Keywords

1 Introduction

While intensifying their desire to be set free, the terrible months they had lived through had taught them prudence, and they had come to count less and less on a speedy end of the epidemic…One of the signs that a return to the golden age of health was secretly awaited was that our fellow citizens…now began to talk…of the new order of life that would set in after the plague.

Albert Camus (1948), The Plague, p. 269

Returning in a time of COVID-19 to Albert Camus’ great novel, The Plague, we were reminded of philosopher Maxine Greene’s brilliant analysis of the text; she writes, “Tarrou recognizes that the plague can be understood as a metaphor for people’s indifference or distancing or thoughtlessness. He finds the imagination to organize people into sanitary squads to fight the plague and, critically, make it the moral concern of all, because everyone carries the microbe for the plague of the body, the potential for the plague of indifference” (Personal communication, n.d.). We believe it is this discourse of indifference that educators must organize against. The time of COVID-19 dramatically shows our indifference to inequality, our indifference to an ongoing unsustainable economy, our indifference to the vulnerability of those who live in extreme poverty. Indeed, we see our indifference to the agony of all the social world. We see our indifference to massive species extinction, our indifference to the dramatic impacts of climate change, and our indifference to the increasing of zoonotic viruses as burgeoning populations push into the wild. And, indeed, we see our indifference to the agony of all the natural world.

Who can say we weren’t warned? Rachel Carson (1962) in Silent Spring, perhaps the most important book of the twentieth century, cautioned us as to the impact of modernity upon the very systems that support life as we know it. She wrote, “future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life” (p. 13). For the book’s epigraph, she chose the bleak words of Albert Schweitzer, “Man has lost the capacity… to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth—from which he and other living creatures draw their food. Poor bees, poor birds, poor men” (1962, p. IV).

It behooves us to prove Dr. Schweitzer wrong! But what to do? We already know most of what needs to be done—forbid wet markets where viruses jump to humans, create and protect large biodiversity preserves, create a sustainable economy that functions within the Earth’s limits, advance a scientific literacy that promotes ecological sustainability, cut consumption dramatically, transition from the use of fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. But to know is not to do.

What will motivate us to action? What values and attitudes and ethics will lead us to change our society’s behavior? One of the answers to this fundamental question which emerges from the research in this book is the prioritizing of an alternative education discourse for the post-COVID-19 world. The project of this book is to understand the implications of COVID-19 on sustainable development, on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and on teaching and research. In this chapter, we advocate for a provocative posthumanistic discourse to be embedded in education where the relational entanglements of all species with whom we share our daily lives shape teaching and learning within this deeply interconnected world.

Greene uses a metaphor for the reification that must be achieved. In The Plague, she writes, “Dr. Rieux fights the plague for the most abstract of reasons at first, because that is his job. Only later, when the unspeakable tragedies he witnesses make him think about what he is doing, does he reconceive his practice and realize that the most important thing he can do is not to be accepting of the pestilence because that is to be complicitous with it” (Personal communication, n.d.). If we accept the destructive impacts of the current political, economic, and educational systems on the ecological systems that support life on Earth, we are complicitous. If we accept the devastating impacts on the poor and on future generations, we are complicitous.

To overcome this complicity, we valorize the deep ethical discourse underpinning the Earth Charter. Although not written explicitly for education but rather as an ethical framework for an interconnected, ecologically sustainable future, the Earth Charter (2000) reminds us:

fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions and ways of living. We must realize when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more” (Earth Charter Commission, Preamble, paragraph four).

Pope Francis (2015) in Laudato Si’ states, “the Earth Charter asks us to leave behind a period of self-destruction and make a new start. But we have not as yet developed a universal awareness needed to achieve this” (Paragraph 207, p.137).

