Performative Pedagogies: Religion and Ecology, Wilderness Spirituality Print

Bobbi Patterson, Emory University

Barbara (Bobbi) Patterson is a senior lecturer in the religion department and has served the Emory University community as the Associate University Chaplain, director of the Emory Scholars Program, founder of the Theory-Practice-Learning (TPL) Program, and a faculty associate of the Office of Sustainability Initiatives. Patterson received her BA from Smith College, MDiv from Harvard University, and PhD in religion from Emory University. Her current research focuses on the intersections of place, contemplative practices, and the ethics of sustainability. Patterson’s leadership in the classroom has earned her a Curriculum Award in Teaching Excellence from the Center for Teaching and an AAR Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has published numerous articles on the scholarship of teaching.

Into the Wild

Some colleagues consider the “Wilderness Spirituality” course I teach an extreme sport. We often work outside on campus and hike and camp on the weekends. Yes, whatever the weather. A foundational exercise asks students to spend weekly time paying attention to, interrogating, and writing reflectively about a specific place of their choice on campus, as follows:

Practicing Place: Discover and choose a place on campus — anywhere, but it must be on campus. Return to that place on a weekly basis. When you come to the location, take a few moments to settle yourself and to pay attention openly to the place as it is. Using contemplative analyses, open your categories and definitions and explore the place with your senses and intuitions. Examine details and describe the site. Then, if you like, you can make connections with readings we have done, memories, and scientific knowledge — any tools and perspectives are welcome. You need not write about your engagement with that place every week, though you must visit it every week. A regular report is welcome, but at least once a month you must include a portfolio entry about that specific place. It may be one of your required four entries or an extra fifth. See what happens by having a single place that you return to weekly — even for a short while. What are the a/effects on your insights, descriptions, categories, and aesthetic reflections in relation to that place over time?

The directions ask the students to approach this learning as a lived experience, engaging their bodies, minds, and affections before tuning in to their conceptual categories. They experiment with the possibilities of joining the ongoing lived performance that generates that place.

One objective of the assignment is to ask a generation of perpetually mobile, globally oriented people to immerse themselves in a particular local living system on a regular basis. Drawing their attention locally and turning down the speed of observation, a second objective asks them to further their investigations using tools gleaned from our texts on phenomenology and contemplative pedagogies (such as David Abram, Dorotheos of Gaza, Taliputra, and Thomas Merton). Several weeks into the class, portfolio entries attempting to eschew conceptual and linguistic categories and labels read like this: 

Begin with a smooth whoosh, baahaahaaaaaaa…of scent. Bum, BoomBOOMBOom, tat ratatatatatatttaaa as the green serrated discs begin to shuffle. (In plain language: A gentle breeze begins to blow. — written by a senior biochemistry major)

Dialogues about these experiences and course texts drove us toward performing learning as critical reasoning through intimate participation with life (Zajonc). I use the phrase "performative learning" to foreground intersubjectivity, gestures, speech, affections, and cognition as the initiating sources of understanding and comprehension in daily life. Highlighting lived learning as interdependence naturally raised questions of ethics and responsibility. Practices of walking meditation, small group work, and analyses of historical and cultural factors thickened the plot by revealing more information and meaning-laden spaces and interactions. Inquiry became journey and narrative routed through daily living. Students described it in various ways:  “I realize that I have been doing so much but actually aware of very little”; “I became an inhabitant with time, which triggered memories of places shaping my own past”; “Our relationship with the earth, however we imagine it, directly influences our treatment of the environment around us.”


Interested in exploring learning experiences within particular locales, I drew pedagogical strategies from recent theoretical and ethnographic studies on “performance” and “lived religion” (Bell; Flueckiger). We approached learning as “emergent” phenomena shifting in relation to contexts. This required the class and me to perform our intellectual lifeworks flexibly, adjusting pedagogical practices to the place and our experiences of and in it. Resituating Thomas Csordas’s work on somatic attention from anthropological theory to our class work, we initially privileged sensorial insights about experiences. Later, we added structured, critical thinking using reflective contemplative pedagogies (Zajonc; O’Reilley). We raised questions about gesture as power and exchange, observational perspectives, and other limitations of our place-based exercises. Sorting through these repertoires, questions of sustainability, economics, environments, and equity regarding local practices of observation and experience led to broader questions about power and categorizing, such as is found in case studies of sprawl and race-based economics in Atlanta.

