As a Citizenship educator and Sustainability practitioner there is consistently a tension between curriculum content that enables critical exploration and meaning-making dialogue, whilst also identifying ‘case studies’ that can exemplify important key themes and knowledge within the ‘time’ and ‘space’ allocated for lessons. The structure of schools temporally, spatially, and the externally imposed ‘calendar’ of examined outcomes becomes highly restrictive when as a teacher one wishes to give time for slow pedagogies, deep critical exploratory discussion (including the skills of discussion themselves) and to teach past, present and future potentials. In the classroom this has been a personal frustration of mine and additionally a contention when extending my own ‘thinking about how we think’ through education practices.
Here I propose an approach I’ve titled ‘time-webs’, which includes features of the educational theory of ‘relational thinking’ as a form of ecological ‘systems thinking’ for learning eco-literacy and global-literacy (Capra, 2002; Sterling, 2009). I also want to suggest that including ‘time-webs’ of historical ‘movements’ enables a very different thinking about the past, the present and the future. However, first I need to define and outline what I mean by ‘time-webs’ and ‘movements’. Initially I am proposing ‘time-webs’ are like ecosystem ‘liife-webs’ and can be used as diagrams or models to explore historical change through collective actions and movements that effect communities, nations or the planet. I want to also note that diagrams or models could become reductionist and overly simplify complexities, but this would be counter-productive to the aim of ‘time-webs’. Therefore, it’s important to not just perceive of ‘time-webs’ as merely a transfer or exchange of historical events but as relationships, changes and affects across and between features historically visualised web. What then is a ‘movement’? It would be in relation to ‘time-webs’ a group/organisation/campaign/political group that affects change to the social, political, economic, cultural and ecological lived experiences of other human beings. There is of course potential to extend ‘time-webs’ to be inclusive of non-human beings/more-than-human-brings and the definition additionally requires more extension conceptually beyond my initial ideas noted here.
I first began considering ‘time-webs’ in more detail after a local film viewing of Robert the Bruce (2019) with Angus MacFadyen at the Isle of Skye’s Colaisde na Gàidhlig. The storytelling of the film and it’s orientation towards the impact of war on families and relationships immediately illustrated that the normally dominant narrative of a monarch as an individual hero required telling the stories of other people. The film explored the complexities of change, histories/herstories as Ourstories, as well as, acknowledging that our past is part of us and helps us build a sense of identity and belonging as communities in the present. How we learn Ourstories is therefore profoundly important to how we participate in community together and thus imagine our futures, which was something Angus mentioned in his Q/A at the end of the film. Rebecca Solnit (2019) brought the ‘movements’ vs. ‘individual’ proposition further into the foreground of my own ideas recently, alongside previous reading into the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and global indigenous rights movements. Solnit (2019) suggests that our over reliance on ‘hero worship’ continues to cloud our abilities to perceive of the vital fluidity of collective change and especially of the responsibility of community rather than ‘the individual’ for socially and ecologically just futures.
The individualism inherent within capitalism, Neo-liberalism, colonialism and patriarchy foreground world views with powerful and controlling social narratives that can and do trivialise ‘movements’ and instead promote stories of individual heroism. These narratives additionally place unreasonable expectations and criticisms upon ‘movements’ holding them to ‘perfectionist scrutiny’ thus undermining the struggle, complexity and differences encountered through ‘movements’. Difficult Women by Helen Lewis (2020), also builds on this challenge of learning with ‘movements’, because collective changes and social shifts are messy, imprecise, full of differences and disagreements. But surely this is more exemplary of the ‘doing’ of community in practice and the lived realities of everyday people participating in relationships, families and society at large. We are continually exploring dissonances, differences alongside the unifying causes that create change to improve the lives of others we may never meet and who we may not align with our principles or personal values. ‘Movements’ can still create change in-spite of, and sometime because of, awareness of differences and similarities that create solidarity. Also, to pedestal individuals as infallibly perfect and conveniently hide flaws does not enable a meaningful exploration of history either, even when some individuals have been exceptionally important in ‘movements’.
With all of the above proposals and exploration in mind I want to consider what ‘time-webs’ and thinking with ‘movements’ might bring to educational experiences and the relationships that are possible through wider civic society by using this approach. I suggest that ‘time-webs’ instead of ‘timelines’ of history would immediately change our perception of past from linear sets of events and actions instigated by ‘powerful’ individuals into an awareness of relational responses, complex groupings and systems of self-organising, difficult negotiations and ethical choices, peaceful flourishing, diplomatic exchanges, collective successes, colonial oppressions, other ways of living as community, and vitally understanding the interdependencies of human settlements with place, culture, leadership, resources, politics and ecologies. This approach would not only highlight the potential of how humans can co-habit, change and co-create places of community but also develop an awareness of the destruction and violence that can occur through abuses of power, control, ownership and military position. Something that is evidently occurring across nations many never expected to witness populism, facism or authoritarianism rise again!
Learning with ‘movements’ through a ‘time-web’ approach would additionally challenge something much more significant. It could challenge our attachment to capitalist materialism and consumerism and of the growing association of individual celebrity exemplifying ‘success’ and ‘status’. If histories/herstories as Ourstories are explored as ‘movements’ across time, space and place the significance of our collective choices and cooperative participation makes all of us significant in the co-creation of our communities, not just people who wield control and power. By learning we are all important and significant historically in the shaping of our cultural, social and ecological destiny, then we know we are each valued and have singular agency through togetherness. It can also enable more critical analysis and exploration of historical systems of governance as ’movements’ and to consider them without partisan divisiveness.
As this is an initial idea I am keen to explore the implications of teaching with ‘time-webs’ in more detail and it will be interesting to research this through historical schools of thought and pedagogies adopted by history curriculums. It could potentially also bring in the use of data journalism as visualisations of important relationships, interactions, influences and affects across inherited temporal, spatial and place-conscious Ourstories!
References:
Capra, F. (2002) The Hidden Connections.
Lewis, H. (2020) Difficult Women.
Solnit, R. (2019) Whose Story Is This? old Conflicts, New Chapters.
Sterling, S. (2009) Ecological Intelligence: viewing the world relationally.