EDUCATING IN A MULTISPECIES WORLD by Ramsey Rasheed Affifi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Philosophy Graduate Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Ramsey Rasheed Affifi (2015) EDUCATING IN A MULTISPECIES WORLD Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Ramsey Rasheed Affifi Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education University of Toronto Abstract The widespread deterioration of our planet's life support system is a global challenge facing humanity. This dissertation is based on the premise that changing course requires fundamentally reconstructing how we think about humans and the rest of nature. If a sustainable course requires that we see ourselves as members of an ever-evolving biotic community, then we will have to abandon ways of thinking and acting that distort a sense of continuity between our species and others, replacing kinship with radical separation. Insofar as education is concerned with human learning processes while considering learning in other species as irrelevant or nonexistent, it institutionalizes and perpetuates attitudes that prevent us from reintegrating back into our web of relations. These attitudes are no longer biologically, philosophically, or ethically warranted. They do not keep up with the extent of our empirical and theoretical progress beyond thinking in terms of metaphysical dualisms. To evolve a better discipline, I claim that we must ecologize education; we must dare to imagine and enact an interspecies pedagogy. In the seven papers that follow, I draw from various philosophical, scientific and pedagogical sources to trace pathways into interspecies pedagogy and I try to overcome some of the ways my culturally-informed biases have blocked me from taking the concept seriously. The papers are diverse but they also overlap, showing the process by which I have worked to develop a theoretical alternative that erases ii iii the line between education and biology. As such, this publication fits within the larger "posthumanist" shift occurring variously throughout the university. My partial solutions and explorations are admittedly situated and contextual. However, I hope that they can help those who suffer similar blockages as I do to feel more viscerally that the world around them is responsive, attentive, and worthy of pedagogical consideration, and that the range of human affairs treating the biological world as but scenery set behind the great human story is as miseducative for other species as it is for us, and in need of a swift dismantling. iv Acknowledgements My daily life is burst open by the presence of countless creatures that are difficult to acknowledge in academic writing without seeming either starry-eyed or deliberately confrontational. Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that everything from the brief encounters to the sustained relationships I've developed with nonhumans over these many years have had a profound impact on the evolution of my thoughts as presented here. This thesis would also not have been possible without the support of many of my own species along the way. I am in particular gratitude to the following people for insights, discussions, criticisms, and support: Liz, Dick, and Morad Affifi, Guy Allen, Nora Bateson, Lauren Bialystok, Sean Blenkinsop, Eric Bredo, Luis Bruni, Sarah Cashmore, Lucie Cermakova, Kimberley Chan, John Currie, Michael Derby, Nigora Erkaeva, Leesa Fawcett, David Greenwood, Ryan Hall, Susan Hall, Peter Harries-Jones, Mark Hathaway, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Filip Jaros, Richard Kahn, Gary Knowles, Rick Kool, Pete Kosa, Sasha Manes, Sarah Martens, Rebecca Martusevicz, Joren McCormack, Jennifer O'Reilly, Antoinette Oberg, Philip Payne, Sophavanh Phommixay, Laura Piersol, Heather Read, Jean-Paul Restoule, Montana Salvoni, Jan Sapp, Sean Smith, Erin Stanley, Anh-Thi Tang, Evan Thompson, Ann Valentin, Denis Walsh, and Anthony Weston. Six families, the Kamels, the McCormacks, the Phommixays, the Reids, the Reeves, and the Sai Nyais, were crucial support throughout. Sophavanh endured the cycles of freneticism and despondency that seem to sometimes accompany my creative process, supporting and encouraging me with her calm attention and loving faith. v Finally, it is impossible to deny that the most significant event inflecting my thesis process in countless known and unknown ways was the death of both of my parents. Not only did they both die during the “doctoral candidate” stage of my program, I was also the primary caregiver for both of them. This consumed much of my time at different points along the journey, and compelled me to restrict my involvement in many “grad school” opportunities, such as research assistantships, teaching assistant positions, and even possibly instructor positions. I had to make cuts somewhere, and I decided that on the hierarchy, reading and writing would be the last things that I should limit, though there were certainly various periods when these both suffered as well. However, there is nothing apologetic in these comments. The depth of intimacy that death solicits, how it confronts one with life and its meaning in the starkest terms, and the general reorientation that one thereby undergoes, have a profound lateral impact on all of one’s activities. A certain generosity of spirit has come to shape my process in all its stages through the gifts that my parents provided me up to and including their passage out of life and time. Pain and love are both great filters, prioritizing things when there is too much noise. Many of the values (fears) that graduate student advisors implanted in me early on, about the dismal prospects of employment and the cut-throat competitiveness required to play the academic game, were really given a powerful antidote by the bone-shaking transformation that my family was given to endure, which allowed me to focus on what I really cared about. As a result, I feel like I managed to retain (most of) my integrity despite half a decade of reminders about the bleak uncertainty and PR compromises one would have to make to stay afloat in the field. I could pursue my research freely, hand in hand with “time” itself, with the beauty and the sadness that are inherently a vi part of its very structure, and its constant reminder that the moments we have are there but to pass away, that the world is perhaps far more serious and far less serious than we give it credit for, and that either way, surrendering to this impermanence can give rise to a broader love of both the joy and pain it provides and a more graceful acceptance of the process. vii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:....................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION:....................................................................................................................1 ARTICLE REPRINT INFORMATION:.................................................................................13 CHAPTER 2: What Weston’s Spider and my Shorebirds might mean for Bateson’s Mind: Some Educational Wanderings in Interspecies Curricula........................................................14 CHAPTER 3: Learning plants: Semiosis between the parts and the whole............................33 CHAPTER 4: Generativity in Biology....................................................................................53 CHAPTER 5: The interspecies educator's cybernetic world...................................................77 CHAPTER 6: Biological pedagogy as concern for semiotic growth......................................92 CHAPTER 7: Drawing analogies in environmental education.............................................118 CHAPTER 8: Deweyan democracy and democratic ecologies............................................139 AFTERWORD:.....................................................................................................................175 REFERENCES:.....................................................................................................................181 1 Introduction Have you ever been stunned into silence by a squirrel? Fixed in place by its fixed gaze? Why should the experience of perceiving another being perceiving me be so disabling? And so wonderfully profound? Is it the impenetrable mystery of being seen -right now- by another? By an other? Or is it the dizzying loop that opens up between us as we see each other see each other? Perhaps it is that sudden awareness that the world is full of sentience, that around me are countless creatures feeling my presence while I take them for granted. Or maybe it is the burst of excitement and fear that through this experience each of us will modulate, in however consequential a way, each other’s possible future? Is it simply the suspense of not knowing what either of us is going to do next? Why did we stop in each other's tracks in the first place? For millennia, people have pondered the fact that the world is watching itself through their eyes. That the world can organize itself into such a configuration that it can perceive itself is indeed shocking and worthy of contemplation, but that it can create meetings -meaningful encounters- between parts of itself leaves me much more dumbfounded. So many feelings are birthed through encountering another and the relationships that come out of such encounters: excitement, shyness, curiosity, play, self-consciousness, love, desire, loneliness, empathy,