Teachers as Eco-Intellectuals: Cultivating miyo pimatisiwin

In this work, I consider teachers as eco-intellectuals, who engage in deep scholarly study, contemplation, and interdisciplinary thinking as they consider the deeper purposes of public education and their own role within it. This emerges from my own enduring commitment as an educator to practice a pedagogy of possibility—that is, to work with children and teachers to imagine the possible ways of shaping our lives together. Within a context of socially, economically, politically, and ecologically challenging times, this pedagogy is characterized by self-reflexive practice, careful attention to the lives of children and students, and composing measured and careful responses to the challenges that we face. I bring social and economic justice together with ecological and Indigenous sensibilities to inquire poetically and narratively into the possibilities for collaborative critical and creative thinking, rich teaching practices, and learning communities. Land-based knowledge, spiritual understandings, respectful relations, reciprocity, and rigorous academic inquiry are at the heart of this work. I question the largely Eurocentric, linear and rational understanding of the intellect, which is geared towards the steps, models, and methods one might use to develop intellectual practice, as if this were the outcome of a procedure. Efforts to improve teachers’ work as intellectuals are generally geared to new procedures and facts without questioning the deep presumptions that underlie such efforts. This way of understanding overlooks the importance of building and maintaining heartful, respectful relationships. Elder Bob Cardinal from the Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta encourages me to ask, “What is missing?” (Bob Cardinal, personal communication, July 13, 2016). This study expands upon Edward Said’s notion of an intellectual as one who inquires into existing social and political structures, and Henry Giroux’s treatment of the teacher as a transformative intellectual, to investigate the work of teachers as eco-intellectuals. Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts that “bureaucratic teaching and learning systems” continue to dominate the field of education; a teacher as eco-intellectual who seeks what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the “free spaces” therein is called to understand the intertwined threads of the social, economic, and ecological storylines that play out in particular times and places. Ecological and Indigenous perspectives assert that becoming an eco-intellectual is not merely a methodological procedure: this work must take on a more holistic understanding and language in order to be sustainable and true. I ask: How does a deeper and more earthly understanding of teachers as eco-intellectuals inform and influence the work of teachers in public schools today? In keeping with the ecological nature of the topic, the writing is an attempt to think “like an ecosystem” (Robert Bringhurst, 2018, p. 31): in layered, recursive, complex, dialogical, “pedagogical rather than prescriptive” (Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia Chambers & Carl Leggo, 2009, p. 6) ways. Through this weaving of poetic inquiry, life writing and transcribed dialogues in the spirit of métissage, I consider how Indigenous and ecological interpretations of four dimensions of the eco-intellect—pluralistic intellect, relational intellect, loving intellect, and life-giving intellect—may influence a more sustainable and holistic understanding of teachers as eco-intellectuals as they cultivate miyo pimatisiwin: (Cree) the wisdom of living a good life.

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