On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces for Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue for the importance in education of space for bewildering questions: questions for which no-one yet knows the answer and where letting-go of certainty and acceptance of ambiguity is possible. This is especially important in this era of climate and ecological emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and being are urgently needed. In addition, there needs to be space for positive conceptions of ‘the wild’ and a be-wilder-ing of education processes themselves towards more demanding, rebellious, ruptive educational futures. This is a challenging move for Westernised pedagogy and its increasing desire to ‘sanitise’ knowledge.
I examine how encouraging aporia —literally lacking a poros , a path—can contribute to opening up ruptural spaces which embrace doubt and see within doubt ‘the questions that make a new understanding possible’ (Burbules, 1997, p. 40, Aporia : Webs, passages, getting lost, and learning to go on . In Philosophy of education 1997: A publication of the philosophy of education society (annual) (pp. 33–43). Philosophy of Education Society). I then draw on a range of thinkers including Arendt, Buber, The Crex Collective and hooks to foreground encounters, creative entwinings and care-ful, attentive listening which can re-centre more-than-human voices and forge new relationships. I argue that such embodied practices have potential to open relationships based on ‘aimance’ (Khatibi, 1995, Le livre de l’aimance . Editions Marsam) and what Snaza (2020, p. 108, Love and bewilderment: On education as affective encounter. In B. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S. McCall, & A. Niccolini (Eds.), Mapping the affective turn in education: Theory, research and pedagogies (pp. 108–121). Routledge) calls ‘possibilities of love beyond the limit of the human’.

Full text

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© e Author(s) 2024
K. Chappell et al. (eds.), Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures, Palgrave
Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52973-3_4
4
On Bewilderment, Education
andOpening Spaces forCreativity
andEmergent Educational Futures
SarahChave
S. Chave (*)
School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
e-mail: k.a.chappell@exeter.ac.uk
Fig. 4.1 Artwork by Tijana Velikinac for Edulab, Institute for Philosophy and
Social Policy, University of Belgrade’s (2022) Third International Conference: Why
still education?

72
Introduction
I was once rmly told in a college administration department: ‘Just tell
those trainee-teachers to stop asking questions and teach.’ I was some-
what taken aback by this comment but it also got me thinking. What is
teaching if it is not about asking questions? (Fig.4.1) Moreover, what
kind of questions are teachers asking? If they already know the answer is
this really questioning? ere are situations where transmission of exist-
ing knowledge is vital—ranging from learning to read to how to y a
plane. In these instances, asking questions when the teacher knows the
answer—often called Socratic questioning—is valuable. However, is this
all education can or should be, especially in this era of climate and eco-
logical emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and
being are urgently needed? ere needs to be space for bewildering ques-
tions where no-one yet knows the answer; space where letting go of cer-
tainty and acceptance of ambiguity is possible; space which encourages
creativity and new ways of knowing and being in the world together. In
addition, there needs to be space for positive conceptions of ‘the wild’
and a be-wilder-ing1 of education processes themselves towards more
demanding, rebellious, ruptive educational futures which can burst
through framings of the world dominant in current Westernised educa-
tion. is is a challenging move for such Westernised education, domi-
nated as it is by anthropocentric, androcentric and Eurocentric
conceptions of ‘man’ (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013) and an increasing
desire to ‘sanitise’ knowledge (Suzawa, 2013). Moreover, such Westernised
pedagogy is not geographically limited. Instead, as Braidotti (2013, p.2)
highlights, ‘it is a structural element of our cultural practices, which is
also embedded in both theory and institutional and pedagogical prac-
tices’ which have spread around the world, driven by colonialism and its
continuing eects.
In this chapter, I explore how a shift towards bewildering/be-wilder-
ing education can be nurtured. I examine how encouraging aporia—lit-
erally lacking a poros, a path, a passage—can contribute to opening up
educational spaces where creative, holistic thinking and new ways of
S. Chave

