Rebecca Martusewicz
Earth, Eros and Art Education: The Influence of Wendell Berry for Pedagogies of Responsibility
We are living in a time of severe social and ecological crises made primarily from a well-established fiction, a metaphysical paradigm and episteme that hyper-separates body and mind, human and nature, man and woman. The result is a social, economic and ideological system that elevates self-interested individuals and enclosures of all kinds above life. Educational reform initiatives based on these neoliberal principles deplete our communities of the possibilities for recognizing our embodied connections to the earth, and responding with relationships of mutuality and care above competition and accumulation.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze important connections between American novelist, poet, and conservationist Wendell Berry’s analysis of the necessary relationship between earth, body, mind and spirit for healthy communities, and the work of eco-feminists and materialist feminists who draw similar conclusions. : Using ecofeminist work (Griffin, 1995; Williams,1994; Plumwood, 2002; Barad, 2012) I draw on a conception of eros as resulting from generative connection and care at the heart of the very possibility of life. The paper works to connect this discussion of eros to Berry’s (2015) recognition of the importance of poiesis (as the process and relations involved in making and creation). Using these ideas, I offer a reconsideration of education as an eco-ethical process shaping our relationships and productive capacities toward those ways of being that recognize our embodied dependencies on the well-being and the intrinsic intelligence and creativity of all creatures. Engaging in cultural critique and exploring what fiction offers pedagogically, I analyze how Berry invents relationships among characters to create a “pedagogy of responsibility” by confronting the “tension between two necessary ethical questions: What do we need to conserve and what needs to be transformed” (Martusewicz, Edmundson and Lupinacci, 2015, p. 18).
Focusing on both Berry and the ecofeminist critique of modern industrial life, the paper uses an EcoJustice framework (Martusewicz et al, 2015; Suominen, 2015) to explore what the purposes and definition of education—in particular art education—ought to be in order to achieve this vision of healthy communities in a crisis-ridden global context. I will lay out the basis for rethinking “public pedagogies” as pedagogies of responsibility which necessarily account for our embeddedness in a vast and complex living world.
Bio
Rebecca Martusewicz is a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Eastern Michigan University. She teaches courses on EcoJustice Education, a concentration in the Masters of Arts program in Social Foundations of Education. She also teaches and is Co-Coordinator of the Educational Studies PhD program at EMU. Rebecca is co-author of EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic and Sustainable Communities, with Jeff Edmundson and Johnny Lupinacci, now in its second edition (Routledge 2015), and is currently working on another book, Pedagogies of Responsibility: Teachings by Wendell Berry for EcoJustice Education