Empowerment Through Relations

Below is an educational storyline I created, where I nestle two lesson plans within a theme of empowerment, relationality, joy, and justice. Each piece gives more context for the lesson plan to document the learning goals and the praxis required to meet them.

Rhizome and Motivation

This Rhizome features core principles of my teaching approach and commitments I have to the type of learning environment I create.

In order to realize the ideas and goals from my Rhizome, I crafted this lesson plan that focuses on an investigation of a place throughout time. In other words, I wanted to facilitate powerful experiences that could result from learning about the history of a place, connecting to this place through the present moment and grounding yourself in your senses, and then working collaboratively to imagine what the place could look like in the future.

This type of investigation ties in to many elements of my Rhizome. Through learning about the past and looking for evidence of what the history of a place is and pairing that with accounts of the past, I use this context to facilitate discussions of Indigenous rights and histories come about, as well as conversations that can incorporate other ways of knowing and finding connections to each individual student’s repertoire of knowledge and community knowledge. When I take students through these lessons, we practice decentering ourselves as humans in ecosystems, emphasize connections and perspective taking of more-than-human actors, connect personally with place, and to find joy in grounding ourselves in the present time and space. Through thoughtful framing and scaffolding, I have seen wonder come as a natural result of this type of activity, all while students lead themselves and each other through investigations of what it means to be here now. Finally, practicing future dreaming together can encourage students to take what they have learned and make decisions about how to interact with the world around them. I see this as a necessary step that allows students to make connections between what they have learned about from a place and see how that might factor into a decision-making process where they are able to use their agency and repertoires of knowing to express their ideas.

Throughout each stage of this potential lesson, I allow space for student agency and responsibility for themselves and each other. While doing these activities, we also practice community building, and through this, feel that we are all connected through our relationships to land, waters, more-than-humans, and one another. While there are many ways to know, to investigate, and to sense make, working collaboratively, highlighting individual strengths and identities, and connecting with the natural world can serve as a powerful combination for learning to happen.

Rhizome and Motivation

The Storyline that I created feels important to me because I think the pursuit of education as liberation is a summation of why education matters to me overall. While my Rhizome states that I think this liberation can be realized through JEDI work with a focus on decolonization, working to decenter humans in ecosystems, place-based knowledge and learning, and prioritizing joy, I recognize that these are all still ideas through my own lens of the world and that will be much more challenging to fully connect and realize in practice. However, I believe that these foundations, in the larger context of understanding power, historicity, and community, could be successful and generative of lessons that challenge colonial ideas of ways of knowing. Particularly, attenuating to power and how it shows up on many different levels in education (in actual lessons and curriculum, in the interpersonal group dynamics in the moment, in how learning is taught/encouraged, etc.) feels like the most essential work to do if education becomes liberatory not just for some but for all. Additionally, I see the decentering of humans in ecosystems and place-based knowledge and learning as an essential part of this because it invites all involved to continue to reimage what the future can look like. On one hand, discussing ecosystems and humans as inherently and always connected while acknowledging that humans are just one of many animals can encourage an accessible way of re/framing power and what we know about the world in a way that might begin to question hegemony. Concurrently, place-based knowledge and learning allows us to contextualize our presence with what has shaped this place and the reverence land and water holds. Through place-based learning, these lessons can build on themes of gratitude, awareness, connection, and presence in visceral ways. Through that work, feelings of joy are prioritized in moments where students are invited to follow their wonders about the world around them to a point of connection and learning.

Background and Context

I used this Storyline during my time teaching at the School Overnight Program (SOP) at IslandWood. During an SOP experience, 4th-6th grade students come to IslandWood for 4 days and 3 nights of learning and living on our campus. Many opportunities abound for students to spend time outside in unique ecosystems and make personal connections to the world around them. Still, these students come into the space with a range of experiences depending on their own positionalities and identities, and it’s important to me and the pursuit of education as liberation that those experiences and ways of knowing are honored. While I try to make very little assumptions about what exactly this knowledge will be, I provide space to learn where the students are at in order to frame the lesson to be successful for the unique group of students that I will be working with at the time. In my practice, I ensure students feel safe and comfortable so that they can show up as their whole selves, taking learning to the next, personal level. I always anticipate that students will come with a range of comfortability and accessibility in terms of being in an outdoor environment, so I choose locations on IslandWood campus that are generally accessible and can be made to feel safe.