73
being in the world can burst through: ruptural spaces which embrace
doubt and see within such doubt ‘the questions that make a new under-
standing possible’ (Burbules, 1997, p.40). I nd it hard to pin down in
words what such ruptural spaces are but suggest that they are combina-
tions of physical spaces and the physical actions and mental responses
arising in these physical spaces. For me, Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of
‘lived spaces’ is helpful here. Lefebvre posits that space is not a neutral,
empty entity. Instead, it is constituted from ‘perceived space’, ‘con-
ceived space’ and ‘lived space’. Perceived space is what (Westernised)
humans experience withtheirsenses as they move through the world.
Conceived space is how the original designers and political powers con-
ceptualised and planned a particular space. en there is ‘lived space’
which, as Zhang (2006) highlights, can be harder to understand. To
help here heturns to Elden (2004, pp.186–188 cited in Zhang, 2006)
and his discussion of Lefebvre’s early work in which Lefebvre critiques
the seventeenth-century Western philosopher Descartes’ binary—res
cogitans (the realm of the mind) and res extensa (the physical realm of
matter). Elden argues that Lefebvre may have rst formulated his con-
ception of conceived space as a response to res cogitans, with Lefebvre
denoting such abstract knowledge with the French word savoir.
Perceived space, on the other hand, corresponds to res extensa. Pursuing
this line of thinking Elden suggests that in his later work,Lefebvreintro-
duced his conception of lived space to form his triad as a way to recon-
cile his own thinking and Descartes’ binary. Lived space combines
(Westernised) human external experience of the space and the power
relations within it with (Westernised) human inner mental life as one
responds to these perceptions and conceptions of inhabited space
around one. Lefebvre denotes knowledge in these lived spaces with the
French word connaître—the things a person is acquainted with and
knows locally. ese three spheres—perceived, conceived and lived—
are not separate ‘slices of a pie’. Rather they act, shift, ow together,
forming experiences of space in everyday life.
In this chapter, I argue that ruptural ‘lived spaces’ have potential to
emerge when students can play with bewildering ideas and questions
without expectations of reaching pre-set outcomes or solutions and
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

74
when there is openness and attentiveness to others, both human and
more- than- human, within the space. I also like the word ‘wallow’ here:
space and time to wallow, to deep-dive into ideas and feelings, luxuriate
in them as well as time to share these ideas with others in an unhurried
atmosphere. ere is a sense of indulgence. Wallowing is something
which humans, especially those in fast-paced Westernised societies
might even have been bidden not to do. Playful, attentive actions as well
as wallowing with ideas can occur in activities often called ‘creative’
such as art, craft, music, dance and creative writing but also stretch
beyond and are not limited to these. As Ken Robinson (Mindshift,
2015) highlights, ‘creativity is in everything… in science, the arts,
mathematics, technology, cuisine, teaching, politics, business, you
name it’. It involves ‘putting your imagination to work’ and is some-
thing which can be cultivated and honed, including, crucially, in edu-
cational settings. Cremin and Chappell (2021) identify that key
characteristics of creative pedagogies include opportunities for student
playfulness, independent thinking, problem-solving, risk-taking (learn-
ing by ‘mistakes’) and co-construction and collaboration as well as
teachers demonstrating their own interest in creative processes. I argue
in this chapter that exploring bewildering questions has an important
role to play in creativity understood in this broad sense. Such creative
approaches have potential to combine and ‘open a window’, as a friend
of mine put it: a window through which novel ideas and ways of being
can break free and contribute to living in the new ways so needed in
this era of biodiversity loss and climate emergency.
Embracing Bewilderment andAporia
According to the Merriam-Webster (n.d), ‘bewilderment is the quality or
state of being lost, perplexed or confused’. Such confusion has long been
accepted as a starting point for education with the aim to then lead stu-
dents to places of certainty. Adopting the approach Socrates used in
Plato’s Meno (circa 385 BCE/1961), bewilderment can also be a
S. Chave

75
mid- point of the educational process. A student is nudged by a teacher
along a pathway aimed to undo their previous certainties. is leads the
student to a place of puzzlement, a place of embodied discomfort as well
as mental uncertainty—an aporia—where they do not have a path or pas-
sage forward. e teacher can then show the student a path out of this
place of confusion towards an accepted answer. What happens, however,
when there isn’t a solution or where it is hard evento form a question as
language and existing dominant conceptions are insucient to allow its
articulation? Can teachers and the curricula and policies which frame
their practice tolerate such ambiguity where there is no ‘answer’, where
students’ bewilderment, confusion, puzzlement cannot be addressed and
solved by the teacher?
Suzawa (2013, p.234) argues for the value of embracing ambiguity and
bewilderment, rather than merely tolerating or actively avoiding it. He
stresses the importance of ‘being open to alternative ideas, never being
very narrow in our thinking as we practice the art of teaching’. Reading
this reminded me of an experience from my own teaching practice which
has spanned over 30 years in vocational, adult and university sectors,
teaching languages, economics, business studies and teacher education.
In an observation I undertook in my role as a teacher-educator of a
plumbing lesson in an inner-city vocational college the students were
revising for a multiple-choice exam. One question, on energy generation,
asked which option was carbon neutral. e answer required was ‘wind
turbines’. A student challenged this, saying that due to the transport of
turbines as well as the materials needed for their construction and main-
tenance it is disputed whether they are carbon neutral. I sat forward,
interested to see how the trainee-teacher would handle this dilemma. He
paused for a moment then responded ‘Well, in your exam please select
“wind turbines” but I take your point, these things are complex and there
isn’t a simple answer. You could, however, research this for the presenta-
tion you are doing for your communication module’. e teacher could
so easily have closed this student down but instead embraced this oppor-
tunity to encourage students to grapple with bewildering issues and
sought ways that this could be done within the constraints of his tightly
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

