A Sentient Planet as a School;a School as a Community Garden: Toward Eco-Creative Think-Practicing

Abstract

The article revisits the notion of theory as differential becoming with a diffractive reading of two practices through/with each other: the curricular project of environmental education in Colombian schools and walking through Colombian volcanic selva. The article discusses both experiences as a practice of being-of living knowledge. Such knowledge is not just practical, functional, or instrumental; it is meaningful because it is co-created, emergent from being/becoming-with. The environmental education classroom discussed in the article is seen as an ecosystem. Academic reflexivity and the process of writing are approached as an ecosystem as well. We argue that decolonized/-ing inquiry requires inner decolonization as a person, as a field, and as academia by overcoming any homogeneous tendency toward being creatively and diversely more-than-theory.

Introduction

Over the last two decades, posthumanism and new materialism gained significant attention throughout disciplines. The conceptualization has expanded and transformed, and the extensive theoretical, methodological and applied literature has been systematized (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Fredriksen, 2020; Fredriksen & Groth, 2022; Herbrechter et al., 2020; Hovde, 2019; Niccolini et al., 2018; Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi, 2018; St. Pierre, 2013; Ulmer, 2017; Varga et al., 2023). Nevertheless, St. Pierre’s (2013) concern regarding scholarly reliance on “humanism’s representational logic” (p. 654) continues to be valid. Reflecting on the experience of community-based environmental education classroom experience in a Colombian secondary school, we want to expand the ecosystem approach to the reflection and the process of writing itself. We understand ecology as a constant co-creating community—and kin-making practice. Reflective inquiry, academic presentation, and teaching are political acts that address the need for transformation (hooks, 1994; Shor & Freire, 1987).

Over-attachment to the written word, theoretical and the approved referential frameworks primarily embedded in the existing power structures of academia sometimes turn the (feminist) posthumanism into a closed society—intellectually located in the North academy. The cited authors and works are reproduced from one text to another, creating a sense of tradition and a pre-defined pool of resources. These concerns have been expressed at the conferences and talks and recently have become more noticeable in the publications (Ringrose, Zarabadi, & Strom, 2018; Rosiek & Snyder, 2020; Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2020; Ulmer, 2017).

White (2007) argued that knowledge cannot be discovered but is made, the same way people, continents, and territories cannot be discovered but are living (p. 232). While the perspective might be a discovery for the knowledge system forged by Enlightenment’s humanism, it has been common for many indigenous cosmologies and practices informed by them, for organic intellectuals (Hoare & Smith, 1971) and community leaders of the Global South (Mejía, 2010) who draw their practice on attentive care for the territory, ancestral knowledge, listening, and engaging with multiple ways of knowing and being (Escobar, 2008).

Critical postqualitative and posthumanist works draw attention to the ethical short-coming of the Western knowledge system and call for its deconstruction (Fredriksen & Groth, 2022; Golovátina-Mora, 2022; Murris, 2017; St. Pierre, 2013; Thiele, 2015; Ulmer, 2017). The gate-keeping citation requirement combined with the word limits of the publication, however, leaves less space for the new authors, non-published, non-written sources and sources of more-than-human origin to contribute. While feminist posthumanism speaks of care, attentive and respectful listening, attunement and trust (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Neimanis, 2017; Ulmer, 2017), its academic practice would often follow the positivist requirement of validation and justification of knowledge. This reproduces the tendency toward the circular circulation of information formulated by Bourdieu (1996) in his criticism of journalism and television and prevents critical ontological revision, decentering knowledge creation and meaning-making, opening up the borders of academia toward the diversity of being and knowing.

While questioning binaries as a foundational principle of knowledge-making (Braidotti, 2006, 2019), posthumanism as an academic field tends to over-engage with positivist artificial separation of theory and practice, especially concerning publications. The language of the theory is predefined, and the already complex concepts tend to be elaborated in a secret language of academia, making this knowledge unacceptable for a broader audience, which makes posthumanist ethical call for a more just and inclusive society (Braidotti, 2006; Haraway, 2007) instead an intellectual play for a closed group of experts.

