Cynical Winds
A recent conversation with a colleague and friend who is newer to the professor life got me thinking about the role of cynicism in the academy. They have reached the point where they realize that most colleagues are not in the academy to improve the thinking and lives of students. They are not there to research interesting questions. They are there to prove to others that they are smart, and to punish students for not following rules. This is 95% of the faculty out there.
What we must do is be a counter-force to such an environment. Faculty are old-growth trees in a dense wood. The leaves they have shed have built up at the base of the trunks preventing new growth. The shade and shadow encourages an abundance of fungus, moss, lichen, and other beings. There is no balance.
Along comes the fire. Forest fires in our contemporary moment have taken on a symbolic significance that, very much like the old-growth trees, overshadows fertile ground for new growth. We see the forest fire as a symbol of our failure as a society to control greenhouse gasses, to care for the planet properly, and a failure to look out for future generations of humans on the Earth.
In fire ecology, the symbolism of the fire is that it is an appropriate and welcome part of the forest. Fire ecologists do control burns to encourage balance in the forest. Old growth trees can survive if healthy, and new beings can grow from the ashes. Certain animals only hibernate or reproduce with the ashes or when the temperature reaches a high level. Some pinecones only scatter seeds when burned (which is why they pop when you throw them in your campfire).
Fire ecology was practiced by First Peoples around the globe. Stephen Pyne’s book World Fire calls fire a technology we first used to help shape the world around us. He also says fire and humans have a lot in common, transforming the landscape we move through in ways that better suit us. I like the second idea better, the idea of fire as a fellow traveler on the Earth, not a technology. The idea that one is in full control of the environment and meant to protect it from things that change it in ways that cannot be controlled is, in my view, a colonizer and controlling mindset.
Faculty who attend to the students, who in the words of Staughton Lynd see the goal of teaching as standing “shoulder to shoulder” with your students to face the world, or like David Graber who believed in teaching as raising a level of conversation (discourse) among students about a field are the fire ecologists of pedagogy. Disruption, chaos, and allowing a spark that sets a fire to burn itself out is the focus of such pedagogy.
Fire ecology in pedagogy is to allow the old growth to burn, to permit students to catch fire and to transform the old forest floor they are studying into something more suited for themselves.
So my friend was chatting about the need to let the spark burn, to clear the forest of the unnecessary unhealthy bramble by letting the students catch fire and burn in the classroom, let the old growth get a little charred and all those healthy things, and I recognized that there is a cynicism that appears when advocating for these things. This wind is what pushes the fire outside of its healthy place in the forest and makes it destructive. The cynical wind pushes the fire to go faster than it should, to make leaps across the firebreaks of thought and wind up destroying the things that it means to preserve or to renew in the first place.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about since my recent birthday is how to be less cynical. I think that attention to this is crucial, as a pedagogy driven by cynicism is destructive and uncontrollable. A pedagogy driven by the tinder and the fuel available in the classroom is renewing. It should spread, but spread among the students and between them, pushing them into places to research, read, and question that often get extinguished, suppressed, or controlled by those who want to preserve the old-growth forest of knowing. Trying to make sure that attention is paid to how that wind makes the fire jump to things it shouldn’t be burning is the goal.
As I said in a recent email to a friend, concentration on your students in the classroom is the right kind of political concentration. To govern your teaching and research by the winds of national politics is to lose out on the transformative power of pedagogy.