76
packed, highly regulated curriculum. His attitude of mind kept a space
open for exploring bewildering concepts such as carbon neutrality, recon-
ciling the restrictive modes of thinking and classication imposed by
multiple-choice assessment with opportunities within the communica-
tion module for more ‘holistic modes of thought opened by dialogical
reasoning and artistic practices’ (Suzawa, 2013, p.232).
Burbules (1997) highlights how artistic creative practices can open
spaces to explore bewildering questions. He considers how dance has
potential to open an embodied ‘gestural space’ for exploring bewildering
issues as an alternative to deductive cognitive thinking with its tendency
to classify and move from A to B in a straight line. Other creative choices
such as musical composition/performance, art/craft, poetry and creative
writing also have potential for embodied holistic exploration of aporia
and topics across subject boundaries. As a teacher-educator I was privi-
leged to observe such a creative activity which was part of a vocational
music qualication. Students aged 16 to 18 had been tasked with creat-
ing a song and music video as well as reecting on the experience. One
group of teenage students had produced a song called Shadows, which
explored thoughts and feelings around love and relationships. I found
their song, video and reection very moving. ese activities highlighted
their creative, musical and technical skills but in their reection they also
drew in another, unexpected aspect. ey explained that whilst lming
they became very aware of the movement of the sun and the physical
shadows it created in their video. ey had to re-record certain scenes as
the shadows cast by the sun did not match up with the words in particu-
lar verses. ey realised that they were approaching ‘shadows’ as meta-
phor but the physical act of recording opened up their awareness of
existing in a physical world. is allowed them to explore what this meant
for their relationship with and responses to physical phenomena. ey
also became more aware of the transient nature of long shadows and what
this could mean for coping with the often-bewildering relationship chal-
lenges, explored in the song, which they faced as they entered adulthood.
e creative processes of music and lm-making enabled the students to
explore these challenges which are hard to articulate in existing language
and where there are no clear solutions.
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77
I am not suggesting that all teaching needs to engage with bewilder-
ment. is could be overwhelming for students as well as neglectful of
certain existing useful skills and knowledge. However, exploratory spaces
are important if, as the thinker Hannah Arendt (1961a/2006a, p.193)
argues, education is where:
we decide whether we love our children [and young people—my addition]
enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own
devices, nor to strike from their hands their chances of undertaking some-
thing new, something unforeseen by us.
Arendt andthePotential forOpening Spaces
ofAppearance Through Intersubjective
First-Hand Encounters
Drawing on Arendt introduces another dimension to exploring bewil-
dering questions. For Arendt, rather than being pre-formed ‘selves’,
who one is emerges intersubjectively (between subjects) in rst-hand
encounters when one speaks and acts with others under what Arendt
terms ‘conditions of plurality’. Such conditions can potentially occur in
encounters when others are receptive to one’s speech and actions and
one is receptive to theirs. is opens potential for ‘spaces of appearance’
through which who one is as a unique being emerges, bringing possibili-
ties for new ways to be, know and act in the world (for further discus-
sion see Chave, 2020). Creative activities exploring bewildering
questions provide time and space for such intersubjective encounters,
for sharing one’s positioning and for openness to the speech and action
of others: encounters through which who one is can begin to
emerge anew.
I experienced such an encounter at a craft workshop I had co- organised
as part of an arts-based project in higher education. Adults were making
notebooks from recycled paper using the Japanese craft of momigami.
e slow creative, embodied repetitive action of crumpling and
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