Over-attachment to the published word-based knowledge makes the field still human-centered and human-dominated, where human authors speak for underrepresented non/more-than-human beings. This contradicts the very foundation of critical feminist posthumanist non-representational ethics (St. Pierre, 2013; Ulmer, 2017). While attempts to decenter the human domination in knowledge and sensemaking have been made (Fredriksen & Groth, 2022; Golovátina-Mora, 2023; Harari, 2014; Hohti & MacLure, 2022; Tesar et al., 2022), it would require dare and structural reorganization of academic norms and schooling, deconstruction of the very principle of monopoly over knowledge, while addressing the question of “who has the right to speak theory?”

We believe and argue that as much as feminist posthumanist research and pedagogies are “fleshy, embodied and sensuous” (Niccolini et al., 2018), where “materiality activates thought and thought activates materiality” (p. 324) through affective relations, they are first and foremost a collaborative, ethical space of care, an open space (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005) based on trust in the matter and in the other in mutual becoming (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2006; Haraway, 2016; Sousanis, 2015). With this article, we hope to contribute to the ongoing deconstruction of dominating hierarchies by shifting attention from the human university-based theoretician toward community-based and territory-specific situated practice toward a more-than-human space of becoming as a theory and theoretician (Thiele, 2015). For us, thinking/being/teaching-with-theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Ulmer et al., 2020) is not limited to the focus of affective relations and reflective praxis (Freire, 2000) but goes beyond it toward plugging-in (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013) understood as trusting in-caring for-thinking-feeling-being with more-than-human ways of being/knowing. It overcomes the sedentary academic inquiry toward nomadic being “diversely more-than-human” (Colebrook, 2019; Hohti & MacLure, 2022) with a diffractive flow of praxis (Thiele, 2015) understood as continuous re-reading of practices and their conceptualizations through each other in their mutual becoming and transformation with the new meanings seen or yet to reveal themselves.

We see this process as affective kin-making with data, source, theory, and authors (Niccolini et al., 2018) and employ the diffractive reading (Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Thiele, 2015) of our engagement with more-than-human knowledge. We see diffraction as a methodology of ethical and critical practice (Thiele, 2015) of inner decolonization and opening up, care, and deconstruction of any exceptionalism.

Our theory and a theoretician are the tropical forest—selva—leading to the top of the volcano Machín in Tolima, Colombia, and Monica’s curricular environmental educational project discussed here. We do not look at it through the lenses of posthumanism or feminism or any other theory that has ever informed our work, and, yes, we do, as it is unavoidable. Similarly, they are, and they are not a metaphor. We read all the practices discussed here through each other. Affective relations create a “resonating chamber” of a kind (Massumi, 2015; Niccolini et al., 2018) that shapes our thought and influences our practice. Each practice is a world that we engage with through think-practicing (Thiele, 2015). The world has its think-practising processes that we become part of or recognize that we are part of, with our momentary think-practising that opens up portals/creates cuts initiating the new or somewhat differential worlding. Think-practicing is affective kin-making between the ever-increasing number of agents involved, which includes theory and practice themselves.

The references indicate the kin we build, either informing or validating our inquiry. They also work as portals or nodes in the relational rhizome of the kin. Rhizomes and mycelia’s nodes contain nutrients for the new sprouts, such as a great state of the art (Bayley, 2018; Fredriksen, 2020; Niccolini et al., 2018; Ulmer, 2017) or field maps (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Fredriksen & Groth, 2022; Herbrechter et al., 2020; Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi, 2018). Considering the temporal and spatial limitations, we trust the readers’ knowledge, desire, and ability to explore the moments that draw their attention to engaging with these nodes. We do and do not deliver the ready information to the readers but open up for kin-making (Golovátina-Mora et al., 2022) as an act of deconstructing the representational logic of interpretation. Form and content work as kin, enhancing our argument (Szwabowski, 2023) by making engagement with the text a transformative educational experience (Kalantzis & Cope, 2004).

