Challenging technocratic logics in teacher education: Seeking guidance from Indigenous and Aristotelian traditions

Introduction

Ways of framing and enacting education based on codifiable, propositional knowledge—knowledge that easily conforms to spaces in rubrics and checklists—tends to deemphasize and devalue the who and the where in educational relations through a focus on the what. Such points of emphasis are miseducational in that they reveal a constrained view of knowledge in education as being a collection of abstracted things (the curriculum plan) that an archetypal teacher delivers to a nameless and placeless mass of students. As curriculum scholar Ted Aoki (1993) warns us—the “curriculum as plan” bears only a resemblance to itself as it is engaged in the context of a classroom as the “lived curriculum.” Knowledge is given breath, substance and meaning as it becomes artfully lived by people coming together with others with unique histories, motives, intentions, and orientations. Curriculum, as lived with body/minds ¹ in the world, does not conform to the plan. As Elizabeth Ellsworth emphasizes: it is “the thinking–feeling, the embodied sensation of making sense, the lived experience of our learning selves that makes the thing we call knowledge” (Ellsworth, 2005: 1). These perspectives on the necessity of educational knowledge that emerges through lived relations are often silenced or marginalized in formal educational settings through technocratic logics that are skeptical of knowledge that is not framed in abstract, propositional, universal, and codifiable ways (Kerr, 2012; Toulmin, 1990). In this article, I will be arguing that we need to reject the framing of education as a technical-rational ² enterprise achieved through technocratic logics, and seek guidance from traditions that perceive knowledge as embodied.

As an educator, I am certainly troubled by the epistemic limitations of technical-rational forms of education, but am further troubled by matters of social inequity and colonialism within which this orientation is enmeshed. As Richard Bernstein highlights, technical-rationality in contemporary society is a mode of effecting domination (Bernstein, 1983: 156). Following decolonial scholars, I would argue that an epistemic commitment to technocratic logics emerges from a colonial context that invisibilizes the body and place of beings (human and more-than-human) in knowledge making practices, in order to obscure the differing material and discursive effects that are experienced by body/minds in located places. As Anabal Quijano (2007) argues, the European paradigm of technical-rational knowledge not only grew in the context of colonialism; it was a foundational part of the power structure of domination. Acknowledging that modernity is coincident and related to the rise of the nation-state, and coloniality was secured at that time, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009a) contends that we are globally in a situation of epistemological monopolization that has produced a monoculture of rigorous scientific knowledge that is inadequate to understand meaningful questions. Santos (2009b) argues that we need to engage an ecology of knowledges when addressing our questions—arguing that the infinite epistemic diversity in the world, emerging from different ontologies, illuminates the possibilities and absences in our own ways of knowing the world.

It is with appreciation for an ecology of knowledges in educational questions, as well concerns for social equity and epistemic authenticity, that I engage with Aristotelian and Indigenous scholarship. I seek to be “taught by” ³ traditions of thought and practice that provide a critical counter-perspective to technical-rational knowledge practices, through attending to embodied ethical engagements. I engage these texts seeking guidance on what Dwayne Donald refers to as ethical relationality—“an ecological understanding of human relationality that does not deny difference, but rather seeks to understand more deeply how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other” (Donald, 2012: 103). As I have been reading and thinking in more detail about Aristotelian and Indigenous traditions of thought and practice over the last decade, I have appreciated that both can help me with my educational aspirations. Both lines of thought and practice are non-dualistic, but also emphasize the notion of wisdom gained through experience of living a meaningful and worthwhile life that becomes embodied in the wise person. In Indigenous texts this is the Elder, and in Aristotelian texts, this is the Phronimos. In this article, I will engage with Aristotle's texts from the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) (Aristotle, 1998) and De Anima (DA) (Aristotle, 2002) that I frame as an ethics of knowing and being in practice, and Indigenous scholar Kundoque Jacquie Green's text “Reclaiming Haisla Ways: Remembering Oolichan Fishing” that I frame as knowing through place and ethical relation. My intent in drawing together these texts is to highlight the resonances and some ontological distinctions in relation to knowledge as embodied without subsuming one into the other.