78
smoothing paper central to momigami opened a lived space and time for
sharing dierent ideas and perspectives. A wide range of bewildering
issues connected to climate change was discussed. As the session pro-
gressed, a respectful atmosphere, a more secure space opened up. One
issue which arose was more sustainable farming methods: a complex
bewildering issue with many dierent opinions and possibilities for
change. As the activity progressed, a participant from a farming family
spoke up to explain how her brother was committed, for various practical
and emotional reasons, to a single breed of cattle he had kept on his farm
for 40 years. Moving to a dierent breed would be a huge challenge, and
understanding such starting points needs to be taken on board in any
change processes. is perspective inserted a new way of thinking about
change. It caught my attention and stayed with me, humbled me, encour-
aged me to nd out more, challenged and changed me and took my
thinking and actions in relation to nature-friendly farming in new direc-
tions. Creative activities had opened a space for speaking and being open
to others and a window in my existing framings through which new ideas
and ways of being could bubble.
Arendt focuses her thinking on encounters within the human realm.
However, it is important to remember that she died in 1975 and it
would be unfair to judge her for not engaging with recent posthuman
ideas. Arendt emphasises the importance of engaging with thinking of
the past, learning from these ‘threads’ without letting them become
‘chains which fetter us’ (1961/2006b, p.94). I would like to believe she
would be interested in extending her theorising in response to recent
posthuman developments and the possibility of intersubjective encoun-
ters with(in) the wider natural world. is possibility is complex, bewil-
dering for several reasons. In Western Modernist thinking only humans
possess subjectivity—which it denes narrowly as having a sense of self,
of who one is, and capacity to reect and have higher-order (abstract)
thoughts and feelings (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013). However,
Lyvers (1999, p.5) makes what is for me a key point, when he com-
ments that to acknowledge subjectivity beyond the human does not
demand that it is ‘similar in all respects to one’s own’. is poses a
S. Chave

79
challenge for many of how to approach the more-than-human without
categorising them or tting them into Western understandings of the
world. Buber provides a helpful insight here (1958/1923) with his idea
of I-it and I-ou relationships. In I-it relationships the other is an
object—an ‘it’. In contrast, in I-ou reciprocal relations ‘I’ recognises
the other as a subject with whom one engages in their entirety rather
than as a sum of their qualities. He highlights how:
e primary word I-ou can be spoken only with the whole being.
Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place
through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become
through my relation to the ou; and as I become I, I say ou.
All real living is meeting (encounter). (24–25)
Buber does not limit I-ou relations to the human realm, giving the
example of contemplating a tree: He recognises how in Western thinking
there are several dierent ways to understand a tree—as an object to be
used/consumed, as an object for contemplation or as an example of a
particular species category but to address the question of whether a tree
has subjectivity Buber comments:
I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this o in
your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is
neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (59)
Reecting on Buber’s ideas, Walsh etal. (1994, p.151) argue that ‘now
the [Western] worldview that presupposed an objectied nature has run
its disastrous course… we are open to a dierent way of relating, a dier-
ent way of life, beyond the subject/object dualism, beyond the I-it rela-
tionship’. All, both human and more-than-human in this our shared
planet can strive towards what Buber (1958/1923, p.79) called “tender-
ness” and an acceptance of the ethical responsibility this then places on
each of us.
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