The way we create kin is by storying and worlding/worldbuilding (Andersen, 2017; Haraway, 2013; Rosiek & Snyder, 2020; Thiele, 2015), which readers become part of. We avoid dissecting the stories/theories in the vignettes so as not to fall back on the representational practice of interpretation. Through the stories, we invite our readers to live the thought through with us. Storying (Golovátina-Mora, 2021; Niccolini et al., 2018) is the practice of resonation. They are lengthier because they require reproduction of the scene, of as many details as possible to present the multiplicity of the affects and because the non-textual references have not been published and need to be introduced in more detail than the published references that could often be mentioned in parenthesis. So, we better begin.

The Selva Story/Theory

A local guide accompanying me (Polina) on my hike to the dormant volcano Machín told me stories about the place, named the plants and birds, shared local jokes, pointed at the most convenient paths, and offered me a hand at the complex parts of the climb. There was no visible path for the person unfamiliar with the area, yet the guide saw it. The trail was steep and slippery.

At the beginning of the climb, I picked up a stick someone had left at the entrance to the forest. I thought I could use it as a support, but soon enough, I had to leave it leaning against a tree for someone else who could find a better use for it. It was not the stick that offered the support but the selva—the forest and the slope. With overwhelming gratitude, I realized how kind they were to intruders like me. I did not expect help. I felt so grateful to be there; I felt love and awe. I want to think the forest offered me its support in return for my feelings toward it. It was a silent, affective conversation based on mutual respect and attentive care for each other.

Mountain bamboo is horizontal, long, and strong. It can work as rails on the way up and as a supporting, safe rope on the way down. When it was not there, young trees, roots, and lianas did the favor. The guide reminded me to check if they are safe to use. With their support, I swung around and over the most challenging slope parts; they pulled me up and helped me slide down safely. I felt I was part of the slope and the selva; we were the extension of each other as if there was an invisible cord running through us (Niccolini et al., 2018; Sousanis, 2015, p. 40).

The cool, wet, and darker forest was over. Through the arch formed by bushes, we went to the opening covered with lichen and yellow flowers. The ground was hot and steaming, smelling of wet warmness. I have never experienced soft, warm lichen. Something big, powerful, and alive was right under the surface—close and everywhere. It was quiet; it was resting. I thanked the mountain for letting me know it; we silently paused to look around and started the descent.

Working for years with critical feminist more-than-humanism, I could not help but see this hike through the prism of the works by Karen Barad (2007) and Donna Haraway (2004, 2016). I recognized that I walked on the land taken from its originary guardians—los Pijaos, among the others. I admired its biodiversity, listened to the land, and tried to move with it; as an educator, I could not help but think of how much one could learn with and from it. The experience was an ongoing conversation with theory, memories, imaginary experiences, previous readings and discussions, conversations, and readings to be completed, which are part of the affect (Fredriksen & Groth, 2022; Manning, 2010; Ringrose, Zarabadi, & Strom, 2018) and propel the worlding process. As mountain bamboo and lianas, they created nodes of sense-making in the network of relationships and experiences I was part of. One such node was a conversation with Mónica we had several years before. Mónica is a secondary school science teacher and, when working on this text, a doctoral candidate writing her thesis about environmental education in Colombia. The conversation I remembered while hiking was about the project she worked on and then introduced in the curriculum of her school.

In the next section, we look closer at Mónica’s project, the limitations and the potentialities of the curricular arrangements it generated, the thoughts that brought it to life, and the pedagogies it offered. The practices that shaped the project were deeply situated within the environmental debates in Colombian academia and society, environmental activism, community practices, needs and realities, school realities, and standards set by the National Curriculum, in addition to the will and enthusiasm of the teachers and students. Thinking about it while engaging in silent conversation-listening with a volcanic selva did not just allow me to recognize its situatedness or, by analogy, my situatedness. However, it urged me to transform my practices of thinking, teaching, conversing, and being. It made us focus on what kind of education might emerge if we pay more attention to more-than-human and collaborative pedagogies if we become diversely more-than-human (Hohti & MacLure, 2022).