Using our portfolio entries as triggers for inquiry-driven discussions, we analyzed texts and pushed our sensorial conclusions further. We evolved a class culture that became a living system of performative life-learning history. Our emergent narratives demonstrated connectedness and tension among ideas within our community, revealing differences in identity-histories, racial and ethnic backgrounds, class status, religious, and/or ethical assumptions. Rather than assume we had arrived at “answers,” these gaps and slippages kept us honest about being a living, learning system. We had, in the words of Mary Oliver, to “keep looking.” Research as communally performed narrative balanced our textual digging and critical thinking. Our emerging story explored physical, personal, and communal constellations of knowing and understanding performed intellectually, as well as through modes of being, values, and meaning (Jackson, 183–184).

One student, the youngest in the class, crafted the following ten points to offer an initial description of the learning experience she had from a course camp-out. She came to view it as her tale of performed learning throughout the semester.

     
 

Ten Things I’ve Learned: Preconceptions Torn Apart

1. It’s harder to sleep outdoors than I thought.
2. It’s easier to pee outside than I thought.
3. You can practice “Leave No Trace,” and the quality of your meals won’t suffer for it!
4. Out in the forest, my species is outnumbered. I am a guest.
5. When you are a guest here, you go to sleep when the forest goes to sleep.
6. “If you think daylight is just daylight, then it is just daylight.” — Mary Oliver
7. 20–25 pounds may be a lot to carry on one’s back for 1.6 miles, but nothing’s impossible.
8. When you’re camping with others, everyone is family.
9. Anyone can get along with everyone; we must simply learn to accept one another’s differences.
10. If everyone’s a leader, then no one will fall behind.

 
     

Performative teaching and learning provides opportunities to bushwhack, not an extreme sport. It is possible in “Research I, Highly Productive” schools like Emory University and in smaller liberal arts colleges. Engaging practices of somatic attention and contemplative reflective analysis requires a teacher standpoint of flexibility via interdependence with students and ordinary life. Some of us effectively use these pedagogies in smaller doses; they need not drive a whole class. Performance and practice may seem to be very fluid pedagogical categories, but in fact they offer an evolutionary framework that help our students to recognize where they are, to slow down, to focus, and to think what they are doing, to quote Hannah Arendt. 

I have also experimented with these performative pedagogies in our “Religion Internship” course. Serving in social service organizations throughout Atlanta, students practiced challenging their quick cognitive assumptions by paying more attention to the embodied and emotional dynamics of the living systems they collaborated with. We used several of the pedagogical approaches named above, including the structured portfolio. One senior biology student interning then with a mobile health unit and now practicing as a physician, wrote the following analytic entry sharing what performative learning offered her:

In an Intro to Bio course, you learn that certain genes, proteins, cells, etc., in our body are “turned on” or “turned off” at different points. They are either functioning/producing members of our system or they take up space. Later you learn that science is not that simple or straightforward but works along a spectrum of possibilities. But the boxes are hard to forget. Sometimes in the liberal arts, we desperately want to operate through such categories so we simplify individuals, institutions, and situations in order to better interact with them. Ms. Betty is 55 years old. She is homeless, mentally ill, most likely substance addicted. In simple scientific terms, she is “turned off,” she is a cell within the living social network that is no longer life sustaining; it is life draining. There are 20,000 people in Atlanta in that box. They have stories written on their bodies and emotions. The categorizing of medicine and science and the liberal arts may alleviate the symptoms of disease, but they won’t understand her pain. This touches on much more fundamental issues, our refusing to realize our connection within this world, as “cells” of sorts within a functioning, greater body. By seeing areas of this world as “other,” or in the “off” position, we destroy ourselves.

Resources

Bell, Catherine. “Performance,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: 205–224.

Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: A Handbook of Classroom Practices. Northampton, MA: The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, 2008.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Csordas, Thomas J. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (28 October 2009).

Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Jackson, Michael. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

O’Reilley, Mary Rose. Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook, 1998.

Zajonc, Arthur. “Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation.” Teachers College Record 108, no. 9 (2006): 1742–1759.

Syllabus - Religion and Ecology: Emory as Place Sustainability and Spiritual Practices - Patterson