What Weston’s Spider and My Shorebirds Might Mean for Bateson’s Mind: Some Educational Wanderings in Interspecies Curricula

Abstract

Education has institutionalized a process that reifies cultures, ecological communities, and ultimately evolution itself. This enclosure has lessened our sensitivity to the pedagogical (eteragogical) nature of our lived relations with other people and with other living beings. By acknowledging that learning and teaching go on between species, humans can regain an eteragogical sense of the interspecies curricula within which they exist. This article explores interspecies lived curricula through a selection of ideas from ecopragmatist Anthony Weston, and cybernetician Gregory Bateson, and through lived experiences with shorebirds of Lake Ontario. Some gulls and a tern teach the author to enrich and diversify, rather than constrict, the potentiality of life. In so doing, being ecological and being educative become unified concepts. Resume L’education a institutionnalise un processus qui a materialise des cultures, des communautes ecologiques et, finalement, l’evolution elle-meme. Cette enceinte a diminue la sensibilite de la nature pedagogique de nos relations vecues avec d’autres personnes et d’autres etres vivants. En reconnaissant que l’apprentissage et l’enseignement se produisent entre les especes, les humains peuvent retrouver un sentiment naturopedagogique dans le cadre des rapports entre especes au sein desquels ils existent. Le present article examine les cadres inter-especes en se penchant sur une selection d’idees de l’ecopragmatiste Anthony Weston et du cyberneticien Gregory Bateson, et sur des experiences vecues aupres d’oiseaux de rivage du lac Ontario. Quelques mouettes et une sterne enseignement a l’auteur a enrichir et a diversifier plutot qu’a restreindre le potentiel des etres vivants en cause. Ce faisant, les methodes ecologique et educative deviennent des concepts unifies.

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