I also am aware that my relation to the texts and modes of engaging with the texts are neither innocent nor neutral (Ceci, 2000). As to Aristotle, his texts emerge from a social milieu of naturalized elitism, and Aristotle's references to citizens do not include women, slaves, children, or non-Greeks. While I would acknowledge that elitism is a deeply problematic feature of Aristotle's texts, I believe I bring a different set of sensibilities to his work through my social equity concerns. I see my engagement as haunted without being determined by the elitist elements—much like my own non-innocent engagement with texts in the context of privilege. I would also point out that as a Euro-descendant Settler ⁴ in Canada, and the colonial realities that Indigenous peoples here continue to resist, I engage Indigenous texts carefully and with mentorship to attempt to avoid appropriations and misguided interpretations. I select Green's texts not only in my appreciation for her epistemic contributions, but also her positioning as both an academic scholar and Indigenous community member. Her texts engage translations across cultural contexts, and assist me in my own challenges in interpretations that emerge from being raised within Euro-Western understandings.

Aristotle: An ethics of knowing and being in practice

For Aristotle, the ways by which we come to know are conditioned by what is to be known, and in book VI of the NE, he details five intellectual excellences (or virtues) by which “the soul possesses truth” (NE 1139b15-17): techne (technical or productive reasoning), episteme (scientific reasoning), phronesis (practical wisdom), sophia (theoretical wisdom), and nous (intuitive reasoning). These brief bracketed translations are provided through David Ross' translation of the NE, and in my view, provide accessible language within which to relate to Aristotle's concepts in Ancient Greek. ⁵ These five ways of knowing are all arête (virtues and excellences), and discussed by Aristotle as always in some way combined in any situation, yet each may be required to take the lead depending on the nature of what is to be known. My analysis is mostly directed at phronesis to inform an understanding of embodied ethical knowledge required for teaching practice.

Phronesis is an intellectual excellence that is concerned with the particularity of ethical living in community that is underdetermined by codes, principles, and standards. Aristotle is not primarily concerned with establishing rules for correct behavior, but with cultivating moral and intellectual excellences of character that are directed to an ethical and flourishing life in community (eudemonia). Steutel and Carr (1999) point out that the NE details an aretaic ethical approach, wherein there is concern over action and an evaluative idea of excellence, particularly with “the evaluation of persons, their characters, intentions and motives” (Steutel and Carr, 1999: 8). Phronesis provides insight to knowing in practical living in community that is oriented towards discerning and being responsive to what is kalon (noble and fine), thus distinguishing an evaluative capacity towards the good in relational contexts (Kerr, 2011; Vokey, 2001; Vokey and Kerr, 2011). Daniel Vokey distinguishes the kind of intrinsic goodness that Aristotle has in mind as not being relative to human interest or desire, but is good because it “embodies or actualizes what merits being valued because it is good” (Vokey, 2001: 258). It is through an embodied direct apprehension of the good that one can recognize inherent goodness through the virtues of knowing in practical matters. ⁶

Within the NE Aristotle clarifies that one cannot expect the same sort of precision in phronesis as in the exercise of other excellences of knowing—and particularly differentiates phronesis from episteme and techne. For Aristotle, this difference is due to the lack of fixity of the subject matter:

As we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject-matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity…the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion. (NE 1104a1-5)