Theoretical Framework

Of course, the ideas in this Storyline are not new, and a variety of resources have helped me develop these ideas from foundations of theories grounded in philosophy and empirical research. For example, much of my storyline focuses on how relationships and being in community can form points of agency, empowerment, and learning for students. Building from the work of Lave and Wenger (1991), Esmonde explains that this idea partially lies in situated learning theory, where skills and knowledge are understood through an individual’s relationship to co-participants and settings where experiences lead to learning over the course of iterating practices within a community (2016). For my Storyline, I intend to attend to these ideas by acknowledging both each student’s unique background and identities and their ability to develop new ideas about themselves and the world through the learning process that occurs within our community. When we are active on IslandWood’s campus, we are situated within the current time and physical place, but also within the nestled expertise that comes as a result of each member of the community’s contributions. Over the course of our learning experience, we will develop an ethics of practice, where through the process of doing activities together in the unique place, time, and community we find ourselves in, everyone will have the opportunity to learn from their peers, consider their perspectives, and develop a more in depth understanding of the role of place and history in the knowledge we share and experience with one another.

Within these concepts, I am also talking about the funds of knowledge students bring with them from their lived, unique experiences (González et al., 2005). When students come to a new space, they carry with them what they have learned throughout their whole lives, which is different for every person, and importantly, these funds of knowledge should be validated in education and responded to in “life affirming” ways. This too edges on work from Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003), where they emphasize the importance of individuality within culture as it is expressed through repertoires of practice. From this work, my Storyline aims to empower students to feel like their ways of knowing and the knowledge they hold from their lives are essential not only to their learning but to the learning of others. As an educator seeking to disrupt conventional systems of power through education, I see potential in my lesson plans to go beyond learning objectives strictly about Western scientific principles and aim to encourage discussions that acknowledge and affirm multiple ways of knowing, differences in expertise, and highlight the practice of science as one of collective, holistic sense making rather than monolithic answer finding.

Speaking of the aspects of personal learner empowerment that have come up throughout my Storyline, I am building from ideas discussed explicitly by Nasir and Cooks (2009). Through affirmation of and validation of learner’s identities, learners can engage more deeply and profoundly with the world around them. By providing all material, relational, and ideational resources, I can scaffold lessons so that there is the opportunity for students to make personal connections to what is being learned. When I say “We are scientists” to a community of learners, I am taking the first step as an educator to empower students to take a personal stance in their own science learning and to introduce that each of us has the power to make discoveries, wonder, and investigate. Further, incorporating the ideas mentioned above, valuing an individual’s interpretation of science and knowledge allows room for the identities they bring with them into a learning space to be validated and possibly expanded, creating new or altered figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998). I see potential in my Storyline to push for these reimaginings through the activities that we will engage with and the momentum we build through practices of joy and mindfulness.

An overt aspect of my Storyline and one of my own commitments is working on the project of decolonization. While I fully acknowledge that decolonization is not a metaphor and can only be achieved through the material redistribution of land rights (Tuck & Wang, 2012), I also want to acknowledge the ways that my Storyline intersects and interacts with Indigenous rights and knowledge. When I am teaching at IslandWood, I am a settler on land I am not from and that is the traditional, ancestral homelands of the Suquamish and Coast Salish people. While I do not have the ability to transfer land rights, I do have a choice in how I portray this story when we are talking about the place that we are in and how I position our learning community within this story. Holding discussions about Indigenous history, rights, and knowledge is one way that I can work to transform the narratives of settler colonialism we tell each other and build from. When orienting a science learning community towards justice, we know that learning can take on profound meaning to learners (Morales-Doyle, 2017). Furthermore, when so much of the content and positioning of my Storyline builds directly from Indigenous, place-based knowledge and ways of knowing and relating (McCoy et al., 2020), I have an obligation to make that connection explicit to the community of learners. Beyond working towards decolonization, other framing of lessons with JEDI practices and ideologies will be imperative to the success of my Storyline.

Building from these ideas of justice, I want to give attention to ideas of future dreaming and how empowerment can function as a tool for learners to take with them as they make decisions and change the world around them through their actions. A central theme in environmental or outdoor education rests in making visible the ways in which we as individuals and communities have an impact on the world (Learning in Places Collaborative, 2020). While some of this narrative may be more explicit at times (i.e., “And that’s why it’s important to turn the lights off when you’re not in a room!”), I am also interested in some broader implications of decision-making from a place of relation. Instead of only framing ourselves as change-making actors where all our individual decisions add up to one great big negative impact on the planet, I would like to also give more time and attention to the process of decision-making from a place of being in communities of care and reciprocity with one another and the more-than-human world. This work feels essential to many of the nodes in my Rhizome, while also making clear the ways in which agency and power can show up outside of intentional learning experiences. The act of future dreaming itself demands both introspection and reflection that can act as practice for the much more challenging work of making decisions in real time in any variety of contexts. When a learning community comes together to share their unique ideas and perspectives, to share their hopes of what the world will be like, and to share visions of joy and justice, the veil of separateness can lift, and a deep connection can form between ourselves and other beings that call this place home.

