The Dance of Structure and Agency by Jane Edwards.
This colossal work by Jane is reconstituting my brain. If one could do a pre and post reading analysis of my neural pathways – I’m certain that the two brains would look unrelated!
19 October 2018.
Jane’s tome quietly sits in my bag, on my desk, back in my bag – then by the bed. It kind of follows me around. In a sense it should be a tomb stone casting a long moon shadow over my edgy conscience. It is always there – quietly knowing it will unfurl all kinds of new ways of being – yet not saying a word. That is, until my gaze finally falls upon it’s open pages – then it just wont shut up!
I’m only up to page 20. The recurring theme in all environmental education theory books that I’ve read lately has nothing to do with the actual education and everything to do with what we call whatever it is that we are trying to do – or rather trying to avoid or trying to include / exclude, engage or embrace. The damned acronyms form an unruly que all the way to the other side of that tomb stone. Wot’s in a name sez he EPA or ESD Is it EftE or plain old EE. As a specialist teacher in this area I referred to the program as EELL – Environmental Education Learning Lab. This seemed to capture what we were on about.
Whilst I’ve glossed over a lot of what came before page 20, I was forced to stop and make the following observation. 2.3.1 refers to ‘transformative learning’. It is at this point that I’d postulate that given the social nature of this way of being as a learner – that ‘transformation’ may not be enough. Rather – the concept of transmogrification (which I notice the spell check picks up – this wasn’t even a word ‘back in the day’) captures sense that as we induct learners in the ways of being in ‘other than human’ contexts as well as socially constructed contexts, there is sufficient neural pathway change – and such a profound repositioning ones concept of self within the very structures that afford such agency that