One of the great insights of the Earth Charter is the concept of a broadening sense of identity and caring. In Western cultures we care for ourselves first, as the capitalist culture places great emphasis on the individual. Beyond ourselves, we care for those close to us such as our families. Beyond that, we care for the communities of which we are a part. The Earth Charter calls upon us to expand our sense of identity and moral responsibility to include all living things, indeed, to include the larger universe. By articulating common concerns and common values, the Earth Charter provides a rich vision and gives us hope that this vision is a viable path to take. It is not the only path and surely it is not the last word on a global ethical framework, but it is an invitation to reflect on the significance of globalization for life on Earth and an invitation to promote another more caring way of being. It is also a call to consider the responsibility of the academy to raise issues related to the direction in which globalization has gone. If our way of life is to be an ecological sustainable one, if globalization can induce caring, we in the educational field, need to engage deeply in such ethical challenges.

2 Reflecting on Caring and Kindness

Perhaps COVID-19 will help us to develop such an awareness as we see how mutually dependent and interconnected, we truly are. Leonardo Boff (2008), in a brilliant essay on the Ethic of Care, writes,

humanity and Earth stand together facing the future. This future is not guaranteed by the forces leading the universe. We have to want it. Hence the Earth Charter goes on to say realistically ‘we must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility.’ Accordingly, the principle of self-destruction must be counteracted with the principle of care and of universal responsibility…This is the context in which the ethic of care proposed by the Earth Charter gains relevance as one of the axes around which the sustainable way of life revolves. It will either be oriented by care or it will not be sustainable” (p. 131).

Schweitzer, despite his fatalism for human prospects, never stopped caring in his own life’s work. The comforting sign at his hospital in Gabon, Central Africa, was reputed to have read “At whatever hour you come, you will find light, and help, and human kindness” (Elliott n.d.).

But what is human kindness and are our societies effective in expressing it? For the authors of this chapter, caring and kindness are actions, rather than cognitive experiences. They occur when thoughts, feelings and intentions of love, empathy, compassion and altruism are deliberately acted upon. Unfortunately, this is not perceived as common in Western societies, although the growing cries for human kindness to be practiced, are. It seems that social infrastructures—politics, healthcare, education, and wider assumptions and social contracts that citizens share—are increasingly understood as not caring or supporting citizens or the planet (Sammel et al. 2020). In seeking to foster caring or kindness, we must resolve to overcome the rising of isolationism, tribalism, racism and authoritarianism underpinned by discourses of indifference and complicity. Dedication to the ethos of caring and kindness is needed to rethink our social systems. This ethos could be understood as showing care and kindness for self, other humans, animals, plants, nature, ecosystems, as well as ideas and collegiality. These thoughts are not new to disciplines that were created to care for children. Marginalized educational philosophies such as education for sustainability, critical education, feminist education, multicultural education, and peace education, at their core, have all organized around an ethos of care and kindness. This agenda hasn’t been fully incorporated within educational systems. Noddings (2003) advises that hegemonic education focuses on ‘caring’ for a limited selection of ideas and excludes other realms of caring. This lack of care in education is significant: as what is taught and learned in schools largely determines what students believe is important or unimportant, possible or not possible, good or bad, normal or abnormal (Eisler and Fry 2019). The assumptions, beliefs and ideas seeded through schooling not only influences how a child’s brain develops, but also how people learn to perceive and interact with the world, and how they learn to perceive themselves.

Globally, in response to the unprecedented global challenge all humans are facing with the recent outbreak of COVID-19, many are asking how we arrived at this lack of caring and the social plague of indifference. How did our social and education systems become so devoid of kindness and so complicit towards the continuing environmental crises? How did people come to view every aspect of our environment as a resource to be consumed or utilized, rather than to be cared for and viewed as inherently connected to our well-being?

3 Reflecting on Western Assumptions

Since the industrial revolution, Western civilizations have been founded on the assumption that the natural world is inert or mechanical. In this way, nature operated like a grand machine, and by investigating the specific functions and functioning of each part of the machine, it was believed that science could come to understand how the whole machine worked (Sammel 2020). This reductionist understanding (reducing the machine down to smaller parts) assumed that the whole could be understood by isolating and investigating parts. To various degrees this assumption still frames Western education where concepts are chunked into distinct sections and taught for the mastery of each section. It is assumed that students will inherently connect learned sections together to gain a fuller picture of how the natural world works. In this discourse, learning is understood as an outcome. This process to teach the workings of nature by separating knowledge into distinct categories is reflective of the Enlightenment period more broadly.