Walking in the selva is a living knowledge as the selva itself, a pulsating and breathing network of entanglement of ever-transforming knowledges and their situated meanings. Such knowledge is not just practical, functional, or instrumental. It is meaningful because it is co-created, emergent from being-with and being-of (Barad, 2007), from being-becoming-with (Braidotti, 2006), a response-able learning-with process (Bayley, 2018; Strom et al., 2020). It did not end when I left the forest; my steps transformed the micro worlds of that ecosystem. They transformed and kept transforming me as a person and, through me, the others in my ecosystems and worlds, where no one and nothing is a pure homogeneous self but a constant hybrid becoming.

Environmental Project’s Story/Theory

Ascending

The traditional configuration of Western education that artificially separates disciplines and knowledge is an action that denies the actual possibilities of hybridity, resistance, and creativity. It is built from a worldview and ideology drawn on the principles of hierarchy and binary oppositions (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). Knowledge is given outwardly from a dusty box that one has to open when said so; it is filtered and fragmented; the practice and reflection on it are often seen as separate activities (Mejía, 2010).

Rather than subscribe to this divisive view of education, we see reflection on practice or theory as pedagogical praxis (Freire, 1994, 2020; Darder, 2002) and as a respons-able (Strom et al., 2020), caring, curious, and passionate way to engage with professional or otherwise practice, think-practicing (Thiele, 2015). The practice and the reflection on it, or conceptualization, do not happen sequentially but simultaneously in butterflies’ flight trajectory as a playful dialogue between all the involved actors and subjects known and unknown at the moment of the reflection. The sense of sequence is a point of view produced by the cut of the rhizome. It is not a reflection on a specific practice but on situated practices, and “rather than ‘reflecting on,’” theory “diffracts (with) other practices in a thinking, measuring, and accounting manner” (Thiele, 2015, p. 101).

As I (Mónica) thought/taught/was-with-theory, I asked myself, why this research project? Why this methodology and goals? What does it mean? What can be done differently? Who benefits from the way it is done? How is it part of the community? What communities are involved? Who leads it and why? Asking these questions allowed me to keep growing closer to nature, myself and society, the community, the school, and my students. I gradually realized that this or that node in the network action corresponded to this or that theory or report I read, or instead, we built kin. New ideas sprouted from the nodes and urged me to expand my search; critical reading of theories and practices through each other led to new theories.

Connecting the project to the school curriculum and national guidelines was tricky because of the necessity to justify my plans to the school administration and, at times, to the students and myself. I also had to negotiate my beliefs with the expectations. I would have to propose any project in familiar terms; the project would have to bring immediate, measurable results, which would often mean addressing a symptom rather than focusing on a longer-term, less visible work toward preventing harm.

Searching for the familiar, I took advantage of the ongoing debates in media and, therefore, society. For example, the discussions around the use of chlorine dioxide intensified with the beginning of the pandemic (Ospina Zapata, 2021), which worked as the entry point for conversation about the environmental impact of domestic chemicals. I cross-checked this theme with the foci of the ongoing research and action projects at the school, such as the Greener Chemistry framework. It allowed us to articulate the connection between air pollution, CO₂ emission, waste disposal, and residual waste management.

I explored the existing practices of environmental classrooms in Colombia in the context of the broader environmental debates. Because of my expertise in the discipline, my interests and networks, I realized that the environmental classroom as a strategy or a design (Kalantzis & Cope, 2004) starts with the concept of territory. Latin American thought, critical pedagogies and participatory action research, ancestral knowledge, and environmental and social movements in Colombia, leaving and knowing with the land and territory reconfirmed my belief in the pedagogical projects owned by students, guided by their knowledge, by teachers as members of the community, not by teachers as avatars, representations of an institution and the institutional structure, transmitters of the established systemic will. This would be the internal decolonization of school spaces and schooling.

However, how should I propose composting—a functional garden at the institution without the school yard, where only “clean” and “approved” classroom teaching is accepted?

The ongoing, active discussion on promoting forms of student leadership in the schools became the next entry point. Most environmental education projects in Colombia connect with the Network of Environmental Roundtables (Red de Mesas Ambientales), non-governmental educational and civic organizations, and Environmental Classrooms (Aulas Ambientales) curated by the Medellín Secretary of Environment. These networks organize, connect, legitimize, institutionalize, and facilitate various initiatives. What sustains them are personal resources: intellectual, emotional, temporal, and at times even financial—of teachers, students, and families that build alliances with and through the territory, with and through their interests, passions, memories, knowledge, and hopes.