In my interpretation of the NE phronesis is primarily concerned with harmonizing reason and emotion in the ethical life. Aristotle sets the stage for his discussion of phronesis in book VI through stating that excellence of character is concerned with making decisions involving a balance of right reason and right desire that results in good action (NE 1139a23-26). Aristotle also makes a statement of this sort in book II, wherein he clarifies that reason and emotions are intertwined in the soul and thus inform each other in a well ordered life—identifying phronesis as the intellectual virtue that completes each of the moral virtues and directs virtuous action in this harmonious manner (NE, II, Sections 5 and 6). ⁷ I see this idea of balancing reason and emotion as a key feature of the embodied nature of teaching and learning in relation—and a key feature of teaching in schools. In this way, phronesis informs the excellence in deliberation needed to direct and prompt the actions of giving the right amount, of the right thing, for the right reasons, to the right person, on the right occasion (Hursthouse, 1999: 12). The embodied and practical aspect of phronesis, as action responsive to particular situations and relations, is emphasized in Aristotle's writing on the Phronimos. The Phronimos is the embodiment of wisdom through refined perception and discernment achieved through a lifetime of thoughtful participation in practical human affairs. As Aristotle states: “regarding phronesis we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it” (NE 1140a24).

Aristotle introduces the concept of phantasia in De Anima as accounting for the movement from our embodied experience of the world to phronesis (DA 428a24-30). ⁸ Aristotle argues that phantasia are the imaginative movements that come to us based on our sense perceptions that persist over time. Martha Nussbaum considers phantasia a crucial cognitive faculty in which an individual comes to perceive an object in the environment as a certain sort of thing (Nussbaum, 1978: 255). Malcolm Lowe adds to this cognitive understanding through distinguishing between the mind acting apprehensively, whereby the mind acquires thoughts through experience of the senses, and autonomously, which begins once the mind has thoughts (Lowe, 1993: 115–116). Lowe thus also affirms an important intellectual dimension into apprehension of the body/mind that is not reliant on discursive-rational argumentation that is more characteristic of episteme. Importantly, this apprehension is enhanced through repeated experiences over time that serves to refine perception and related understanding.

Nussbaum (1990) makes a link between the role of the emotions in thought with both desire and the deliberative aspects of phantasia. I would argue this is a crucial aspect of considering the intellectual/emotional aspects of the body/mind wholistically. Nussbaum acknowledges that there are strong views (both ancient and modern) that the emotions obscure rationality, and that imaginative thought can be seen to misdirect the emotions (Nussbaum, 1990: 76). Nussbaum argues that to fully see a situation in all of its features requires an acknowledgement that “perception is not merely aided by emotions … but the emotions are themselves modes of vision, or recognition” (Nussbaum, 1990: 79). Nussbaum argues that the emotions thus contribute to “a full recognition or acknowledgement of the nature of the practical situation,” clarifying that the emotional response is “part of what knowing, that is truly recognizing or acknowledging, consists in” (Nussbaum, 1990: 79).

Aristotle's words, and those of his commentators, provide an enhanced understanding of the ways a body/mind in ethical relations perceives, thinks, and acts in context—how we come to know and act in ethical ways. These ideas provide educators with guidance on knowing through discernment of the fine-grained particulars of the learning context within complex relations. I have also been taught by Indigenous scholars in the area of Southern British Columbia about these considerations on embodied knowledges to address my questions about educational practice. While my previous work engaged with the work of five Indigenous scholars, in this article, I will focus on one of those scholars, as her work helped me pull together a more wholistic understanding of ontological distinctions in embodied knowing through a located Indigenous perspective.

Green: Knowing through place and ethical relation

Kundoque Jacquie Green is from the Killer Whale clan of the Haisla Peoples, and is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. In her text, Green's highlights the importance of story as a way to understand Haisla identity and knowledge that fully acknowledges people and place in ethical relations. Green articulates detailed stories of oolican fishing to illustrate the relationships between land, culture, knowledge, and identity. She emphasizes these points through her story of fishing with her father and learning the stories. Through the stories marked by actual places on the land as they move through the territory, she understands ethics, being, relation, and her identity as Haisla—importantly the stories and practices are shared in deeply caring relations. The way and manner her father interacts with her as she learns and becomes, melds with the significance of the more-than-human they are with, the deep awareness of where they are, and the protocols of being in Haisla territory.

