Cultivating Care through Culture and Education

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I discuss the importance of cultivating educational spaces wherein collective care is celebrated and emboldened. To do so, I outline ways environmental communication as a field is particularly well situated to foster these spaces. Journeying from a deep ecology retreat to the original intent of higher education to foster moral character in our future civic leaders, I visit shared laments about the lack of care and environmental focus in contemporary formal education, and dominant culture, and the opportunity our field has to fill this gap. Our teaching can deconstruct entwined cultural and formal education “separations between inside classroom and outside world, between university and place, humanity and nature, body and environment, self and other” and link internal and external relevance, as well as transformative potential (Milstein et al., 2017, Breathing life into learning: Ecocultural pedagogy and the inside-out classroom. In T. Milstein, M. Pileggi, & E. Morgan (Eds.), Environmental communication pedagogy and practice (pp. 45–61). Routledge). Indeed, instead of going along with a neoliberal education mission to produce cogs for the status quo machine, environmental communication educators, responsive to crisis and attuned to planet, are deconstructors, throwing spanners in the works, fostering ecocultural identities of care.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecocultural identity
• inside-out classroom
• pedagogy
• courage
• transformation

It’s been seven years since publication of the field’s first book dedicated to education, Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice. As editor with Mairi Pileggi and Eric Morgan, we wrote of education as a response to our current ecological crises and as “a rising swell of aching, questioning, caring, and pushback, a welling up from source, and a gift of movement surging forth.” Like Gumbs (2021), quoted by our field’s new journal editor in this issue, the book’s 40 chapter authors shared a collective feeling of needing to keep ourselves and our students “undrowned.” The purpose of environmental communication education, we wrote, is to avoid “sinking speechlessly beneath the surface and instead work to effectively navigate and consciously contribute to generative discourse and praxis” (Milstein et al., 2017b, p. 1).

Care is something that motivates every environmental communication educator I know, each of us driven in some way by the crisis-care dialectic (Pezzullo, 2023). It’s in care we also find support to address the crises – knowing we are cared for by Earth, and being able to express and create space for care in our classrooms. And we recognize classrooms broadly as learning spaces – outside and inside (Hawley et al., 2023) – where we have opportunity to assemble around, and recognize, our shared care, and tend to collective awareness and action.

While we teach, we learn. I’ve carried this truism since the 4th grade, when my future was to be a (world-famous) singer, but my only moment of fame was that year on the school stage, belting out Julie Andrews’ solo “Getting to Know You” from the King and I to assembled chorus kid parents: “It's a very ancient saying, But a true and honest thought, That if you become a teacher, By your pupils you'll be taught.” My adult-self has done far less singing than kid-self planned, but the message stuck: There’s an ancient honesty in education being relational and we all benefit in acknowledgment and care for those relations.

In this essay, I’ll discuss how no field is better equipped than our own for providing such transformative education. Journeying from a deep ecology retreat to the original intent of higher education – to foster moral character in our future civic leaders – I visit shared laments about the lack of care or environmental focus in most contemporary formal education. I also point to ways education is a reflection, production, and producer of dominant culture, constraining learners to anthropocentric ecocultural identities far more than it provides subversive classroom space to positively transform and collectively undiscipline those identities to attend to care (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020). I close with a focus on the powerful potential of our sub- and meta-discipline and a pedagogical call to the relational practice of care – in our classrooms and beyond.

Addressing the lack of care in higher education

I recently had the opportunity to learn as an attendee of a 3-day workshop led by the Australian father of deep ecology John Seed at his ecovillage north of Sydney. The workshop’s activities were created by Seed and US-based Joanna Macy, author and teacher of the Work that Reconnects (Macy & Brown, 2014), when she visited Australia in 1985. Our workshop culminated with an activity many of you will know, the Council of All Beings (Seed et al., 2007), in which participants temporarily step aside from their human identities to take on those of other life forms, expressing for other species and elements, raising awareness about interconnectedness, and strengthening commitment to care for the planet. While the workshop was profound, a repeated lament voiced by participants gathered from across Australia was the contrasting lack of care and lack of the more-than-human world they experienced in their formal educations. Many talked about feeling alienated in their educations. Some dropped out. Many continued, but in realms of study that discounted their care, and now found themselves decades deep in business careers or objectively distanced sciences or technical fields, and were still trying to find a way to merge their work with their care.

