teacher educationaction orientation in the Anthropocene

“

What do we do when our practices are out of step with conditions? Draw on resources and well-springs already in teacher education to use for evolving appropriate action :

Repertoires of practice (our ‘signature pedagogies’ [Hooley 2016]) that have and continue to evolve

Multi-disciplinary field

Experience in recontextualising other knowledges into the pedagogical - ‘teachable moments’

Links to schools

Commitment to ‘making a difference’

Education as reconstructing relationships, knowledge, cultural tools in action

Educational contribution to new practices (and their associated forms of knowledge work) means teachers and teacher educators have a key role in marshalling access to action-sites and organising links with both local community and disciplinary expertises.

Using new technologies to help student ‘globalisation from below’ mobilisation and linkages across locals to help map and deepen their readings of issues, practices and relationships

Construct opportunities to articulate and reflect on knowledge.

Developing and sharing new knowledges and practices as a form of Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ for/in/with the society.

Imagining a non-salvational action orientation to uncertain times

Education cannot ‘save’ society or ‘nature’ but can contribute through

a focus on local action and linked up actions

Linking diverse resources including disciplinary knowledges for students and communities

Helping to construct post-Westphalian/post national sovereignty narratives with some explanatory power about actual conditions, histories and possible future options

Living with uncertainty, partial belonging, a commons of diversity

Selected references

Berlant, L. (2016) The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3) 393–419

Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Green, B., Reid, J-A. & Brennan, M. (forthcoming 2016): Challenging Policy, Rethinking Practice: Struggling for

the Soul of Teacher Education. Chapter in T. A. Trippesand, A. Swennen & T. Werler (Eds) The Struggle for Teacher Education. Bloomsbury. Reinventing Teacher Education series.

Hamilton, C., Bonneuille , C. & Gemenne, F. (Eds) (2015) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch. Milton Park & New York: Routledge.

Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165 www.environmentalhumanities.org

Hinkson, J. (2013-2014) Why do we place our hope in technology? A Secular faith? Arena Journal 41-42, 59-92. Hooley, N. (2012) Signature pedagogies: Sharing the knowledge. Campus Review. June 25.

http://www.campusreview.com.au/2012/06/signature-pedagogies-sharing-the-knowledge/ accessed September 2016.

IPCC (2014) –Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – Fifth Assessment Report (AR) http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full.pdf and a summary for policy makers: http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf accessed February 2015.

James, P. (2013-2014) People, planet and the anthropocene: Spectators of our own demise? Arena Journal 41-42, 1-6.

Moore, J. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life. NY: Sharp, G. (2002) The Idea of the Intellectual and After. Arena Journal, 17-18, pp. 269-316.Stengers, I. (2015) In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.