Environmental education, as formulated by these networks, aims at creating sustainable living spaces through environmental consciousness, respect, care and dreaming that can be achieved with “ownership of the educational and research spaces” (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2022). The environmental networks establish bridges between the school and the scenarios in which students can develop life skills and generate spaces and tools for collaborative work. These collaborations are part of nature-society entanglements, which makes them meaningful teaching and learning processes.

The Territory

Building alliances, making kin, and diffractively engaging with them were other lessons in the initial steps of the project development. Students attended environmental classrooms in the city, participated in the environmental roundtables, and learned about the local environmental legislative work. All this made the teaching in the classroom not abstract, fragmented, and detached from other school disciplines and the world outside of the classroom but part of the knowledge of the city, region, land, and territory altogether. The alliances and knowledge created within them helped students, and myself realize that the educational community is much larger than the lecturer in the classroom, that we are part of this community, and that knowledge is not hierarchized but distributed throughout it. The parents, neighbors, and grandparents are the researchers and knowledge guardians as much as the trees, vegetables, bees, buildings, or soil are.

Here are some examples of what students did within this project: Students started small functional and vegetable gardens in their homes; they monitored their water and electricity consumption and discussed strategies to reduce it; they practiced bird watching; they learnt to compost to produce organic fertilizers using the waste from the school cafeteria and their households; they recycled. One mom had a succulent plant business and shared her knowledge of cultivating succulents with the students. The students planted pumpkins, tomatoes, onions, and aromatic herbs in their vegetable garden; they were selling them with fertilizers at a pop-up mini-market they organized. These activities merged different disciplines and got themselves integrated into the school curriculum. Fragmented experiences were brought together in the science classes through discussions about what makes knowledge, which made students recognize the stereotypes about research and science they had and start deconstructing them (Rocha Bravo & Golovátina-Mora, 2024).

The territory, or rather the project’s space, was shaped by organizations and institutions, people, urban nature, background stories, and relations between them. The school did not have a permanent territory to develop a garden. The territory-land was, in a way, outsourced, extended, and connected to the larger environment outside or instead beyond the school by invisible tentacles (Haraway, 2016), by mountain bamboo (Selva story/theory) or yarn (Niccolini et al., 2018). This limitation became an extension for the territory-space of the project, forcing it to go beyond the fragmentation and isolation of the school knowledge toward reflection on its situatedness (Braidotti, 2006; Haraway, 1988) as well as on the ubiquitous nature of learning (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), on the ways of learning with the territory, community, the land and self in them, on the methods of forming the alliances. Later, not being able to use the physical school territory during the COVID lockdowns, the project explored other learning spaces, thus reinforcing the continuity and relationality between the school, the classroom, and the community, family, the city.

The students facilitated the research projects. Their commitment and engagement attracted attention outside of school; the students began gaining awards. In turn, that gained more attention, recognition, and approval inside the school—from the school leadership and other faculty members who were not yet involved in the project. They started searching for ways to connect their classes to the project and articulate the project’s activities in their classes. Using Derrick Bell’s (1980) interest convergence theory to look at educational policies, we can say that personal passions or preferences, along with community needs, start a change that slowly changes how people talk about things in society. This eventually dovetails with the elite’s interests, generating the governmental initiative, policies, and guidelines (Milner et al., 2013). This relationality is not strictly sequential either. The changes we described here embodied interest convergence and generated micro-level structural changes. One day this might happen again in this school, other schools, education, academia altogether (?) . . .