80
Fig. 4.2 C/artography: Meandering, encountering, attending with Thames (2023)
It was with these ideas on intersubjective encounters in mind that I set
out to walk beside meandering River ames2 between Lechlade and
Buscot in Oxfordshire, UK, recording the experiences in a c/artography
(Fig.4.2) and reection. ese cannot fully capture encounters which
happen between ‘I and ou’—but are an attempt. It might seem strange
to explore bewilderment and aporia (the lack of a path or passage way) by
following a river. However, rivers are vital forces, life-givers, they mean-
der, ood, change: new routes, and habitations emerge.
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81
Meandering, Encountering, Attending
withThames
Stepping down onto the riverside path my husband, Peter, and I are
enveloped by the tall grasses and reeds that ourish near the bridge which
stands beside the Trout Inn near Lechlade. e hubbub of people quickly
fades and, on this sun-lled day, we enter a world of insect buzz and bird
call—surprised to hear immediately the distinctive sound of a wood-
pecker. Eager to see if this is still a place where damselies thrive, we
make our way to where a wooden bridge crosses a lily pond. We stop,
lled with joy and wonder to see the iridescent deep blue of the male
banded demoiselles with distinctive dark spots on their wings and the
smaller, lighter common blues darting above the lily pads and settling on
the reeds. As we look closer, we begin to see more—the well-camouaged
green females as well as entwined mating pairs. We feel the ‘tenderness‘
that Buber (1958/1923, p.59) describes. We are drawn into attentive
caring relation with these damselies who cease to be ‘its’– mere exam-
ples. Instead, it is with these damselies ‘on this occasion that I engage
into a relation and this lls my world’ (59). We follow ames as he
meanders across the at plain, forced to slow down and take a circuitous
route, laughing at the short distance we would have covered by travelling
in a straight line. Along the way we enjoy birdsong—the repetitive calls
of jackdaws and chichas and melodious blackbirds, goldnches, wrens
and reed warblers. We pause to appreciate the alders and willows leaning
outwards from the bank, the waving teasel heads, the yellow wild brassi-
cas, tiny pink geraniums and vivid blue alkanets. Damselies and but-
teries it across the path. Reaching Buscot Lock we resist the urge to
power on to Kelmscott where William Morris once lived, pausing instead
beside ames to enjoy the sunshine and the moorhens swimming
between the reeds. We retrace our steps, hot and tired now but still open
to this special place and the calls of the more-than-human all around us.
We stop once more at the lily pond, sad to leave the damselies as they
dart, settle, entwine, but heartened that this place still exists for them and
aware of the importance of protecting it and other places like it.
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

82
Such embodied encounters open something beyond articulation.
Spending time with these damselies on this occasion opened a new way
for me to be in the world. Returning home, I learnt more about them
from the British Dragony Society website. I became more aware of dam-
selies and many dierent coloured bees, butteries, moths, greeny and
ants in my little garden. I am now less afraid of these creatures, more
absorbed in their never-ending dance. I tend owers which support them
and which the insects in turn support through pollination, an ecosystem
in which humans are both entangled and dependent. I have learnt the
shocking statistic that ying insects have declined by almost 60% in the
UK over the last 20 years (Ball etal., 2021). I have investigated actions to
reverse this trend and support their lives such as nature-friendly and
regenerative farming. On sun-lled days, damselies sometimes enter my
home through the open kitchen door then become trapped against the
windows. On one such day, I stand on tiptoes and reach across the work-
top, all the time aware of the frantic damsely beating his delicate wings
against the glass. I manage to push open the sti window and joyfully
watch as the damsely ies free: an embodied happening for us both and
a reminder too of other lived spaces where caring inter-actions can open
a window through which new ideas can take ight.
A Pedagogy ofBe-Wilderment
Intersubjective encounters and the ethical responsibilities these raise, for
example with ames and with all that live within and beside his water,
open space to explore what Snaza (2013, 2020) calls a ‘pedagogy of be-
wilderment’: an approach which aims to rupture existing educational
framings and open possibilities of new educational futures. Snaza high-
lights how Westernised education is a humanising project. In this fram-
ing, children are not fully human and education is a way of bringing
them to a fully human state. Snaza outlines how this conception is seen
in educational writing dating back to Plato’s Republic (1961) rst pub-
lished in the fourth century BCE.In this work by Plato, Socrates refers to
the ‘uneducated’ as an ‘unintelligent philistine’ who has ‘no use for rea-
soned discussion and [has] an animal addiction to settle everything by
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83
brute force’ (177). e ‘philistine’ needs to be brought out of this state
through educational processes. Almost 2000years later, although at rst
sight more sympathetic to the wildness of Emile, Rousseau (1972) argues
for the necessity of forming ‘man’ through education and emphasises the
importance of doing this according to human nature rather than social
institutions. For Kant (1960, 3), man needs to be ‘turned aside from his
animal impulses’ and through education be led towards ‘humanity, his
appointed end’.
Snaza (2013, 2020) challenges this conception of education where the
telos—endpoint— is to learn to be fully ‘human’, particularly where what
it is to be human is based on Western conceptions of ‘Man’—white,
European, male, heterosexual and able-bodied. Such centring of Western
Man has been performed for so long in education it has become nor-
malised, disappearing from view. Snaza calls instead for education in
which the concept of Western man is taken as a starting point for enquiry,
for exploring what it would mean to let go of being human as separate
from and superior to all that is more-than-human and what it would
mean to accept, reconnect and value the part of ourselves which is ani-
mal. is be-wildering is itself a bewildering process—a letting go of a
clear path towards Westernised conceptions of becoming ‘fully human’.
Yet, it is this unsettlement and the doubts this engenders that open up
‘the possibility of love beyond the human’.
As an academic I feel that perhaps I should reach here for some learned
texts such as bel hooks’ (2000) reection on love, compassion and heal-
ing; Freire (2000) on love as a commitment to others; Donna Haraway
(2007) on our entanglement with the more-than-human and Snaza’s rec-
ommendation of Education out of bounds (Lewis & Kahn, 2010). I do
encourage you to explore these texts and I will examine hooks’ ideas later
in this chapter. However, it is the lm Paddington (King, 2014), particu-
larly its ending, which comes strongly to my mind at this moment. In the
lm, the taxidermist Millicent Clyde wants to kidnap Paddington from
the Brown family who have taken him into their home, then kill him,
stu him and place him in a museum. Judy, the Brown’s daughter, defends
Paddington passionately, declaring that even though Paddington is from
a dierent species he is still a member of their family. e lm is prob-
lematic in many ways, for example it does anthropomorphise bears and
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