In the Enlightenment era, alongside this reductionist science, many dominant faith traditions continued to espouse that humans were the only species with intelligent souls and divinely connected. Constructed as being less significant than that of humans, the rest of nature was ultimately viewed in service to humanity. Philosophy was also built on this understanding, with Aristotle advocating only humans possessed a ‘rational soul’ that provided access to the divine. Descartes proposed ‘the Great Chain of Being’ that provided a hierarchy of living things, dichotomizing unthinking, mechanical objects (the human body, non-human animals, plants etc.) and the thinking human mind, which was understood as being reflective of the divine. With humans perceived as the top of this Earthly hierarchy, Western civilizations progressed with the belief that by virtue of their intellect, humans were exceptional in regard to other species, and above or separate from things classified as “nature”. This dualistic thinking of humans as distinct from nature still justifies the exploitation of those classified as objects, and the dismissal of cultures who were perceived as being closer to animals and nature. This perception of separateness comes from the story of humanism and is unfortunately endorsed in many people’s everyday experiences. For example, large populations in the Western world live in cities where natural systems may be rendered invisible and the infinite ways humans are supported by what science classifies as ‘nature’ can be ignored or discredited. Legacies of these beliefs still circulate in the collective consciousness, policies and infrastructures of contemporary colonial cultures. These foundational assumptions need to be challenged as they underpin the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene.

4 Reflecting on the Anthropocene Epoch

The Anthropocene is the name given to this historical era or geological epoch in which human activities have changed planetary ecosystems, generated mass species extinction, and altered the composition of air, water, and land globally. In this era, humans have become the dominant driver of accelerating changes in the Earth’s climate. However, the Anthropocene era is not just about weather patterns, or the disappearance of flora or fauna, or even the social or political unrest that follows these kinds of changes. This era is about the unpredictable effects unsustainable human ideologies and practices are having on deeply integrated social and natural systems. The deeply integrated, complex relationship humans have with all aspects of the planet is not easily understood by Science or Western cultures: indeed, the English language does not have a word that fully captures this embeddedness. Even the concept of ‘humanity’ defines our separateness from nature.

Far from being separate and superior to nature, the emerging consequences of Western ideologies and actions illustrates how complex our relationship with nature is. Morton (2010) suggests humans share an “unbearable intimacy” (p. 50) with all of nature and the ecological emergencies we are now facing illustrate how deeply our actions influence this complexity and how wrong Western ideology is that distances humans and their beliefs and actions from nature. However, Haraway (2016) suggests that it is not really ‘humans’ per say who are to blame for this environmental crisis, but the era of Capitalocene or hegemonic world systems. She suggests that the narrative of Anthropocene points to a destructive ending and proposes a reframing of the way we think about this era through her use of the term Chthulucene. The Chthulecene explores how multiple species connect and interact in this multispecies world. She believes that the world is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices that highlight how we are all beings from, with and of the Earth (Haraway 2016). Haraway believes that all earthlings are kin but making and recognizing kin is the hardest and most urgent challenge for humans. Interestingly, Western science has always shown that humans have coevolved with and are connected to ecosystems, yet within this understanding lurked a disconnection from nature. This disconnect was and is underpinned by the ideologies of humanism, reductionism and the belief of humanity’s unique and privileged position above animals, plants and all other objects classified as natural.