Conclusions: Affective Learning Toward Decolonializing the Self

Reading one story/theory through the other through the theories we (Mónica and Polina) have ever read, through experiences we have ever reflected on, urges rethinking the idea of schooling. The ideal school would be organized on the principle of a community garden, on the premise that the planet is a sentient being, the network of sentient beings, the network of multiple forms of knowledge (Escobar, 2020; Golovátina-Mora, 2021; Latour, 1999; Manning, 2010; Rautio et al., 2022), the decentered structure of learning, the decentered community-based school. The decentralization would blur the borders of the disciplines and expertise as the knowledge center. It would not be accurate to say it is student-centered or project-based as these terms are the products of the border, identity, role, or binary-based teleological system of knowledge. The ideal school would be a practice, an event, a territory, or a space for becoming in alliances and kins (Haraway, 2016), of distributed and co-created knowledge (Blaikie et al., 2020), curiosity- and care-driven, reflective, responsive, and respons-able (St. Pierre et al., 2016; Strom et al., 2020) attentive education and scholarship. This is how knowledge is made and shared in the world (Barad, 2007), but this principle is still far from shaping the educational system or academic norms.

Each grade had its own project. The projects connected different disciplines and school grades. They also connected classrooms and homes, engaging the knowledge of family members and allowing them to modify the focus of the study. The environmental classroom became a connection space, the node, where the Deleuze-Guattarian lines of flight sprouted (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005), opening up the possibilities for the ecosystem’s re-assemblages, for further co-creation of new communities. These nodes led to revisions of the school’s research program and generated new incentives among students. It drew closer attention to the research itself. It made the students ask questions about the meaning of research, the relation between practice and theory, the role of the research in everyday life, and even about the image of a researcher in society. Reliving and rethinking this experience made Mónica restructure the paper she was working on; thinking of the possible scenarios for the school environmental project back then inspired her dissertation.

The processes discussed here in this article are the processes of both individual and institutional decolonization and de-individualization (Bayley, 2018; Niccolini et al., 2018). It means letting the desire to control the research and learning process go and letting the matter, the learning process, lead you. This shift of the locus of control and the change in the power relations from the centralized to the decentralized and dispersed control and knowledge empowers, liberates, and makes learning more a/effective (Thiele, 2015, p. 103). We opened up and trusted each other, trusted the knowledge of the territory and that of its guardians. The guardians are the ones who had an early start in the process of decolonization. Decolonization started with trust and co-created new relations of trust and care. We strengthened the community by co-creating our territory with the territory of the environmental project as a physical, symbolic, narrative, reflective, and response-able space.

The practice/stories/theories organically lay on the premise that “powerful learning is active, participatory, grounded in dialogue, corresponding to issues and questions of importance to students, and purposefully recognises and builds on the assets of students” (Strom & Martin, 2022, p.1) and continue the tradition of practice-led, critical, transformative, collaborative, feminist diversely more-than-human (Hohti & MacLure, 2022) pedagogies.

It makes part of the broader critical social discourse that allies with care for the environment, territory, and shared well-being. The alliance results from interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and the indicator of patterns of oppression—of peasants, indigenous communities, and the poor that is reproduced and informed throughout all social institutions, including the school system (Freire, 2000). The organic sensitivity against oppression and its internal resistance comes from reality itself. More-than-humanist education enhances this sensitivity in collaboration, alliances, and kinships in the more-than-human world. The more-than-human school recognizes and values the sentience of the world and the diversity of knowledges. It decentralizes control and lets these knowledges lead toward sensitivity against oppression through the selva with the support of mountain bamboo.

The curriculum arrangements at the school that we discussed here could be called project-oriented teaching, teaching with gardening, compost, and soil, and teaching with alternative classrooms (Bayley, 2018; Rautio et al., 2022; Ulmer, 2017). The school program was adapted to the garden cycle to meet the needs of compost and glass houses. The curricular transformations embraced multiple ecologies (Leff, 1998, 2015), pluriverse (Escobar, 2020) reality, and became a symbiotic compost body (Haraway, 2016) itself, “the fleshy, embodied and sensuous” experience (Niccolini et al., 2018, p. 324). It became the selva that reaches out to those who gratefully accept its knowledge-being, one living, breathing volcanic land, the organism that transformed the meaning of the study plan and made knowledge meaningful and living.

Reading our stories/theories through each other allowed us to rely on our senses, be led by the affects (together-with/through the other authors), with our words (together-with/through those of the others). They expanded our understanding-feeling of feminist posthumanism as being learned through/with the source as diversely more-than-human think-practicing.