Rewild My Heart: With Pedagogies of Love, Kindness and the Sun and Moon

Abstract

The pressing problems we face from wars to pandemics erupt against the less dramatic background of the mundane continued destruction of our planet as a habitable realm. In education, technology can be environmentally destructive in a variety of ways. Educators may feel the urge to address these matters but we also know that EdTech solutionism can create new problems as fast as it fixes old ones. Something in the urgency of the fix may be the problem. It may be that we are too desperate to fill a hole in the world that we only see through a hole in ourselves. Hence, in order to truly escape our colonised and domesticated fates, we need to rewild our very thinking. We need to examine the underlying emotional tones and waves that cause us to act as we do against our own interests and that of our planet. This conundrum is explored here through the device of storytelling using a multimodal speculative auto-ethnography to push into realms beyond mere utility and out into conceptual wilds. No fixes or solutions are offered here for the planet. Lifeless celestial objects such as the sun and moon loom large by contrast. Both have walk-on parts in this tale, and watch us as we watch them, with whatever love and kindness we can.

Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures

“…Similarly, Cox’s ( 2021 ) article on AI similarly has multiple fictions, most of which focus on the challenges that AI implementation might mean to various aspects of academic institutional operations. Costello’s ( 2022 : 4–5) recent foray into speculative fiction is difficult to characterize as either hopeful or pessimistic, particularly given its more experimental form as hybrid autoethnographic fiction focused on ‘the strangeness of the lived realities of education’, where strangeness is not by definition bad or good, harmful or supportive, but perhaps usefully disorienting. The paper by Hillman et al ( 2020 : 13) also has multiple short fictions, which the authors do identify as scenarios, but as these scenarios unfold across three decades and feature a number of characters, they come together to create a not overly hopeful story of the future.…”

Creative practices: thinking and thriving together

“…I could speculate on what might have happened if I had invited the head teacher to tell a story about this meeting and educational development. With story, perhaps, we could think together and unpack the puzzle of this misunderstanding and move forward on the "curious axis of human connection" (Costello, 2022).…”