Rewild My Heart: With Pedagogies of Love, Kindness and the Sun and Moon

Abstract

AbstractThe pressing problems we face from wars to pandemics erupt against the less dramatic background of the mundane continued destruction of our planet as a habitable realm. In education, technology can be environmentally destructive in a variety of ways. Educators may feel the urge to address these matters but we also know that EdTech solutionism can create new problems as fast as it fixes old ones. Something in the urgency of the fix may be the problem. It may be that we are too desperate to fill a hole in the world that we only see through a hole in ourselves. Hence, in order to truly escape our colonised and domesticated fates, we need to rewild our very thinking. We need to examine the underlying emotional tones and waves that cause us to act as we do against our own interests and that of our planet. This conundrum is explored here through the device of storytelling using a multimodal speculative auto-ethnography to push into realms beyond mere utility and out into conceptual wilds. No fixes or solutions are offered here for the planet. Lifeless celestial objects such as the sun and moon loom large by contrast. Both have walk-on parts in this tale, and watch us as we watch them, with whatever love and kindness we can.