One of the tasks I am finishing off is creating a brief bio for a book chapter I have just completed. Our edited collection, Planetary Praxis & Pedagogy: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Sustainability, will come out this summer and I am looking forward to using some of the chapters in my teaching next year.
While I am writing this short bio, what strikes me is my experience with narrative research and how autobiographies (a method I have been working with over the last 10+ years) implicate others in the stories we tell about ourselves – our histories. And while we often think that we are just telling our story, we are in fact telling many stories that interlock and co-construct not just our identities, but also those of the people around us. This interlocking of stories, and identities reminds me of when I was recently asked about my research for this chapter and why I thought I was the right person to undertake it. Here are my points for why this research, why now, why me and how stories are about relationships:
- As an Environmental Educator, I recognize that all of our Environmental Education efforts need to be focused on restructuring more equitable relationships with each other and the world around us
- We must critically engage with the relations we have in order to understand our own privilege, and how we might work as allies for social and environmental justice
- As an educator, I am motivated to include community knowledge into my courses. Yet I am very mindful that people in positions of power and privilege must begin our own process of critical awareness, where we remap history in order to understand how we are implicated in the ongoing legacy of colonization at the root of processes of marginalization. Our goal must be to reestablish more equitable relations and I believe that those in positions of power must listen to those always already speaking, because we have much work to do at reconciliation and this begins by, what Julie Cruikshank (2006) describes as, listening closely. That work must be the stuff that educators engage, and as educators we must make this work central to our curricular and pedagogical efforts.
When I reflect on my research for this chapter, I realize that there is so much work to be done so that social justice and environmental justice issues can focus on local issues and be discussed in our classes. I remember my own experience as a student having discussions about social and environmental justice, but the focus was on other places, other counties. I now wonder if educators “feel safe” discussing race, ethnicity, religion, ability and sexuality as an issue for another place – not Canada and not right here (I think of the work by Thobani (2007). Exalted Subjects: Studies of Race and Nation in Canada). My chapter for Planetary Praxis & Pedagogy: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Sustainability, discusses how I have begun the work of discussing race in a local environmental justice issue, and I recognize that I have only just begun unraveling my own history, relations and mis-education. My hope with this chapter is that it contributes to the discussion among environmental educators who are also struggling, examining and (in Freud’s terms) “working through” the difficult knowledge (Pitt and Britzman, 2003) Others’ stories present and how to relate and engage with the world around us in more equitable ways.
Pariss Garramone
Digging Where We Stand 