84
use species classication. However, it also allows for possibilities of
humans encountering bears, learning from bears, resisting killing bears
and other animals for human glorication and advancement. It chal-
lenges limiting notions of kinship. ese are all issues which can be dis-
cussed with students as starting points for exploring the possibilities of
love as forging a ‘new kinship bestiary that is strange, and in that strange-
ness opens itself up to new forms of learning out of bounds’ (Lewis &
Kahn, 2010, p.147).
Be-Wilder-Ment and‘Wild Pedagogies’
e Crex Collective (2018, p.6), who include e Hebrides as a co-
author, provide another interesting way to consider bewilderment/ be-
wilderment, exploring opportunities for what they call ‘wild pedagogies’.
ey argue that:
If we take seriously the notion that the natural world is not made up of
inert entities; but rather, it is lled with active, self-directing, and vibrant
participants, then our attention towards the aordances of place-based
education changes. In seeking to teach with nature, educators become
open and available to the range of facts, knowings, and understandings
that places have to oer.
ey highlight how ‘Such attention involves carefully listening to
available voices and building partnerships … and it will, at times, involve
actively de-centring the taken-for-granted human voice and re-centring
more-than-human voices’ (6). A starting point for such listening can be
as simple as encountering, attending to a plant breaking through the tar-
mac in a school playground. Opportunities to be found further aeld
could include at an urban or rural farm, a river meander, a local or
national park, a forest, a seashore. e Crex Collective provide what they
call six touchstones, or jumping o points, for wild pedagogies. ese are
nature as co-teacher; engaging with complexity, the unknown and spon-
taneity; relocating the wild (which can be found everywhere); the need
for time and practice; socio-cultural change (and the recognition of
S. Chave

85
education as a method of political activism) and the need to build alli-
ances within the human community and beyond. ey emphasise that
these are starting points rather than a prescriptive list. ey include ques-
tions to encourage teachers to reect on their existing practices in relation
to these touchstones. Wild pedagogies foreground a role for intersubjec-
tive rst-hand encounters, for care-ful and attentive entanglements with
the more-than-human, for embracing the wildness within each of us and
the bewilderment and doubts this can engender. is is not an easy move,
or one that is guaranteed. However, with encouragement, eeting
moments can emerge, moments to treasure rather than shut down,
moments which open possibilities of rupturing existing Westernised edu-
cational framings and supporting the bursting through of new ways of
knowing, being and acting in the world.
Returning totheRiver
I place my feet in the cooling water of ames. I see the owing water
glittering in the sunshine, the spikey reeds, the mossy stones and thick
trailing weed. I am lulled by birdsong, the buzz of insects and the occa-
sional distant sound of a car. Reecting on e Crex Collective’s touch-
stones my mind turns to the poem At the River Clarion (2009) by Mary
Oliver. In this, Oliver emphasises the importance of giving time and
patience to listening to the voices of the more-than-human, highlighting
how one does not hear them in a mere hour or day. As she comments, it
is as though ‘selfhood has stued your ears’. Whilst visiting the country-
side I have seen primary-aged (four to eleven) and secondary-aged (11 to
18) students on eld-trips, busy, busy, busy in the landscape, measuring,
weighing, making notes, urged on by their teachers. But even amongst
this busyness, moments of encountering, entangling and care-ful listen-
ing emerge when a student is caught up in the intricate pattern in a stone,
the smoothness of a rock shaped thus by a river, the swaying movement
of grasses rustled by the wind. As teachers we can encourage such
moments and support students to nd ways to respond holistically, ten-
derly, creatively to these in ways which, to use Suzawa’s (2013) phrase,
exceed narrow cognitive processes. As I continue to listen, I feel the love,
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