5 Reflecting on Humanism, Discourses and Subjectivity

Humanism is the story that frames Western societies, including formal education. Foucault (1984) describes humanism as a set of themes that, though varied in their content, have reappeared over time in European societies. Forming an almost invisible thread that ties together our conscious and unconscious; individual and social thoughts; understandings, actions and infrastructures, humanism has shaped the power relations and value judgments that support certain ways of knowing and understanding the world. St. Pierre (2000) says humanism is “the air we breathe, the language we speak, the shape of the homes we live in, the relations we are able to have with others, the politics we practice, the map that locates us on the earth, the futures we imagine, the limits of our pleasures” (p. 478). Humanism underpins the assumption that nature can be known, represented and predicted by science. This paradigm provides a structured logic and credible, verifiable practices that perpetuate human exceptionalism (Plumwood 2002) which promotes and endorses the human/nature divide. It mandates that knowledge of the world is centered around humans, and humans are the judge and jury for what counts as intelligence. The impact of this discourse on Western culture cannot be understated.

Human exceptionalism should not be perceived as an idea or a belief, as it is much more than this: it is a key player in the discourse of humanism. Bove (1990) argues that the concept of discourse “aims to describe surface linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, the control of populations, and the modern state as these intersect in the functions of systems of thought” (p. 35). Foucault (1984) suggests that discourses highlight how language gathers itself together according to socially constructed rules and regularities, allowing certain statements to be made and not others. Discourses organize certain ways of thinking within a culture and create and maintain the ways of acting in the world that over time become normal or natural. These historically constructed ways of knowing and acting limit thinking, understanding, being and questioning to only that inside the boundaries of the language and concepts prioritized within that discourse (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000). The fixed meanings or closed systems of conceptualizing words, constructed within the discursive, produce accepted notions of truth and common-sense ways of knowing (Weedon 1987). These truths are believed to be absolute rather than belonging to specific cultural narratives. Discourses, therefore, are social practices through which ‘reality’ is made intelligible. In other words, dominant Western discourses shape how individuals come to understand themselves and their place in the world. It speaks to power relations and value judgments that support certain ways of knowing that are viewed as natural. Therefore, as much as science shows we are part of nature, it seems normal to perceive humans as distinct or above nature. A critique of this normalized perception makes us question if we, the authors, do believe this? What do we think as individuals and why do we hold these views? To explore these questions, we need to understand the concept of the subject versus the individual.

The concept of subject illuminates the role discourse plays in our lives, the depths to which language constitutes the very nature of our conscious and unconscious understandings of self (St. Pierre 2000). Weedon (1987) maintains “neither the body nor thoughts and feelings have meaning outside their discursive articulation, but the way in which discourse constitutes the minds and bodies of individuals is always part of a wider network of power relations, often with institutional bases” (p. 108). Therefore, language is not merely a tool for describing, and a discourse is not just a narrative in which an individual locates herself or himself (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000). They both form the basis through which persons understand themselves as knowable individuals with a collective reality. Thus, the term subject acknowledges the constitutive force of discourse. A person inevitably understands the world from within a repertoire and from the vantage point of the particular images, storylines, metaphors and concepts of their discursive practices (Davies 2000). In this way a person is the product of the discourses they are exposed to, or engage in, rather than an autonomous individual who can choose to be independent of all discourses. The individual is continually produced by and situated within similar or competing discourses, and this understanding is fundamentally different from the humanist perspective. The humanistic perspective assumes that a person is an individual agent, a relatively fixed product whose sense of self or identity is established before birth. This notion of identity is linked to talk of an authentic self (Davies 2000). It is assumed there is a stable and coherent self that can look objectively and reliably on knowledge gathered through the correct use of reason and obedience to scientific laws (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000). The humanistic notion of self and individual agency is key in education. Learning is viewed as an end point, rather than a process of becoming.

When we move away from seeing teachers and students as having a fixed or stable identity, to understanding how their subjectivity is produced by the dominant political, economic and social educational discourse, we can develop more clarity in analyzing their struggles. As subjects who have been produced by the dominant educational discourse, their language and the meanings hidden within that language are reflective of this humanistic discourse (Martusewicz 2001). Hence, invisible understandings about the role of education becomes that of securing future economic wealth and the assumptions and methods of achieving that directly link to isolationism, tribalism, racism and authoritarianism underpinned by indifference, complicity, and lack of kindness or care for self, other humans, animals, plants, nature, or ecosystems.

