White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, (...) socialism, welfare capitalism, andlibertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the affinities between curriculum theory, hermeneutics, and ecology. Some of the historical origins of modernist curriculum, such as the works of Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Jean Piaget, are critiqued. The works of major figures in the interpretive paradigm, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, are used to unearth a more generous, more ecologically sane understanding of curriculum and our lives with children.

In a Different Voice is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond.

I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of (...) the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world.ed from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations. (shrink)

This paper begins with an assumption that the natural world is literally able to speak. What follows is research around a new place-based, ecological and imaginative public school in Maple Ridge, BC. The school has no building to speak of as there is an attempt being made, as part of the day-to-day pedagogical practice, to listen to the more-than-human as an active voice and co-teacher thereby moving from human teachers/researchers speaking in, about and for the more-than-human towards speaking with and (...) listening to it. Drawing on our lived experience as researchers, theorists, and ecological educators, this paper proposes to draw on the student voices at the Environmental School to posit a series of five distinct orientations. Each of these orientations is potentially available to us and each offers a different way to understand, attend to and communicate with the natural world. These orientations have implications, if taken seriously, for educational practice and content. In this paper, we focus on clarifying these orientations and anchor them with examples from interviews done over the course of several school years with three different students. We end the paper by pointing out some of the educational implications that might arise if we are to take these students and, as a result, the proposed orientations seriously. (shrink)

Originally published: 1st American ed. New York: Orion Press, 1965. With new afterword.

A leading figure in the emerging field of extinction studies, Thom van Dooren puts philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences and his ethnographic encounters to vivify the cultural and ethical significance of modern-day extinctions. Unlike other meditations on the subject, _Flight Ways_ incorporates the particularities of real animals and their worlds, drawing philosophers, natural scientists, and general readers into the experience of living among and losing biodiversity. Each chapter of _Flight Ways_ focuses on a different species or group of (...) birds: North Pacific albatrosses, Indian vultures, an endangered colony of penguins in Australia, Hawaiian crows, and the iconic whooping cranes of North America. Written in eloquent and moving prose, the book takes stock of what is lost when a life form disappears from the world--the wide-ranging ramifications that ripple out to implicate a number of human and more-than-human others. Van Dooren intimately explores what life is like for those who must live on the edge of extinction, balanced between life and oblivion, taking care of their young and grieving their dead. He bolsters his studies with real-life accounts from scientists and local communities at the forefront of these developments. No longer abstract entities with Latin names, these species become fully realized characters enmeshed in complex and precarious ways of life, sparking our sense of curiosity, concern, and accountability toward others in a rapidly changing world. (shrink)

This article explores an important section of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous early work, Being and Nothingness. In that section Sartre proposes that part of the human condition is to actively engage in a particular kind of self-deception he calls bad faith. Bad faith is recognized by the obvious inconsistency between the purported self-knowledge of an individual and ways of acting and being in the world that are demonstrably in defiance of that stated position. This article begins by exploring examples of this (...) self-deception in education along with a short query into the role pain avoidance might play in the development of this particular skill. The article then goes on to offer a series of manifestations of bad faith that Sartre identified along with possible examples of how each example, perhaps ‘excuse’, of bad faith might appear in education. (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on our research group’s year of preparation before the opening of a new K-7 publicly funded ecological ‘school’ for students aged 5–12. The article begins with a discussion of the reasons for seeking ways to change the values of a culture which fails to confront the consequences of its destructive practices, and for looking for a new approach to ecological education which sees the more-than-human world as an integral part of the learning situation. Five principles are (...) introduced and explained—principles that have grown out of the evolving experience of the research group, and then four ‘slogans’, which have served to guide the ongoing work of development, are described and illustrated. As part of the purpose of this project to change social and cultural values, the change of values within the research group during its ongoing work is also explored. (shrink)