Classroom EcologiesB

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If the liberal arts behaved more like ecology, and less like our human endeavors to
control the environment, might small U.S. colleges function as borderlands, ecotones
where we could ride, on the one hand, against the ruins of classical education, and on
the other, the industrial rigidity of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top? 

Querying the “Natural”: Re-thinking Classroom Ecologies

In such a context, what new shapes might our teaching and learning take, as liminal
spaces and excursions, arising in the midst of the crucial, yet impossible separations
between country and city, school and not-school, inside and out? Traversing the edges
of promise, desire, nervousness  and threat, surprising conjoinings that are neither this
nor that, contained yet uncontainable, inviting always the unexpected?

In Class/Out Classed: On the Uses of a Liberal Education

In the middle ages, European monastic communities preserved learning that the Catholic
Church forbade; in the 18th century, U.S. slaves could only learn to read in secret. We
experience liberal arts colleges as occupying a similar position today: endangered them-
selves by wide-spread valuing of the technical-and-vertical, attended by students who are read
either as privileged outsiders, or as scapegoats prey to predatory fiscal policies and scoffing
from “the real world.”

Women in Walled Communities: Silence, Voice, Vision

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We tell a different story, one that identifies the liberal arts as a political-and-spiritual cell culture, a hive of resistance
groups with the capacity to challenge the leading paradigms in American education. We do so by tracking the chaotic
and unpredictable, both unconscious and environmental, as deeply educative, creative, stretching our zone of the possible.
Where else is this kind of work/play is happening: how broadly can we construe "classrooms"?

Crafting Sustainable Teaching Practices

We explore a pedagogical orientation that is both ecological and sustainable, in the very largest sense of these terms:
engaging teachers and students in re-thinking classroom practices, and our larger lives, as complex, enmeshed, volatile,
ever-expanding eco-systems. Our project has a porous, interactive energy, inviting reader-participants into pedagogical
spaces where they might attend to the shifting borderlands between what we’re more familiar with and what feels edgy,
new--with the goal of transfiguring what spaces of teaching and learning are and can be-and-do. We weave through our
own voices--stories, images and propositions--those of students and colleagues with whom we have taught, learned, co-
presented and co-written. This is a genre-crossing project, a dialogue working across verbal and visual forms, telling some
good stories, inviting others in response, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary forms
of teaching and learning, and incorporating concrete suggestions about how academic and other structures might work to
open this up.

Transition and Location: On Leaving Home, In Search of a Place of Understanding

We explore classrooms as testing grounds, paradoxically boxed-in spaces that cannot keep their promise to enclose, categorize,
or name, and thus can become productive of conditions ripe for breaking through to experiences of reality, to the piercing that
is possible in the intensity and instability of border ecologies.

Eco-Literary: A 360° Cluster