Green's writing about Haisla oolichan fishing and processing makes an important connection between embodied knowing, traditional practices, and ethical relations. As Green conveys: “The entire process of oolican fishing included teaching respect, honor, modelling our relationship with the land, the importance of family and community” (Green, 2008: 18). Green describes in detail the onerous and repetitive practices of harvesting and processing oolican into kglateeh (oolichan grease), as well the specific practices and responsibilities required of community members. She brings attention to the idea that it is through repetition that relationships and relational values develop. Green highlights that the communal nature of oolican fishing and processing developed important communal understandings: “Many diverse families were in the oolican camps. They helped each other with varied tasks; this helping is what our people call gyawaglaab, meaning ‘helping one another’. For Haisla people, oolican fishing generates this collective aspect throughout the community” (Green, 2008: 19).

Importantly, these practices are not just happening anywhere, and involving any random sort of activity. The practices themselves are in a specific place and concern an important aspect of the Haisla identity. As Green iterates, the practices developed: “in Kuqwajeequas territory. This is where our existence as Haisla began, where the sustenance of our being evolves, and our creation story about our relationship to oolichans” (Green, 2008: 14). The work of harvesting and processing is shown as inter-generational, thus allowing for the teaching of the importance of specific places, practices, and stories. The traditional practice requires knowing and timing in accordance with the “functions of environment, seasons, weather, and animals,” but also knowing how to be in terms of patience and respect so that everything “would be processed in the best way possible” (18). The territory and practice is embedded in identity and the way to go about relationships with the land, more-than-human relations and community members, but also non-community members. Green highlights that the role of trading kglateeh in neighboring territories has developed deep understandings of how to conduct respectful relationships based in notions of interdependence with those outside the territory (Green, 2008: 19).

Green explains that there are important ceremonies such as naming, cleansing, memorial, and other sorts of community-gathering events, and these various ceremonies sustain laws, traditional teachings, and identity (Green, 2008: 13). She pays specific attention to practices and understandings involved in the naming ceremony. Green notes in detail the specifics of witnessing and reciprocity. She draws my attention to ethics as being engaged in embodied practices and protocols of reciprocity. Through Green's text, I am able to understand that embodiment in knowledge is possible through attending to relations—and the limitations of an anthropocentric focus in ethics and learning. That in her orientation, becoming Haisla is possible through participating in the practices in the places that the practices developed and made sense through the stories in caring relations—with the human and more-than-human.

From Green, I understand how embodied knowing needs to be experienced within relationships. Her explanation of intergenerational aspects of knowledge flowing through embodied activity, brought out the importance of knowing being transferred in deeply caring relationships. The relationships of child-adult, oolican-fisher, Haisla-neighbor, and people-land are characterized not just as deserving respectful acknowledgement, but also as requiring the utmost care and attention as performed through an ethically centered body/mind. In my view, this illustrates the enmeshed connection of knowing how to be and knowing how to do in order to know anything with ethical responsibility. In this way, embodied knowing requires care and respect in relations of teacher-learner and knower-to be known. These ideas on returning and refining highlight that a learning encounter is not always an encounter with newness, but pedagogically requires repeated encounters with what is already familiar. It is to refine knowing through repeated experience and attending to the nuances and departures and to appreciate the layers of knowledge in all of our pedagogical encounters.

Haisla and Aristotelian traditions in teacher education

Engaging what I have learned from Aristotelian and Haisla traditions in my work in teacher education has been a thoughtful, multi-layered, and experiential ongoing event—full of promise and challenge (see Kerr, 2014, for the complications of a Settler working in teacher education with Indigeneity). For this article, a summary and discussion of what I have been taught through the texts completely exceeds this format. I can only point out some significant resonances and distinctions between these traditions that inform my teaching practice, and a particular activity I designed in teacher education that emerged from being taught by these texts. Key to both traditions is that the possibility of being able to engage the complexity of knowing and being in the world emerges from the good and our ability to recognize it—and we learn this in and through our relationships with experienced others. In this way, knowing is an active and contextual practice that happens in caring relationships with attentiveness to the particularity of the context—we become through this practice and in relations. Importantly, our learning is not based on a succession of new experiences, but repetition and refinement of experiences over time to discern the layers, patterns, and complexities. The necessity of seeking balance of the intellectual/emotional in learning—through story and/or direct experience—is approached through attentiveness to ethical relations between knower and to-be-known. A key distinction between the traditions that emerge for me is the ontological positioning in Green's analysis of the more-than-human and land as significant relations, and not only the context of experience, and that identity emerges through knowing in these relations. Significantly, ceremonies and protocols developed over generations embody and mark knowing and identity in both the context of community and the self. The self is therefore not at the center, but the community is the center of knowing, constituted by members whose identity emerges through community and relations of human and more-than-human.