6 Reflecting on Educational Discourses

So, who is to blame? Are the teachers? The students? If this dominant educational discourse represented the only discourse teachers and students had been exposed to, then these assumptions would be the only way these teachers or students could understand what it means to teach and learn (Davies 2000). Educational discourses are structured and restructured to suit particular political agendas which most often perpetuate human exceptionalism and the nature/human perception as being normal. To this end, dominant Western educational curricula, pedagogies, teacher identities, and administrative practices inherently promote ecological unsustainability rather than sustainability by controlling what counts as knowledge, truth, normalizing the educational experience while silencing minority perspectives and voices (Sammel et al. 2020). Pedagogies are examples of this, as they are structured around people rather than nature: either teacher centered, or more progressively, student centered. Teachers are normally portrayed as lesson-dispensers, controlling and being controlled by the dominant narratives that perpetuates turning the ‘empty vessels’ sitting in front of them into workforce ready producers and consumers. Giroux (1988) speaks to this when he says that powerful invisible narratives that continuously promote and maintain dominant power structures are evident in most school curricula. Curricula explicitly and dramatically influences teachers’ work, supporting and confirming the political agendas through the daily rhetoric of schools. All players within educational systems have been historically produced to understand what is socially acceptable to teach and learn, and what is not (Davies 1990). As such, our educational discourses are complicitous with the discourse of pestilence.

Much has been written for five decades on this problem. However, Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2016) suggest it is easier to theorize about challenging this reality then it is to practice it, as these are powerful and core beliefs within educational systems. But there is always hope! Discourses that shape our world have a situated character, shaped through and by social understandings and practices, and are continually open to contestation and negotiation. This continually emerging work that challenges discourses associated with human exceptionalism and human/nature dualisms, can be referred to as posthumanism. When teachers and students are exposed to other educational discourses, such as posthumanism, they are offered other ways of understanding what it means to teach and learn. They may be able to shift among available discourses. However, rarely does exposing someone to new discourses lead to causal or linear change relationships. Power dynamics always influence how people position ourselves within the similar and competing discourses they are exposed to. In our experiences, teachers struggle with power dynamics that play out between dominant and marginalized educational discourses which can lead to a disconnection between what they believe they should be teaching and what they want to teach (Sammel 2020). Recognizing and resisting dominant educational discourses operating in Western societies is a significant challenge for anyone who wants to generate change.

7 Reflecting on a Posthumanistic Education for Sustainability

Posthumanism invites us to appreciate the constitutive potential that underlies any discourse and the impressive power of the way discourses are overtly taken up but rarely recognized. It makes visible the productive power of educational discourses that explains how education systems, teachers and students have been produced within humanism’s grids of regularity and normalcy. By decentering the individual (politician, administrator, teacher, students etc.) our focus turns to how subjects are produced through the humanistic discourse rather than standing outside of this discourse. It encourages us to grasp the difference and possibility of another discourse of teaching and learning, one that explores shifting educational conversations towards a more relational framing of how we can understand ourselves and the world around us. Posthumanistic education for sustainability directly challenges the idea of human alienation from nature and rejects the notion that humans are the crown of evolutionary processes. This discourse focuses on making visible the deep interconnections and relationships that link everything on the planet. It highlights that humans are just one part of the biological fabric of life on Earth and acknowledges humans are incapable of an independent existence. At its core, posthumanistic education for sustainability promotes care and kindness towards all aspects of the planet by illustrating how we are all deeply interconnected, and by harming one aspect, we are harming all aspects.

Posthumanistic education for sustainability offers the chance to view learning as a relational process rather than product or outcome. Learning requires the fusing of horizons, or the melding of discourses. When Gadamer (1997) writes of horizons, he is referring to conscious and subconscious perceptions, beliefs, and biases that are brought into any discussion. These horizons are twofold: a historical horizon—defined by the past and the traditions that have resulted from it—and a present horizon—that encompasses all that is believed and understood by a person at this moment in their current situation. They are interconnected as the historical horizon influences the present horizon and as such and must be acknowledged and examined so that the present horizon can be better understood. The explorations of these horizons result in what Gadamer (1997) refers to as their fusing.