86
stretching back through deep time, that this life-giving river gifts. I reect
on Arendt’s (2006a) words, introduced earlier in the chapter, that educa-
tion is a place where, as teachers, we decide whether we love our children
enough neither to abandon them to their own devices nor ‘to strike from
their hands something new, something unforeseen by us’. Introducing
love into education runs a risk of sentimentality but here Khatibi’s (1995)
conception of aimance—which brings together friendship (philia) and
love (eros) is helpful. Zembylas (2017, p.23) describes how Khatibi’s
aimance is a ‘constructed term for anity, aection, tolerance and friend-
ship’ and a ‘powerful concept for invoking love as a force for social change’
(23). Love, understood as aimance—‘opens possibilities for aective soli-
darity toward and with otherness’ (Taylor & Gannon 2021, p.120) and
introduces ethico-political practices in education by encouraging educa-
tors to develop pedagogies that attempt:
to address wound, injury and suering within a frame that takes into con-
sideration histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice. (Zembylas,
2017, p.23)
ese ideas resonate with e Crex Collective’s (2018) touchstone six
which emphasises building community with others and ‘extending the
number of communities to which each of us belong’ (33). e Collective
highlight the importance of reecting on ‘the complex inter-dependent
composition of those communities that always implicates the more-than-
human’ (33). One is both supported and challenged by the members of
these dierent communities. Such communities are ‘lived spaces’, to use
Lefebvre’s (1991) conception, which combine one’s external conceptions
and one’s perceptions of a space, including the power relations within
them, with one’s inner mental life. ey are spaces where one can depart
from the status quo and nd ‘belonging, friendship, and joy’ and the sup-
portive communities we all need ‘as we attempt to re-wild our lives, peda-
gogies, and the places where we live’ (e Crex Collection, 2018, p.34).
ey are spaces where together, as members of such supportive commu-
nities, we can take risks; where we can explore bewildering questions
which do not have ready answers and also nd embodied, creative ways
(understood in the broad sense discussed in this chapter) to explore
S. Chave

87
questions and issues we cannot even put into existing language. Such,
supportive communities have potential to open ‘an orientation to the
future that admits of the possibility of future transformations that exceed
and resist colonisation by the constraints of the present’ (Facer, 2016,
p. 69). Such transformations can open unexpected, unforeseen ways to
address the ecological and climate threats currently destroying both
more-than-human and human life and ourishing. Supportive commu-
nities can be spaces to practice what hooks (1995) calls ‘beloved com-
munity’ where ‘loving ties of care and knowing bind us together in our
dierence’ (hooks, 1995, pp.263–264 cited in Snaza, 2020, p.119). As
humans, especially those raised with Westernised conceptions of the
world, we need to extend this love to include the more-than-human as
well as challenge the so-called boundaries between the self and the other.
‘Saturating’ spaces of learning with love (Snaza, 2020) opens potential for
students to overcome the possible fears and barriers which bewildering
and be-wilder-ing education can engender. Practicing beloved communi-
ties can encourage students to respond attentively and armatively to the
opportunities which can burst through when existing androcentric,
anthropomorphic, Eurocentric (Westernised) educational framings are
ruptured. is is not an easy move, but as hooks identies in Teaching to
Transgress (1994, p.207):
e classroom [and other learning spaces- my addition], with all its limita-
tions, remains a location of possibility. In that eld of possibility, we have
the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our com-
rades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as
we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.
is is education as the practice of freedom.
Notes
1. e word bewilderment has its origins in the word ‘wild’. First recorded
in the 1680s it is a combination of ‘be’, ‘thoroughly’ and ‘wilder’ i.e., ‘lead
astray’ or ‘lured into the wilds’ (Vocabulary.com, n.d.). In this original
4 On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces…

88
understanding there is a negative connation of the wild which this chapter
challenges.
2. Rivers are often associated with river gods and nymphs with ames
known as a male deity- Old Father ames (e Londonist, 2015). Just
as we do not place ‘the’ before a name (i.e. the Susan), I do not place an
objectifying ‘the’ before ames.
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