Care-full Collectives
Tact-full, thought-full, response-full relations
Ancient wisdom—the Law of the Land—shows the way to an ethics of care, love and
response-ability with more-than-human beings.
(Poelina, Webb, Wooltorton, & Godden, 2024, p. 36)
While it is now becoming manifestly clear to many educators, education scholars, and school students that “the Anthropocene is arguably the great educational challenge of our times” (Smith, et al., 2017, p. 196), when this inquiry started ten years ago (2015), there was little educational research framed as such. The inquiry on which this chapter is based, was partially in/formed by the omissions of climate change in the curriculum and the Capitalocene’s impact on educational futures through intrenchant “petro-pedagogies” (Eaton & Day, 2019). Now, the daily reminders, the mainstream recognition of the anthropogenic climate crisis, and the young people calling on political and educational change, pose a massive “reckoning for education” (Verlie & Flynn, 2022). That includes reckoning with the ongoing impact of colonisation against the ethics of care, what Weintrobe (2020) calls a “culture of uncare”.
To substantively address this culture, education and research concerned with ‘the environment’ must cease ignoring the indelible marks of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practices of caring for Country. As Poelina et al. (2024) urge, all the lessons we now need may be learned through the “ancient wisdom” that is the “Law of the Land”, a sophisticated praxis of more-than-human care. Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues the colonial relationship with land is defined by “possession”, and Kimmerer (2020) asserts that while capitalist and colonialist relationship with land has been defined by greed, it can and must change, lyrically proposing:
Land is the residence of our more-than-human relatives, the dust of our ancestors, the holder of seeds, the makers of rain; our teacher. Land is not capital to which we have property rights; rather it is the place for which we have moral responsibility in reciprocity for its gift of life (n.p.).
Learning-with this placetime means attuning care-fully to the Land, the places where we live (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014), which is a way of bearing witness to these ongoingly life-destroying, relationally reductive practices. Learning with this time calls forth the praxis of sympoethical withnessing. This embedded praxis of ‘paying attention’ is not “simply an epistemic project” rather, Rose and van Dooren (2016) argue, “it is about the difficult work of learning to live well with others in this challenging time” (p. 120). While witnessing the lives and livelihoods of all the human and nonhumans with whom we live is increasingly important as the sixth great extinction event is underway (Kolbert, 2014), the onto-epistemic and emplaced ethical praxis of withnessing that emerged within Alicia’s doctoral inquiry, takes those more-than-human ethical relations to another level, enduring and recuperating with our sympoietic relations not just observing the ‘other’ in ‘their’ peril.
Through the riparian relations of being with specific geocultural places in the vibrant world outside schools, by transversing the deterministic boundaries of disciplines, ages, cultures, species, genders, place and time, learning as care-full collectives becomes a praxiological proposition for making school and scholarship less extractive, less exhausting, and more attuned to well-becoming-with the world. While “in this neoliberal era of productivity agendas and hyper-individualism,” Taylor et al. (2012) seek to story education research with “children’s relations to the more-than-human world” and argue, “by paying these relations more attention, we can do our bit to defuse the human-centric conceits of rampant individualism” (p. 81). As such, the Common Worlds Research Collective (2020) has made the urgent call to shift the focus of education to “learning to become with the world.” It is this ‘withness’ that we have taken up in this chapter, especially lively in the data stories of Green Monsters to which we now re-turn.
Through various situated practices, the boys of Green Monsters formed new kinds of attachments. They cultivated care not as an act of charity or obligation, but as a mutualistic, reciprocal relationship—one that rendered them response-full to specific relations, to kin, and the riparian sympogogies which became response-fulfilling of more-than-human care. The creek and its many relational beings became entangled with the lives of the young people and the young people part of the web of riparian relations.
The process was not without messiness, contradiction or struggle, rather, it was through this messy, differentiated, negotiated entanglement that the boys began to feel a sense of belonging in ways that standard Euro-settler, classroom-based, individualised, sedentary schooling had not provided. These theories and practices have now been addressed at length in early childhood education (see for example Murris, 2016; Nxumalo, 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015) but as far as the authors are aware, not with the young people of high school settings with their more-than-human kin.
So re-turning to Kimmerer’s (2013) urge to cultivate ‘ceremonies’ that help us “remember to remember” (p. 5), we wonder, what practices do we have in schools to ‘remember to remember’ the knowledges the planet needs us to know? During Green Monsters, we started to think about the purposes of learning in the Merri Merri riparian in the sense of what does this place need us to know? What do we need to know to take care with this place? What do we really need to re-member? And by extension, we discussed the trans-local pressures of this time (global heating, climate change, mass extinctions, social upheaval), wondering what does the planet now need us to remember? We continue to consider what the situated ‘ceremonies’ could be at school to remember to remember:
we are more-than-human
to become response-full at school to every relation
to practice care with/in our more-than-human collectives
Perhaps more important than any, to remember that we become-with the world because of care. How affecting could these expressions of ‘ceremony’ continue to be at this state high school, in this recuperating settler colonial city, in this time of “environmental and social unravelling” (Fletcher, 2020)? What practices could we continue to cultivate to ‘remember to remember’ these earthbound, place-responsive knowledges? Poetic contemplation and responding-with the riparian through walking-with and collecting litter become Damon’s care-giving practices. Self-described as adamantly “anti-religious,” Damon agreed these practices became a kind of ritual, a situated ceremony of learning-with this riparian place, where learning for him was not about extracting knowledge but about caring-with this cultureplace by refusing the refuse.