The following activity in teacher education emerged from my learning from Indigenous and Aristotelian texts. The complexity of my positioning is consistently on my mind in this work, and I am aware that my attempts to engage Indigenous texts as a Settler may always lead to a form of appropriation. I would only state at this point that the practices are engaged with respect for what I have learned and have been taught, and emerge from a Settler interpretation of Indigenous knowledges combined with Ancient Western ideas—making no claims to having expertise in Indigenous knowledges. I further developed these practices through consultation with my colleagues with whom I was working at the time, while also developing these practices with Indigenous mentors that help me navigate the complexities of identity and place in relations of reciprocity. I see this particular activity as an event within an emerging learning community that centers ethics, identity, and relations to develop a generative context for embodied learning.

The place-based relational educational Autobiography (Autobiography)

The Autobiography assignment was supported through a full-day collaborative session with a cohort of 30 teacher candidates, the course instructors and program facilitators. ⁹ I invite you to consider the ideas presented in this section as emerging from a specific context (post-graduate, full time, one-year teacher certification program, course-based with tutorial and workshop components), where scheduling and ethos supported a high degree of collaboration amongst instructors/facilitators in planning and teaching. I invite you to imagine the possibilities within your own context. The Autobiography assignment itself is a multi-modal representation through prezi format of a person's ideas about teaching and learning told through personal cultural artifacts, varieties of text, image, and sound that symbolize the times, places, and relations through which these priorities emerged. The representation is meant to bring to the fore implicit and explicit assumptions and commitments of teaching and learning and unearth the unique relations and interpretations that have led to this decision to become or continue to refine understandings as an educator in this place.

The introduction and evolution of the assignment is key to the connection I make to Indigenous and Aristotelian texts. The assignment was embedded in a full day experience and engaged by all members of the cohort as a community within the first week of the program. Everyone was asked to come to the session having considered the informal and formal educational experiences that have led to this point in their life, and to bring with them symbolic or actual artifacts, images, text, sounds of their priorities of teaching and learning that relate to these experiences. They were also asked to bring with them an object that symbolizes a key aspect of their cultural ¹⁰ identity and a story that illuminates that object. Teacher candidates were also asked to collaboratively plan a potluck for the lunch session and to let instructors know what they would like them to bring, and that breakfast items, coffee/snacks would be available for everyone throughout the day.

On the actual day, the room was ready with food in an area accessible for socializing and chairs for everyone in a larger circle. There was time for socializing and then all were invited to sit in the chairs in a circle where an Indigenous circle protocol was then engaged. I was taught this protocol by Indigenous academic mentors through the oral tradition, and the felt experience of participating in such a circle is emotionally and intellectually powerful. The protocols are meant to provide opportunity for each person's voice in the circle to be heard uninterrupted, as matters of importance are engaged and the synergy of ideas draws the people in the circle together. The day itself involved the following elements: learning an Indigenous circle protocol; cultural identity sharing circle through story/significant object by everyone in the cohort (opportunity to become known to each other as unique and complexly related people); land-based silent walking experience (close attention to the multi-sensory experience of being on the land through sights, sounds, and feelings as it relates to your own current reality and memories attentive to the more-than-human); ending the walk at part of an outdoor Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds artistic installation Native Hosts (Heap of Birds, 1991/2007) for political discussion of Indigeneity and territory; potluck lunch led by teacher candidates (collaborative engagement to provide/share/enjoy food with others); and time to work independently and collaboratively on the Autobiography. Each experience in the day was planned to emphasize a balance of the intellect/emotion, ethical relations, storying, and recognizing the land and place where we were learning in a multi-sensory and political way. The Autobiographies were shared within smaller tutorial group times scheduled over the Fall term and were maintained on our on-line educational platform used by all students, instructors, and facilitators. This was only one day, but the priorities of ethical relations that are outlined here were continually engaged throughout the year-long program within different courses as well as planned events in our already scheduled workshop times each month. The Autobiography became a touchstone that I returned to throughout my courses with the teacher candidates, and to continue to map the journey and to document the transformations in perspective that occurred throughout the year in response to course-based activities that shared similar relational and place-based priorities.

