Under an Owl Moon: Topos and Abundance in Jardine's Ecopedagogy

Preamble I first met David Jardine in 1993 as an undergraduate student at the University of Calgary. At the time, I was enrolled in a required course entitled Methods in Early Childhood Education. Having heard that this class was typically quite dry and overly-methodological to the point of being reductionist, I was shocked when such an unconventional looking professor entered the room. Wearing hiking boots, a t-shirt and jeans, Jardine scrawled his name on the board in illegible figures, noting it was his first year teaching the course. After a brief introduction, Jardine began the class by lighting several candles and dimming the lights. One candle, situated in the center of the table, was affixed to the top of a bear skull! It was an eerie and uncanny sight. Behind the candles, the faintly illuminated Jardine began to read from Jane Yolen's Owl Moon (1987), a visceral narrative in which a father takes his young daughter 'owling' on a cold winter night. Beyond the literal mindedness of much teaching methodology, Owl Moon enacted an implicit narrative of care, of ecological mindedness and identity in kinship. This kinship not only occurred between father and daughter, it extended to those absent, and to those encounters through which we become aware of place (topos). These features were not merely particular to this one specific narrative. Instead, they had a wider 'hearing' in the world, in our relationships with children, and to our identities as students, student teachers and teachers. These features of patience, of responsibility, of place and interest (inter esse--the liminal space) appear throughout Jardine's ecopedagogical approach to curriculum study. Owl Moon was not merely one book in a litany of children's literature that Jardine could have selected. It was specific to our experience of wandering into new spaces, of being out in the cold, and of not knowing in advance what lies in wait beyond our wanting and doing (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxvii). In hindsight, Jardine's use of Owl Moon seems blatantly deliberate. Yet, rather than merely one more book to read or 'do,' Owl Moon provided a generous space in which we could gather to 'work out' our shared experience as hesitant initiates and newcomers to the study of curriculum. Borderline Figures Throughout Jardine's work as a researcher, professor, and practicum supervisor, he has endeavored to cultivate and navigate the interrelationships between hermeneutics, ecology and pedagogy. Drawing upon such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Jardine has sought to explore the role of interpretation as germane to ecological interconnectedness, generativity, kinship and ancestry. Further, by setting these philosophers in relation to the ecological writings of Wendel Berry, poetry of Gary Snyder, and the Jungian psychoanalytic oeuvre of James Hillman, Jardine explores the interrelationships between young/old, tradition/natality, and innovation/ proof. In a move that foregrounds the notion of curriculum as a deconstructed text, Jardine has constantly sought to maintain a passage, an inter esse, between the codified binary enunciations posited by the Cartesian antecedents of structuralism. Pivoting on the dual gesture of composition and decomposition, Jardine mirrors the Heideggerian double movement of Destruktion (Destruction) and Abbau (Creation), focusing on the 'liminal' borderline character Hermes, the figure from which hermeneutics derives its name. For Jardine, Hermes is a figure critical to an understanding of interpretation particular to an examination of such borders and boundaries as student-teacher (1992), self-other (2000a), and mystery-mastery (1994). As a thief, Hermes intimates the role of interpretation in stealing the illusory assumption of control and mastery from beneath our feet. Drawing upon the mythopoetic writing of Hillman, Jardine notes how Hermes subverts our best laid plans and desire for objective distance in lieu of keeping the world open and enticing and alive and inviting (Jardine, 1994, p. …

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