Revitalising schools and scholarship with the collectivised care praxis of sympoethical withnessing
What then, are the affordances of these stories for the future of education and research? As educators and scholars, we are challenged to consider how care ethics—rooted in relational, situated, and response-full practices—might transform our approaches to teaching, learning, and inquiring with/in more-than-human worlds in crisis. In times of ecological disasters, social fragmentation, and growing uncertainty, educators and scholars must ask: How can education be reimagined as a practice of care—not just for the environment, or for each other, but with our situated more-than-human relations? How can a more-than-human ethics of care be embraced in research practices, and in doing so, create spaces for new ways of knowing, relating, and caring with the world?
This chapter proffers an invitation to reflect on these questions, not as abstract principles but as practices made with others in the messiness of everyday life. The boys in this study, through their relationship with their riparian community, began to affect and be affected by the world differently—through care, through thought, through response, through an intimate, relational knowing that will continue to shape their lives and the liveliness of their riparian relations.
Through this relational entanglement, they taught us that care, in its many expressions, is not just an action, but a way of being with the world, and a way of learning to become fully human, which is always already more-than-human (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019; Haraway, 2008), in a time of entangled crises, where ‘Paradise’ is a specifically locatable place—the Merri Merri riparian—that is not ‘lost’, but beset with the carelessness and tactlessness of colonial control, capitalist extraction, and neoliberal atomisation. But, cautions Myers (2021, n.p.), “Edenic visions of nature are not the kind of green that will save us.” Rather, it is through the messiness of rooting ourselves in situated care collectives.
Through this chapter a more expansive notion of care for education has been mobilised. Care in education has long been argued by figures such as Noddings (1998), who writes of the process of responding "toward the living other with feeling that responds to the other's condition" (Noddings, 1998, p.161). Compelling educators to not just teach children content but "show children how to care, engage regularly in dialogue with them about care, and provide many opportunities for them to practice care," Noddings (1998, p.161) was key in establishing the idea of schools as places of learning how to express care. In this chapter, we have expanded on care in education by thinking with the situated, non-idealised “matters of care” with a “more-than-human world” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, 2017).
Relating-with the riparian, through the early practices in Green Monsters of be-ing, was a way of becoming different kinds of learning bodies; becoming riparian relations. Being-with the riparian, regularly and over the prolonged period of time of the school term, became a multipronged and differentiated process of becoming-with this place as learning bodies otherwise. Learning as becoming-with (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020) means becoming among the “affective ecologies” of a dynamic, multispecies more-than-human community, and gradually attuning to the “involutionary momentum” (Hustak & Myers, 2012) of becoming involved-with each other.
Becoming involved-with the riparian over time, afforded practices of becoming tact-full, thought-full, and response-full. Altogether becoming more care-full with the in-betweenness of the Merri’s riparian zone, and the in-between inter/trans/disciplinary learning that took place. In this biome, caring was a collectivised, relational practice that defied individualised ontologies. These gradually emerged as a situated praxis that we have called ‘sympoethical withnessing’. These practices refuse the “metaphysics of individualism” (Barad, 2007, p. 393) whose rigid categories produce the neoliberal ‘individual student’ who ‘succeeds’ and later becomes a ‘worker’ who ‘consumes’ (Apple, 2006).
Instead, a sympoethical praxis of withnessing decomposes the individualised human learner by turning them affirmatively into the more-than-human humus to cultivate care-full collectives of multigenerational and multispecies webs (Haraway, 2016). This process does not ‘dissolve’ or reduce personal differences, creativities and multiple belongings, but instead proliferates differences, cultivating differentiated cooperation and belonging-with the world, taking the pressure off ‘individual success’ and refusing the reductions of competition. What if ‘success’ at school meant caring with the more-than-human relations of school lifeworlds?
The urge of Indigenous scholars, following the longterm commitment of traditional ecological knowledge practices across the planet, and decolonial theory, is to become more care-full ancestors (Bawaka, et al, 2019; Couzens, 2016; Cumpston, 2020; Poelina et al, 2024). Kimmerer (2020) urges humans, whoever and wherever we are, to re-member our common belonging with the land. Situated places are where justices are made. Especially in colonising and colonised places, educators and researchers must weave this praxiological narrative into every course we teach, every article we write and every initiative we collaborate on.