First Activity - Solo Walk

To frame the week of learning that will happen at IslandWood, I ask students to reflect on what they might already know about this place and remind students that we are on the lands of the Suquamish, the original and current stewards of this place. Through this discussion, we can explore ideas of what this place used to look like and why it is the way it is today. From there, I introduce the concept of a Solo Walk, where students will have the opportunity to walk a trail in the woods by themselves, following a path of cards with reflective prompts. We consider safety and boundaries together, then I walk the trail and set out cards for students. To connect this activity to my Storyline, I use Solo Walk cards that ask students to engage with their senses through mindfulness practices that enhance noticing the forest around them. Additionally, there are be prompts connecting us to the past, such as “What do you think this spot looked like 100 years ago?” and “Who has walked this path before you?.” Once they reach the end of the Solo Walk one-by-one, I have their journals out and ready where I will ask them to write or draw about plants, ideas, or other things that they noticed along the way that felt important to them. I repeat this activity on the last day of SOP on the same trail, except prompts are present-future oriented. While grounding in through senses and noticing will be prevalent again, some other reflective questions featured are “What does this forest need to be healthy for the next 15 years?” and “If you came back here in another season, what might be different and/or the same?” To debrief the last Solo Walk, we collectively share how the walk felt to us the first time vs. the second time, if learning throughout the week helped us gain a new perspective, and what it means that we have a choice in how the future looks.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes - Students will be able to reflect on the past, present, and future of a place they’ve gotten to know well - Students will be able to make connections between themselves and the futures they hope for, as well as their inherent connections to the more-than-human world - Students will be able to contextualize their experiences through quiet reflection, artistic expression, and communication

Second Activity - Perspective Storytelling

In the middle of the week, students and I engage in an artful project of Perspective Storytelling. In order to mentalize with a more-than-human actor and to celebrate the joy of artistic expression, students choose a local more-than-human that they have met during the week to either write or draw a story from the perspective of that actor. To frame this, I lead a turn-and-talk discussion about some of the coolest more-than-humans we’ve seen, heard, or noticed signs of and what was interesting about them. I use this practice to encourage a sense of agency, where students are free to select whichever object or actor that they had a personal connection with. I then invite students to consider how different it would be if they were living as the object or actor of their choosing and remind them that while we experience the world from our human senses, other things have a totally different way of experiencing the world and have totally different ecological roles and niches. From there, I ensure that each student has at least a couple of ideas of what they’d like to create and will encourage them to take 10 minutes exploring their ideas in written or drawn forms. Depending on how the group would like to present, I either allow students to pair up and share to one other student or share out in a gallery walk style. We close by wondering if some things were harder or easier to write from the perspective of, why, and how we can remember to think about new perspectives at home and at school.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes - Students will be able to think creatively about more-than-humans and the experience of others, growing empathy and appreciation for the world around them - Students will apply ecological concepts such as food webs, community, and resilience to an artifact of their creation - Students will be able to gain confidence in sharing their ideas with others and better understand the value in learning from peers

References

Esmonde, I., & Booker, A. N. (2017). Power and privilege in the learning sciences: Critical and sociocultural theories of learning. Chapter 2: Power and Sociocultural Theories of Learning. New York: Routledge.

González, N., Moll, L. C, & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Chapter 2. Gutiérrez, K., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 19-25.

Holland, D., Lachicotte Jr., W., Skinner, D., & Cain. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Chapter 2: A Practice Theory of Self and Identity. (pp. 19-46). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Learning in Places Collaborative (2020). Ethical Deliberation and Decision-Making in Socio-ecological Systems Framework. Bothell, Seattle, WA & Evanston, Il: Learning in Places.

McCoy, M., Elliott-Groves, E., Sabzalian, L., & Bang M. (2020). Restoring Indigenous Systems of Relationality. Center for Humans & Nature. Retrieved gggggiifrom: https://www.humansandnature.org/restoring-indigenous-systems-of-relationality?gggggiifbclid=IwAR1eNCxm5CU2VreVSUlaL51pGW7nMtiz30n4LQu8SnJijxU9Qb_xsJWzgNgggggiik

Morales-Doyle, D. (2017). Justice-centered science pedagogy: A catalyst for academic achievement and social transformation. Science Education, 101(6), 1034–1060. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21305

Nasir, N. I. S., & Cooks, J. (2009). Becoming a hurdler: How learning settings afford identities. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 40(1), 41-61.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1