Senses of Wonder

Recent sustainability education theorists have identified a gap in the research literature regarding sensory entanglement and wonder in sustainability education. Sensory entanglement and wonder are requisite because they bring valuable shifts supporting a more critical and transformative kind of sustainability education by (1) awakening a compassionate connection with the living world, (2) nurturing alternative epistemologies, (3) providing a strengthening function for sustainability educators and their co-learners, for stamina and ongoing engagement, and (4) generating sustainability agency and an active and authentic hope to sustain a sense of the possible in the midst of the dire. This article focuses on how awakening the senses to foster a sense of wonder can nurture grounded, authentic, active hope and agency in sustainability education. It is authored collaboratively by sixteen graduate course participants and faculty co-researchers who discuss interrelated theories pointing to a need to foster senses of wonder in sustainability education. The researchers work in research teams to explore experiential and sense-based hope- and agency-building curricula. Findings include activities and reflections across the five senses as well as with the sixth sense, intuition. Sensing, listening, intimate observing, imagining, feeling, entangling, and wondering can shift unsustainability epistemologies and transform human and cultural engagement. The sense of sound can be immersive and resonant, lending learners to relational and multispecies sensing. Scent can catalyze wonder and inspire experiential, holistic growth and integration of time. Savoring in the sense of taste can extend learners from survival to joy, offering opportunities for mindfulness that can connect cultural and biocultural mutualisms and collaborative sustainability agencies. Pattern sensing for similarity using the visual sense of wonder can support connected knowing and ecological vision. The sense of touch can offer a continuous and mutual comfort and belonging. Visual pattern and texture scavenger hunts can cultivate these sustainability sense capacities. The sixth sense, intuition, opens learners to imaginative, transformative, and connective ways of knowing as place and planet, stimulating hope-giving, integrative sustainability agencies.

Locating and Loving the Personal

In this chapter the author takes up the use of narrative inquiry within a secondary English language arts methods course. She focuses on two discrete moments that took place during one class session, where she and her students shared and discussed personal narratives. In particular, she explores the pedagogy that might be required to support a group of pre-service teachers’ work to become a connected knowing group, including the disruptive nature of vulnerability and risk taking.

Facilitating Connected Knowing Through Virtual Learning Communities

Generally believed critical to facilitating multi-dimensional instructional experiences for participants in a range of educational environments (for example, as accessed through academic institutions, corporate staff development, professional organizations, and so forth), the use of learning communities as an important instructional method is widely recognized across academic disciplines, teaching approaches, and delivery media. In fact, Lave and Wenger (in McPherson & Nunes, 2004) argued that learning is, by nature, an activity by which one engages knowledge in many forms, through which one becomes a “member of the community of knowledge” (p. 305). As such, communication, collaboration, and interaction become essential methods in facilitating instructional partnerships. Extending beyond a social context, the ongoing relationship building, advising, and mentoring generated through participation in learning communities provide a foundation for continued cognitive development and knowledge construction (Rovai, 2002; Wegerif, 1998).

Facilitating Connected Knowing Through Virtual Learning Communities

Generally believed critical to facilitating multi-dimensional instructional experiences for participants in a range of educational environments (for example, as accessed through academic institutions, corporate staff development, professional organizations, and so forth), the use of learning communities as an important instructional method is widely recognized across academic disciplines, teaching approaches, and delivery media. In fact, Lave and Wenger (in McPherson & Nunes, 2004) argued that learning is, by nature, an activity by which one engages knowledge in many forms, through which one becomes a “member of the community of knowledge” (p. 305). As such, communication, collaboration, and interaction become essential methods in facilitating instructional partnerships. Extending beyond a social context, the ongoing relationship building, advising, and mentoring generated through participation in learning communities provide a foundation for continued cognitive development and knowledge construction (Rovai, 2002; Wegerif, 1998).

Building Leadership Capacity Among Student Teachers: A Narrative Inquiry Into Relational Continuity in Student Teachers’ Field Placements

The authors of this paper are two teacher researchers, one situated at the university and one situated as principal of an elementary school. Through narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) two main themes of belonging and becoming were illuminated. The work suggests trusting relationships evolving from dialogue sustained over two field placements at the same school offer student teachers the possibilities of connecting their life experiences with their new experiences at the school; a connected knowing that enables them to develop their identifies as beginning teachers.