Counter to schools and scholarship being the perpetrator of silence and harm, Silova (2021) argues education could be the ‘connective tissue’ where we learn more deeply how to become caring with the world:
Education could be a space to learn how to attune to and coexist in these ‘intertwined worldings’ [Barad, 2007] in reciprocal and recuperative relationships. Located at the intersection of different worlds[...]education could help us learn how to encounter and engage with different worlds and world-views, both human and more-than-human (p. 601).
We can only do this in our specifically situated, geocultural places, and the place of becoming care-full (tact-full, thought-full, response-full) for this chapter has been the Merri Merri riparian in the Land of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people in Narrm Melbourne.
These sympoethical practices take time. Paradoxically the placetime of the Merri Merri riparian in the “colonial Anthropocene” (Gómez-Barris, 2019), asks of us to learn these slow sympogogies quickly, as Tsing et al. (2017) write, “perhaps counterintuitively, slowing down to listen to the world—empirically and imaginatively at the same time—seems our only hope in a moment of crisis and urgency” (p. M8). This kind of schooling moves to a very different onto-ethical (Barad, 2010) tempo to neoliberal settler-capitalist education. This temporality expands rather than reduces, cultivating the possibility of and for recuperating-with the world, for intergenerational ongoing. “To become truly invested in the protection of country”, argues Birch (2018), “we must become responsible for the health and survival of the non-human” (p. 13), in sites of education and every where.
The praxis of sympoethical withnessing in schools and scholarship is a propositional response to start these care-full commitments where we are, with whatever we have to hand, within motley collectives, not, as Noddings (2018[1995]) has argued, through an ‘impartial’ morality via ‘deontology’, ‘utilitarianism’ or ‘consequentialism’ (see also Hansson, 2024), but with the care ethics of this expanded more-than-human ontological imagination.
Both Noddings (2013) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) proffer that care ethics are non-transactional and multidirectional, happening in relational webs, that is, by caring with relations with the world not just ‘for others’. In Green Monsters, these care ethics emerged through the clumsy, formative practices of more-than-human sympoethical withnessing; our practice of enacting ‘little justices’. Rousell (2018) makes a case for “doing little justices” that “can be as small as a movement, a word, an image, or an idea that brings care and attention to the fragilities, entanglements, and uncertainties of life in the Anthropocene” (p. 2). In schools and other education sites, these ‘little justices’ must become collectivised and permeable, leaking throughout the organisation to sustain more-than-human care within situated relations.
Collectivising care across the entrenched binaries of nature and culture in hyper individualised, neoliberal, settler schooling systems, is an intentionally complex pursuit, de-simplifying the sterile standardising of what ‘school success’ looks like and the purposes of education in this precarious moment. The approach to collectivising care through more-than-human sympoethics is a naturalcultural confluence of the various prerogatives the world is beckoning for and must reckon with which are “the conjoined issues of interspecies and intergenerational justice” (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015, p. 508), which still includes humanitarian justice. As such, this necessitates commitment to anticolonial and postcapitalist ethics both materially and socioculturally as situated enactments of ‘little justices’, which are becoming increasingly pertinent as force-full members of the geopolitical world perform big acts of care-less authoritarian injustices.
The Common Worlds Research Collective (2020, p2) argues:
“it is time to step up to the challenge and fundamentally reconfigure the role of education and schooling in order to radically reimagine and relearn our place and agency in the world”.
As such, we wonder, are the places of learning and inquiry capable of beholding this time, and all it requires of us, with care? Do we have the capacity to “knit together new webs of care” to cultivate “more just and creative” “carescapes” (Kenner, 2018, p. 183)? The riparian relations of the Green Monsters collective provided a placetime to momentarily weave a more-than-human ‘carescape’ through the situated practices of sympoethical withnessing. How can this be sustained, enriched, manifested ongoingly in different ways in every site of learning?
Haraway (2016) asserts that “the established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress” (p. 51). In response, Silova (2021) wonders whether educators would agree with Haraway’s assertion and if so, “how would we respond?” Compelling educators (and scholars) to consider the idea, Silova argues (2021) “today more than ever, our survival depends on our response—and our response-ability—to engage and remake worlds together ... Sympoietically” (p. 610).
In conclusion, we expand on Silova’s call to respond not just sympoietically on an onto-epistemic level, but through the collectivised care praxis of sympoethical withnessing. That is, recuperating-with the world care-fully by responding with our (trans)local, more-than-human (educational) communities, across all the differentiated-relational inflections of faunal, floral, fungal, elemental, geocultural, intergenerational becoming with and as the world. Knowing and loving our worlds, our planet, can only happen with care, through the praxis of care-full sympoethical withnessing.
Can you imagine what practices this entails in your site of schooling or scholarship?
* For a list of references, please see this document (at the bottom of the excerpt)