EL CRISTIANO Y SU NUEVA VIDA EN CRISTO: CONSEJOS PRÁCTICOS

Jamie also involved approaches within her teaching that sought to develop amongst learners a sense of experiential and presentational knowing (Heron and Reason 1997). Her approach represents a separate theme to Pat’s though, because of the emphasis she placed on coming to know nature through reflection on multiple-sensory experience. Jamie taught creative writing and she described how in one of these courses (Writing Inspired by Your Surroundings), she asks learners to explore their environment through the use of senses other than sight. To do this, she initially invites learners to ‘walk around outside and look at the different buildings and the natural

environment’ (3.2.12:31). Depending on the location of the course this would include a visit to woodlands, open spaces or historic buildings. During these phases of exploration, she asks learners to close their eyes, to stand or sit

quietly and experience in another way their immediate environment. Next, she invites learners to write stories about their experiences and to recite these to the rest of their learning group. Jamie explained that, by engaging learners in this activity, she was encouraging other senses to come to the fore, noting that:

…it’s very easy to go to a place and think, ‘Oh yeah,’ whereas when you say to them ‘what sounds can you hear?’, ‘what can you smell?’ ‘What does the place feel like?’ (3.2.12:26).

Additionally, Jamie described a technique which she uses to encourage learners to critically reflect on the senses they mainly use when

exploring an environment:

I get them to describe something and then I get them to take different coloured pens and underline the different senses they’ve used. So it’s sound, taste, touch and smell. And a lot of them they’ll just tend to have one colour. ‘Cause they’re all in different colours, it’s very easy to see the sense they’ve most used and, ‘Oh, I’ve only used the sense of sight.’ I said, ‘Yes, I was hoping you’d say...’ because that’s what people tend to write about - what they can see. But obviously if you’re, sitting here and if all of your other senses were blocked out it’d be quite strange. So I get them to try and think about more than what you see around you (3.2.12:27).

Jamie commented that her main focus was on progressing learners to a position where they could begin to sense realities and phenomena that at other times may have remained unexplored. She posited how ‘it’s very easy to ignore the little things’ (3.2.12:27), the faint smell of summered herbs, or the sound of jewelled water washing over a flooded bank. Jamie suggested that by encouraging critical reflection on sense, a door is opened through which learners can experience and describe their environments in different ways, ‘It opens their [learners] eyes to new ways of describing things – and it does make them more aware’ (3.2.12:30).

Like Pat, Jamie was encouraging learners to develop experiential knowledge through ‘actually meeting and feeling the presence’ of a natural phenomenon

(Heron, 1996a:33). Similarly, she encouraged learners to develop presentational knowledge (Heron and Reason, 1997) by asking them to create stories relating to their sensed experiences and then to share these with other members of their learning group. What is particularly important about Jamie’s approach is that learners were asked to critically reflect on their own personal ways of perceiving nature and to foreground feelings from senses other than sight (i.e. sound, touch, smell, taste). By doing this, learners were creating their own tacit knowledge about nature, which was additional to their sighted experience. It was individualised, particular and specific to the context of their sensing. In this way, learners were encouraged to re-vision nature and to perceive it in a new light, as special and unique to the moment of their sensing the experience. In much the same way as Thompson (2008) emphasises developing a ‘new relationship’ (p.96) with nature, Jamie enabled learners to re-sense and explore ‘new ways’ (Jamie, 3.2.12:30) of perceiving nature.

Although Jamie provided opportunity for learners to re-vision their

relationships with nature, however, it emerged during discussions that her approach was underpinned by anthropocentric intentions. Jamie explained that her main objective within the ‘Writing Inspired by Your Surroundings’ course revolved around developing learners creative writing skills.

Encouraging learners to reflect on and engender deeper relationships with nature did not constitute one of Jamie’s identified learning objectives. Importantly, she ascribed a use to natural environments, in that they

contributed to the development of learners writing skills, and posited that the focus of the course was on ‘using the environment and place around you to inspire more stories’ (3.2.12:27). Jamie later added ‘although you’re looking at the environment, what you’re learning are the techniques you can use in any form of writing’ (3.2.12:29). There was evidence here, within the fabric of the course, that an instrumental value or usefulness was being associated with nature.

Despite this concern, Jamie’s approach provided an important contribution to the research. Her approach further illustrated that examples of practice that

engendered experiential and presentational ways of knowing (Heron and Reason, 1997) already exist within the adult community education service where I work. Like Pat, Jamie was also willing to share her example of practice with other practitioners. I considered this particularly important because of her focus on foregrounding learners’ felt experiences from senses other than sight.

4.3 Conclusion

I consider there to be three important observations that can be drawn out from these early findings. Firstly, all practitioners perceived themselves as more separate than connected to nature and predominantly associated an

instrumental value with nature. These perceptions and values expressed by practitioners are significantly discordant to those extolled within innovative environmental pedagogies that place human kind as an integral part of the natural community and emphasise an inherent intrinsic value toward nature. Secondly, at the start of my research there is indication of a rhetoric-reality gap between the innovative environmental pedagogies proposed by theorists and the realities of teaching in a local government adult community education service. Most practitioners integrated transmissive environmental pedagogies into practice that had a resource focus. Thirdly, although there is indication of a rhetoric-reality gap, three practitioners integrated environmental pedagogies into practice that engendered learners’ experiential and presentational ways of knowing (Heron and Reason, 1997). These examples of practice were offered up to other practitioners to reflect upon during the period of

intervention. In the next chapter I will analyse and report on practitioners’ responses to these and other examples of practice that were introduced during the period of intervention.