Though educated largely in the United States, I shared their laments. There were no environmental courses at my university from non-physical science standpoints. My learning path was defined by seeking, looking for mentioned scraps of the more-than-human world. It was only at the end of my PhD program, having never encountered an environmental communication course, I learned the field existed from a fellow student who told me of the Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE). A few months later, at my first COCE, I met colleagues who founded – or, like me, gratefully found – this field that merges care with education and vocation.

That was the same year Cox (2007) wrote in the inaugural issue of this journal about the field’s “ethical duty.” As a “crisis discipline,” Cox argued, environmental communication scholars should contribute to repairing the world and delivering restorative outcomes for environment and society. This duty is equally true in our pedagogy – where we not only teach about anthropogenic systemic crises from a communication standpoint but also support students to translate their care into praxis. Carbaugh (2007), responding to Cox in the same issue, drew attention to such a crisis discipline’s tenets, in particular the importance of opening up “our words to the world’s teachings, making nature the measure of what we say so not to be enslaved by our own preconstructed representations” (p. 69). Carbaugh reminded us “our education and understanding should never be focused solely on our words” (p. 68), which, though crucial and focal in our field, if overly relied upon, evade more-than-human expressiveness and relations that keeps us grounded.

As I began to teach environmental communication, I sought ways to put Cox’s duty of care and Carbaugh’s “touchstones on Earth” into educational practice. I developed a model called the inside-out classroom (Milstein et al., 2017a), which first acknowledges – and helps learners connect with – their inner care for and attunement with the more-than-human world. Students get to know themselves, and the learning community gets to know each other. When learners realize their care is seen and encouraged in the classroom, they develop a strong foundation of experiential, theoretical, and relational knowledge, learning core environmental communication concepts and frameworks through the validated lens of their collective care. The final inside-out learning stage is praxis, with newly affirmed knowledge holders supported to transition outward into change makers, making real-world impact by applying their learning in environment and society arenas they intensely care about. The inside-out classroom, as with other educational approaches in our field, creates a transformative learning space by linking internal and external relevance, deconstructing “separations between inside classroom and outside world, between university and place, humanity and nature, body and environment, self and other” (Milstein et al., 2017a, p. 47).

At the deep ecology workshop, I kept finding myself talking about our field with those who mentioned they felt alienated in their educations. While the field of environmental communication is only about 40 years old, we have come far in greening the wider communication discipline (Milstein, 2009, 2012a) and, likewise, as a meta-field cutting across disciplines, in offering educators and learners ways to green other areas of knowledge. I recently offered a workshop with visiting colleague Irina Gendelman to immerse university educators across disciplines in local environments and place-based knowledges. After learning and having their care validated through collective experiences with place and people, participants generated ideas of ways to apply more-than-human-world attunement to their teaching to engage students in restorative and relational paradigm shifts (Figure 1). Environmental communication offers what so many crave in education: an inclusive way to align one’s care with one’s study and one’s work. With universities increasingly caught up in neoliberal narratives and touting “jobs” as primary reason and outcome of a university education, our field destabilizes the narrative and recenters knowledge and care, rejecting missions of producing cogs for a status quo machine, so instead care, steeped in knowledge, guides one's way before and after graduation.

Figure 1. Milstein and Gendelman worked in partnership with Latoya Brown, descendant of the Dhawarral, Walbunja, Djiringanj, and Gunai/Kurnai peoples and owner of Kadoo Indigenous Experiences, to immerse university educators in place-based knowledges and care. Photo by Irina Gendelman.

It’s important to note that the contemporary institution of higher education was founded to foster moral character in society’s future civic leaders (Milstein, 2012b), not to make cogs. Critical and creative thinking and a praxis of care is central to such a project, and civic leadership is increasingly understood – after too long a hiatus – as inextricable from ecological responsibility. Nearly halfway through the Decisive Decade for climate and biodiversity protection, environmental communication and adjacent fields (such as environmental/sustainability studies, environmental humanities, ecolinguistics) must be core to curricula if we are to be true to higher education’s original purpose. At this crucial moment, environmental communication educators, driven by care and responsive to crisis, may be the deconstructors, throwing spanners in the works, fostering moral character, educating to survive and thrive into the future, and, hand in hand, affirming identities of care.

Education and identity from an intercultural perspective

My work sees environmental communication through an intercultural lens, which I refer to as ecocultural – acknowledging our cultural and ecological relations are entwined, attentive to dominant and counter ecocultural discourses, to local and globalized cultures as they connect to environmental relations, to material-symbolic tensions, constraints, cultivations, and transformations that shape and are shaped by our environments. The theory of ecocultural identity (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020) helps explain how an educational process nearly devoid of “nature” denies our ecological orientations. Conventional institutional education’s near erasure of the more-than-human world, except largely as specimen or resource to be probed, extracted, or commodified, is a reflection and production of dominant culture. The dominant human/nature binary is coded into our higher educations, teaching learners to be relationally and ecologically blind (Carr & Milstein, 2021) and, therefore, blindered to globalized profit-driven systems as they proceed – largely unquestioned and unchallenged – to burn, drain, and exterminate our planet and ourselves.

