Chapter 9: Necessary Tensions Within Present Possibilities: Juxtaposing Voices from the Field to Envision Sustainability Teaching and Learning

Schools today can be a lonely and fearful place for teachers and students. Institutional structures such as grades, standardized performance measures, and siloed disciplines separate and build walls between teachers and students (Olson, 2009; Palmer, 1998). Within this model of isolation, teachers teach, and students are supposed to learn. Teachers work alone in their classrooms surrounded by youth they are responsible for teaching. Isolation has primacy over the relational, and separateness itself influences how teachers think; teaching becomes about educational processes, curriculum, and management—a dangerous direction (Bingham, Sidorkin, & Noddings, 2004) that lulls us away from meaningful education.

Cultural myths of teaching whisper or shout at educators that everything depends on them and that they must “know,” since the teacher is the expert (Britzman, 2003). As subjects operating in a highly rational world with efficiency as its aim, teachers are compelled to find ways to control learning in order to reduce the unpredictability and complexity, both antithetical to efficiency, that naturally accompany deep learning since to “explore with students the dangerous territory of the unknown . . . the student teacher must devalue her or his own power” (Britzman, 2003, p. 224). Student actions, ideas, and questions that challenge this order in ways that are too messy, complex, or challenging are often silenced as teachers and students hide behind the plan for the day or a set of behavioral norms. Playing out their roles with artificial boundaries and separation, teachers and students exist in isolation despite their relative proximity, objects instead of subjects who interrelate with one another and the subject matter to be understood.