In/Appropriate Education in a Time of Mass Extinction: Composing a Methodological Imbroglio of Love and Grief

This qualitative, transdisciplinary, process-relational, autoecographic, arts-informed study considers the meaning of education as the Sixth Extinction unfolds, when human’s are radically changing planetary systems, including climate, causing alarming declines in biodiversity and calling into question the viability of the human. Educational institutions appear unwilling and/or unable to respond to multiple cascading eco-cultural crises. Despite paradigmatic changes in science and philosophy in the past century, and scientific evidence of systemic degradations to the planet, educational leaders barely acknowledge the import of changes happening; educational institutions largely reproduce an outmoded, now perilous worldview. The significance of educational inertia and disconnection—in tandem with Thomas Berry’s call to “reinvent the human at the species level”¬—leads to my question: What does it mean to educate in a time of mass extinction? An emergent, experimental, blended meta-methodology co-arises as conceptual score—a hermeneutics of becoming—that borrows elements from phenomenological, poststructural, dialogical, and alchemical hermeneutics; as well as autoecographic, poïetic/poetic, a/r/tographic, and expressive arts enquiry. Leaning into concepts that emerge from process-relational philosophy as the basis of an enquiry into image and meaning—I hermeneutically engage/encounter multiple “texts,” broadly conceived to include words/language, ideas, elder professors, the more-than-human, place, art, dreams, and personal story.