As the ecocultural identity framework exhibits, all identities are always ecologically and culturally entwined, from the most environmentally destructive to the most restorative (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020). If dominant culture and education disciplines us into anthropocentric ecocultural identities, that is where most of us will stay. Breaking out from the heavily guarded borders of anthropocentrism is hard, but transformative education is one way in which people can cross into realms of ecocentric identity (Milstein, 2020a) or what Macy (2016) describes as the “encompassing self” – positionalities that caringly identify with the wide reaches of life and motivate sustained, resilient action.

In studying ways people undiscipline themselves from anthropocentric identity to embrace ecocentric identity, I’ve identified four tactics: (1) be open to vulnerability (by recognizing, and forming an environmental ethic around, our interrelatedness), (2) acknowledge many forms of knowledge (including intercultural and internatural knowledges), (3) break the bonds (flip the script, call foul, and refuse to be disciplined), and (4) change with others (in collective, even fun transformative spaces, including classrooms). Environmental communication education holds the subversive potential to provide space for learners – and teachers – to engage in all four of these loosenings from dominant culture’s constraints and to move forward into caring ecocultural identities (Milstein, 2020a).

Educational praxis

At the deep ecology workshop, I found myself standing in the Truth Mandala, a collective activity that helps participants get in touch with their most negative feelings about our current crises – emotions most of us spend a lot of energy avoiding. The idea is that once we attend to these feelings collectively, we create support and space to move into – and activate – our care and to turn these crises around. I found myself in the direction of anger in the mandala, following hearing so many others’ anger, fear, grief, and emptiness. I was angry so many of us had formal educations devoid of care for the more-than-human world, that so many today still go through their educations never finding a path to embolden their care, and that my own children, growing up within environmental and climactic crises, still don’t have this path in their K-12 schooling.

As the activity was meant to do, after the negative feelings, I also felt hope, in hearing people’s shared stories and experiencing consciousness raising together about the collective importance of education. I also felt gratitude for our field, and for knowing our colleagues around the world are creating spaces for environmental care and Earthly expression in formal education – and that parallel spaces have been made for millennia and continue to be made by dynamic teachings of First Nations peoples and are being made afresh in youthful environmental movements.

So, I close with practical encouragement for advancing the care power of education in our institutions and on our streets. Don’t have an environmental communication course yet on the books? Add one now. My experience introducing such courses has been that, after initial paperwork and approval processes, the moment these courses open for enrollment, they fill and have waiting lists of eager students. Already have a course on the books? Make another, related one. We did this at my former institution, University of New Mexico, and both courses (environmental rhetoric and ecocultural communication) had waiting lists, making a popular major concentration in environmental communication. Not part of a communication department? Offer an environmental communication course in whatever program you’re in. Many have done this. At my current institution, the University of New South Wales, we have an environmental communication course in our Master of Environmental Management program (Figure 2), integrate the field into our Environmental Humanities undergraduate major, and have increasing numbers of PhD students coming to our transdisciplinary Environment & Society Group to study environmental communication. Or teach environmental communication concepts and approaches in whatever you are teaching – for example, in a course on community gardening, anthropology, English, or geography (Milstein et al., 2023). And who is better positioned than environmental communication educators to bring our care to the streets to address crisis and be voices for the planet? As I write elsewhere (Milstein, 2020b), if we aim to encourage our students to turn knowledge and care into action, we also must have courage to do so ourselves. Encouragement, courage, and care are inextricable, with “cour” coming from the Latin word for heart (“cor”). After a decline in use that charts onto the industrial revolution and the shift in higher education’s mission from fostering moral character to fostering objectivity and professionalization (Milstein, 2012b), “courage” is again on the rise (Figure 3). When we encourage through education, we make the heart strong and begin to identify with, and once again pump care into, the whole planet.

Figure 2. Students in UNSW’s Master of Environmental Management program, which Milstein convenes, learn concepts of environmental communication, and simultaneously are validated in their care. Emboldened, students generate a sense of support and community, and organize student-faculty outings in the local environment to connect with each other and place during and after their educations. Photo by Tema Milstein.

Figure 3. Google Ngram viewer, 10 November 2023.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).