In this fusion, the historical horizon remains fixed, while the present horizon is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices. It is through dialogue between the two horizons that understanding can grow. Gadamer (1997) proposes that developing a rich understanding is not something that can be achieved individually, but through dialogue when people lay open their experiences and horizons, and entertain the possibility of change and growth. Posthumanistic education for sustainability seeks to enter this type of Gadamerian dialogue where historic and present horizons fuse in an attempt to challenge dualistic ontologies about the human/nature divide within schools. It disrupts this dominant discourse by embedding diverse ways of knowing the world, and self, into daily teaching and learning practices. Posthuman must therefore be based in dialogue, where there is respect for diverse ways to understand the world that does not privilege this human/nature dualism.

Practically, all citizens live in worlds that include non-human life, environmental forces and entities (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2016). Latour (2005) speaks to the idea of ‘common worlds’ as the intersection where all life and ecosystems meets. A posthumanistic pedagogy advocates that students explore how their lives are intertwined and embedded with, and mutually dependent on, this common world. This way students can begin to understand and acknowledge that all life shares common vulnerabilities, and engages in common daily actions, and all have a responsibility to protect, and show care and kindness for our common world. By decentering the human and directing students to make sense of their relationship with this common world, posthumanistic education for sustainability encourages pedagogies that explore the entirety of what constitutes local environments. Students are encouraged to see connections between all species and to recognize we are all interconnected and deserving of the right to dignity, the right to food, the right to security, to shelter and to kindness and compassion. If coming-to-know is inseparable from coming-to-being (Higgins 2016), then it is imperative that citizens are exposed to alternative discourses that nurture capacities for caring and build students capacities and neural networks to come to be more compassionate citizens. By infusing small acts of kindness into daily educational practices, formal education may not directly save the planet, but hopefully it will create new modes of attention to the entangled relationships that thread our common world together (Haraway 2010; Tsing 2013).

Citizens of today and the future need to be exposed to alternative discourses promoting attention to this common world and ecological sustainability, rather than those associated with human growth and entitlement. If not, the plague of indifference will continue to bring us new challenges we are ill-equipped to resolve. Posthumanistic education for sustainability emerges as one discourse that focuses on nurturing the relational agenda of human as nature, in order to promote an ecological sustainable way of citizens coming to be. It encourages another way of using socially available repertoires of concepts, philosophies, words, and gestures to promote ecologically sustainable perspectives, actions and societies.

8 Conclusion

In this chapter, we advocate for systemic, long-term educational change—change that encourages a clearer understanding of our ethical responsibility within this COVID-19 era. By analyzing the historical development of the dominant hegemonic discourse of humanism, we seek to challenge how Western cultures have come to understand their connection to the Earth. We explain how the humanistic discourse perpetuates the belief that it is normal to support human exceptionalism and endorse the human/nature divide. We maintain that if humanism is the only educational discourse teachers and students are exposed to, then education will inherently promote ecological unsustainability rather than sustainability.

We call for teachers and students to be offered other educational discourses that promote human potential, ecological consciousness, and acknowledge our responsibility to the future of all species - and to Earth itself. Instead of identifying humanity as above nature, education needs discourses that highlight humanity's deep interconnections with non-human animals, plants, and ecosystems. To find a way through the plague of indifference and the challenges the Anthropocene is bringing, we need a different way of thinking than that of the humanistic discourse which caused it. We believe that posthumanistic education for sustainability is one way to generate citizens who can develop compassion and kindness toward their local ecosystems. It provides opportunities to engage with learning as a way of becoming rather than just a way of knowing, embedded within local ecologies. It advocates for ecological sustainable agendas that promote what it means to live in relationship with all aspects of the biosphere.

Looking ahead, we believe that COVID-19 provides a transformational opportunity. In this period of social disruption and crisis, it is vital not simply to get the educational cart out of the ditch and back on the same road. Rather, we must find new paths that create revolutionary ways of learning and teaching that move students and teachers beyond indifference and complicity and toward caring and kindness.