Shuffling blindly in the dark

Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe.

I know in my bones that there’s a strong link between the climate change threat and the English classroom. I can’t find the words for it. A clear statement of the link exists behind a closed door and I’m in a room with no light. I think I’m going to need to shuffle towards it, probably setting off in the wrong direction a few times, banging into walls, wanting to give up, before I find the door.

Is it something to do with the nature of the worlds we inhabit, the way schools (and English classrooms) contribute to the idea that we’re in charge of things, that the world exists in order to be used by humans, that we (our minds, our bodies) are in charge?

If I imagine myself as a student entering an English classroom, what is it that I’m likely to experience? First, a teacher out the front ‘in charge’. Then - at least in some classrooms - some talk about what the aims are, what the syllabus is, what outcomes will set our course, what texts we’ll ‘do’ or ‘study’ or ‘respond to’. It’s a space where the agency is all about the humans: the teacher’s skill, the student’s intelligence and effort. 

All of this reflects the way we talk and think and behave in the wider world. The news is all about people - leaders doing stuff, people resisting. Bushfires, floods, ice melts, extinctions intrude, but in a sense are always portrayed as interruptors or threats to the centrality of human life. The world, in other words, is the place where us humans, for the most part, do our thing. It’s a place of plans, outcomes, desires, shifts, constructions, responses. Our heroic stage.

What if we think of the English classroom, instead, as Massey describes the world, as a place where ‘there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction (or not, for not all potential connections have to be established), relations which may or may not be accomplished’. And where the connections are not just connections between humans, but connections of a thousand types, in every moment: connections with the non-human like the weather and the tables and the windows and the history of the room. And connections with the unconscious too, which reveal themselves in what Kathleen Stewart calls ordinary affects: the forces in our ‘weighted and reeling present …[in] … a scene of immanent force, rather than …[the] dead effects imposed on an innocent world’. 

This kind of English classroom is one where the teacher enters with a sense of anticipation, with an openness to what is about to reveal itself, with a sense of that mysterious and unknowable forces or powers are present, with a strong intuitive sense that the literature that is the stuff of the syllabus both contains and has the capacity to release interesting impulses, affects, thoughts, reactions in a flow that is not moving towards a predictable end but is instead unfolding both visibly and invisibly in both stimulating and disruptive ways.

That’s enough for today. Still thrashing around in the dark. Maybe not-quite-as-pitch-black dark.