Between Complicity and Integrity

List of Figures

Figure 3.1. Victim of Corporation Greed

Figure 3.2. The Mystical Moist Night Air

Figure 3.3. Collected Nests

Figure 4.1. Guests Are God

Figure 4.2. Madhu’s Backyard Hostas

Figure 4.3. Arranging the Classroom

Figure 5.1. ANKN Patch

Figure 5.2. Ray’s Honors

Figure 5.3. Alaska to Aotearoa

Figure 5.4. Chena With Moon

Preface

This research required and received approval from the University of British Columbia Behavioral Research Ethics Board (certificate number H09-03051) and the Northern Arizona University Institutional Review Board for the Human Research Protection Program (project number 892803-2).

Acknowledgments

I dedicated this book to my many teachers, and these acknowledgements offer me space to expand on that dedication. With each passing day I feel more and more gratitude for, and more and more recognition of, the many teachers that shape my life and experience.

Starting most broadly and deeply, I acknowledge the cacophonous, riotous, fecund, rhythmic, and fantastically mysterious critters and ecosystems that are woven into my most basic being. On the day-to-day, I see and appreciate you as the plants I cultivate in the garden, food I savor, fur babes I pet, or glorious landscapes I traverse. But I know you are more than I will ever know, that you are the gut flora that keeps me alive and hungry, the cycle of O2 and CO2 that we mutually breathe and exhale, the orbiting moon that pushes and pulls our collective rhythms, and everything more. I acknowledge that my entire being is made from your history and presence, and that all learning I have done in this book is grounded always in (y)our being.

In my human circles, I acknowledge my parents and siblings for encouraging me to question, for loving me for who I am, for gifting me with genuine trust, and for showing me how to turn work into craft. I gratefully acknowledge my partner, Nina. Nina, my learning from and with you each day is a gift. Your very presence in my life has always been a teacher, quite literally from day one. For this book, I acknowledge how you teach me not only the words and ideas that helped shape so much of what I wrote in my final chapters, but also the feelings in my body and heart of what integrity means. Thank you. And to my partner in parenting and a person with whom I share such rich history and relationship, I acknowledge Mike for years’ worth of support, believing in me, and always “having my back.” Mike, I continue to learn what generosity, joy, and freedom mean from you. I am so lucky to have you in my life.

Connie Russell and Justin Dillon, as series editors, gave me endless encouragement and patience through this process. Connie, this book is certainly finished due to your incredibly lovely and joyful guidance; I am hugely grateful to you! My mentors for the original form of this work, my dissertation, are some of the best teachers I know. Sean Blenkinsop, Daniel Vokey, and Claudia Ruitenberg, thank you all for your brilliance, inspiration, and support—I think of you always when I imagine teaching and mentoring with integrity. I also acknowledge Marcia McKenzie for providing me excellent mentorship, opportunities to write, and the trust to envision myself as a scholar in my early days of graduate school. I am deeply grateful to the nine educators who wrote vignettes with vulnerability and authenticity, and the three who bravely and generously opened their homes for me to come and learn with them. This book is made possible through your sharing; thank you. Colleagues, friends, and extended family have shaped me and this work in innumerable ways through writing groups, critical conversation, and emotional support. I acknowledge and give my gratitude to you: Kim Curtis, Jessi Quizar, Ari Burford, Dana Caulkins, Mark Lewis, Tallie Segel, Leah Mundell, Julia Ostertag, Briana Galas, Alex Kwiatkowski, Luis Fernandez, Brian Petersen, Sean Parson, Marie Gladue, Kristen Flugstad, Sandra Lubarsky, Ramsey Affifi, Lex Scully, Laura Piersol, Mike de Daannan Datura, Joshua Russell, Hannah Miller, Joe Henderson, Jody Clements, Timothy Cordivae, Liz Caulkins, Francine Porter, Nathan Porter, Sharon Crews, Blue Swadner, Mathilde Gatinois, Peter Friederici, Diana Stuart, Viki Blackgoat, Heather Martel, Ned del Callejo, Alexandra Samarrón, Jayne Lee, Andrew Rushmere, Erika Mundell, Claudia Díaz, Alvaro Luna, Ofira Roll, Ido Roll, Shannon McCune Dickerson, Josh Caulkins, Mara Pfeffer, Madison Ledgerwood, Danielle Austin, Leah Porter, Frankie Beesley, Kelsey Morales, Nailah Coleman, Liz Do, my dissertation sisters from all those years ago!, and all my students.

Finally, I acknowledge my children, Bridger and Alex. The seed of this whole project started with my desire to be good for you, to help you become good people, and to contribute to making the world good for you. You are my most powerful teachers: your freedom as children, your learning, your questioning, your challenging, your insight, and your beauty are always the brightest stars in my sky.

1

Encountering Complicity, Questioning Integrity

Most of us are shocked and disturbed when we learn how our food, clothing, and shelter are produced and the effects of that production. Industrial agriculture, chemical dumping, sweatshops, stolen land, exploited workers, forest fires, melting glaciers, oil spills, rape and pillage… our day-to-day living is built upon mountains of harm and suffering. When we start digging into these problems, we see how they are rooted in systems that we all participate in, though differentially. We is a difficult word here—not everyone is implicated in the same ways; our class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability render us responsible in differentiated ways. Yet, most of us living in industrialized societies are implicated in unjust systems in some way. We are complicit.

I remember deepening my knowledge of the injustices in our world during my own education. I learned about how my life—my successes, my purchases, my classes, my desires—was built on systems of oppression. I’m still learning this. Giant pill after giant pill, swallowing this kind of knowledge is hard.

Encountering my complicity became most acute for me when I was simultaneously working on my PhD and raising my first child. Through study, I found words to explain colonialism, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, heteronormativity, neoliberalism, and so on, a long list of deeply held beliefs and material relationships that result in a multitude of oppressions. And through my parenting, I found examples of how the skeletons of these social, cultural, political, and economic patterns are shared from generation to generation. I saw myself unwittingly passing on these patterns to my own child. The “bones” were everywhere: how we talked, how we ate, who had authority, what was funny, what was good, what was bad. My best efforts to teach something different from the norm felt mere drops in the large, cultural and political-economic ocean within which we swam. And, more often than not, I reproduced the problematic norms as much as I resisted them.

I see it in my own college students now: their anguish, anger, anxiety. As an educator, I have accompanied many students as they discover the deeply layered and embedded injustices tied to their simple acts of eating a salad, buying a shirt, or living in a home. About halfway through the semester, there is a common response. Some students inevitably throw their hands up in exasperation, repulsed by the many systems of oppression, wanting to pull themselves out of their culpability within them. They start planning for escape: how can I stop contributing to this corrupt society, this corrupt educational system, this climate change chaos, this crumbling democracy, this – fill in the blank?? The problems are too big, the patterns too strong to break. “We just all need to go out and live in the woods!!”