Teaching Beyond the Curriculum
Abstract
In her 2021 manual of socioecological repair Hospicing Modernity the mixed heritage Brazilian academic Vanessa Andreotti recounts her experience of a near-lethal car accident and of the ensuing depression that led her, now at the threshold of suicide, to turn to her indigenous maternal community for help. What came of this turn, Andreotti tells us, has offered her a compass for surviving the systemic violence endemic to modernity. It also planted the seed of the Hospicing Modernity project through which she has been co-curating a praxis of ‘depth education’ to offer an equivalent ontological compass to young people living within metropolitan societies, largely separated from a direct experience of the living land. Replying to Andreotti’s story in both form and intent this paper interweaves personal experience and related critical reflection as it attempts to navigate the growing unease now haunting our cultural institutions – and haunting universities in particular: their common complicity in the intergenerational extermination project currently being enacted by minority world governments and corporate elites. A central focus of these reflections is to consider how our universities might foster and cultivate workable response-ability before the unthinkable predicament that is runaway global heating and socioecological collapse. With the late American ecologist David Orr it argues for an educational praxis rooted in a critical awareness of our radically vulnerable entanglement in the living biosphere: the bio-intelligent metabolism upon whose flourishing vitality all human lives depend.
Mat Osmond’s a writer and visual artist based in Cornwall. He’s currently co-curating a course in Ecological Citizenship at Falmouth University where he works as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Visual Communications. Mat was convenor for the arts and ecology research fellowship art.earth’s 2021 online summit on ecological grief and death cultures, Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change. His most recent illustrated poetry pamphlet The Black Madonna’s Song was published by Atlantic Press in 2020.