The themes I was trying to engage through the activity, day and throughout the year were the possibilities of embodied knowing through ethical attentiveness in educational relations, and the experiential and political aspects of place to knowing. I tried to maintain attentiveness to the verb-like quality of knowing, and the creation of generative conditions for teaching and learning in and through embodied ethical relationships. This underscores the idea that teacher candidates are not interchangeable abstractions, but are real people with their own histories, desires, priorities, beliefs, and commitments. A consideration of the ways that instructors and students become known to each other as complex people was significant to planning—being invited to share food; to take leadership; to be led; to consider identity and complexity of who we are, and support each other in learning as we open ourselves to being taught. The opportunity to express ideas creatively was meant to honor our unique and overlapping ways of engaging in the world, but also to invite the emotional valence embedded in poetry, music, art, etc., to work harmoniously with a rational engagement with ideas. The land-based silent walk was attentive to our body's capacity to smell, hear, and feel the place of learning in which the campus is located, and consider the multiple relations in that place—and also introduced the complexity of our presence in place and how our knowing is then effected by the ethics of our relations to the more-than-human and Indigenous Nations on the territories we live and study. The structural ability to return to the Autobiography allowed opportunity for more fine-grained understanding and enrichment of ideas over time.

A significant piece of the actual day was my own attempt to embody a humble orientation to knowing, through communicating a lived appreciation for the infinite complexity of understanding and making meaning with others. We all participated in the activities and the actual assignment—not solely the teacher candidates—and we all shared in the conversations of how to consider this work from our unique ways of seeing the world.

Conclusion

Technical-rational educational approaches that attempt to reduce the complexity, uncertainty, and diversity of ways of knowing and being in the world are a pervasive and growing problem in education. I have argued that such approaches are miseducational through focusing on deliverable propositional knowledge that lacks significance and meaning for students and teachers in educational relations. Technocratic approaches are epistemically reductive through ignoring the richness, complexity, and ethical landscape that emerges from people and place in educational relations, but are also intricately tied to ongoing colonial relations of oppression and silencing. In this article, I have followed Santos's (2009a) decolonial approach of engaging an ecology of knowledges through my framing of an Aristotelian ethics of knowing and being through practice as well as Green's knowing through place and ethical relation. Through engaging with the ideas of Green and Aristotle, I engage with my own becoming as an educator, learner, and human being. This is to see education as indivisible from human desires for a good and worthwhile life—attempting to live a life full of meaning with recognition of ethical responsibility. I appreciate that these authors help me resist the technocratic logics within institutional educational settings through sharing understandings of embodied forms of knowledge as intellectual in ways that transcend the limitations of purely propositional forms—helping me exceed the what. They also inspire me to engage in education as a person immersed in trying to live a good life, rather than merely mastering a professional role as an educator or helping teacher candidates do the same. I appreciate the careful attention they provide to their scholarship that enables me to learn ways to engage with teacher candidates that are epistemically rich yet ethically responsible in my own attempts to embody meaningful learning contexts and social equity. I also acknowledge that I am fortunate to write this article on Treaty 1 territory and home of the Métis Nation, on the traditional lands of the Anishnabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples. I am nourished by the relations in this place and appreciate the opportunity to continue to be taught about ideas and practices for a good life here.