Marcus Bussey
University of the Sunshine Coast
Queensland Australia
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“How can we as educators help make our students whole if we are not committed to
becoming whole ourselves?” Aostre N. Johnson (1999: 108)
I want to reflect here not on what happens when I teach well, best to avoid such
hubris, but on what happens when, to paraphrase Woody Allen’s comment about life,
my teaching is about simply showing up. All teachers are familiar with these daily
tracts of time when we are hanging out with people, sharing, connecting, missing the
boat and generally mucking around. For me this is liminal time, where the mundane
dross of daily activity merges into the background of fertile shadowy possibilities. It
is on these occasions when I am at my most vulnerable and human and when the
deeper processes of the social and cosmic intersect and shape consciousness.
My reflections will be set against the backdrop of an entry I wrote for UNESCO’s
Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) on sustainable education (Bussey
2002). In this entry I mapped out a series of imperatives for sustainable education and
offered an holistic taxonomy, summarized below, of what such education might
entail. Here I want to offer a subjective account of how I arrived at the writing of this
article for EOLSS. I am doing this with Johnson’s question, cited above, as my
compass. Her analysis of education and its need for sacrament points a finger directly
at the teacher and the systems of intelligibility that create her/him. Thus she draws a
direct link between our life practice and the practice of teaching:

The teacher who would nurture the centering of students must be deeply
engaged in his or her own centering, simultaneously exploring both ‘inner’
and ‘outer’ worlds (ibid: 108).

Though the following is largely subjective I have always found it useful to anchor my
musings in the literature, so I will cite where ever it seems useful and thus offer the
reader some insight into my intellectual ‘DNA’. Furthermore, I will also offer a
‘peek’ into my sustainable education tool kit. Noting the uniqueness of all such
conceptual and practical summaries I draw attention to the necessity of thinking ‘out
of the box’ as a fundamental principle of all transformative education.
Finally, I am, of course, aware of the problematic nature of the term ‘sustainable’ and
seek to ground it in lived experience. In doing so I am not advocating for
sustainability curricula interventions, nor for greener or more ‘natural’ schools. What
I am recognising and endeavouring to engage is the loose, multiple and thoroughly
intimate face of an embodied approach to sustainable education (Le Grange 2004;
Bonnett 2006). But, to begin at the beginning, let me summarize the central feature of
my original article on sustainable education (Bussey 2002).
1 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Rana Alderman (1982-2007), former student from 1988-
1992, and beautiful human being.
2
Layered Sustainability
In EOLSS I argued for a layered approach to thinking about sustainability2. In this
way I sought to avoid essentialising the term, locking it into a recipe or an absolute
state. Instead I argued that it was something to be embodied, as a state of being, as an
orientation to life. In this I was working with the understanding that ‘reality’ is neither
a given nor purely subjective. Following Michael Bonnett (2006) I feel that “reality
itself is human-related, that things only ‘show up’ … in the space which is
consciousness” (ibid: 273). This situates me and my teaching in a phenomenological
‘space’ in which I am my consciousness, I do my consciousness, and that therefore I
teach my consciousness. And this being-doing-teaching all occur within a relationship
with those things which constitute reality.

Bonnett sums up this relational space that is consciousness beautifully:
Consciousness, alone, is not the author of things, it, itself, is only in its
relationship with things. Consciousness is nothing without its things: things
constitute consciousness as much as consciousness constitutes things.
Consciousness is the space where things stand forth and the precise quality
of conscious space at any moment is conditioned by these things in their
standing forth (with all their cultural significances). (ibid: 274)

The sense of this reciprocity is integral to my thinking about teaching. It provides the
foundation for a poetic engagement with curriculum and sustainability that I find to be
profoundly human. In being human it acknowledges the place that paradox, tension
and contradiction have in the classroom, and in educational thought in general. These
are the aporias of modernity and the post-material turn.

To manage the tensions involved in an embodied approach to education requires me
to manage the layered nature of consciousness as mapped below. Such a negotiation
requires integrity while recognising that the layered approach to thinking and
enacting sustainability is about living our lives aware of the whole while recognising
the tradeoffs that our own choices invite. Thus when I calculate my environmental
footprint, as I do annually with students, I always do badly on petroleum fuels despite
having a small three-cylinder car. This is because I live 40km from my work. My
choice to live in a rural setting meets an emotional need. This distancing from urban
settings helps me manage the intensity of my work commitments – the choice is part
of the architecture of my life, in short it is part of my own emotional sustainability.
The result is that I must live with the tension between physical and emotionally
sustainable criteria and contexts.
So when I think about my teaching as an expression of a sustainable orientation to life
I take into account the layered nature of the process (Bussey 2002). This involves five
basic categories:
2 I define Sustainability in EOLSS as: coordinated action on the physical, intellectual, ethical,
emotional and spiritual levels to ensure the full expression of the human drive to expand in harmony
with the environment
3
• Physical Sustainability: Sustainable educational activities focus on deepening
our individual and collective consciousness of the interconnectedness of all
things and the physical practices needed to foster this awareness. This sphere
often tends to be the area of focus for policy and curriculum with the result
that students can become overwhelmed and apathetic as they view a litany of
problems with solutions that seem beyond their reach.

• Intellectual Sustainability: This focuses on the ideologies that underpin action
and the language that defines all that falls within human experience.
Educationally it is about developing the psychic 'software' to help us construct
the critical sensibility that leads to effectively sustainable action on the
physical level. It builds on enlightenment rationality and incorporates forms
of post-material spiritual rationality such as meditation and myth.

• Ethical Sustainability: This layer has its roots in the spiritual rationality that
emerges from intellectually sustainable activity. Paradox will never be
removed from life, indeed it is a necessary and creative element of our
existence, but ethical discrimination can bring coherence and vision to both
the intellectual and physical spheres of educational activity. In this way it will
protect the heart from the stresses such paradoxes necessarily create. Ethical
sustainability is the coherent application of intellectually sustainable
rationality based on benevolence born of an appreciation of our relationship,
both in time and across time, with the world both at an individual and
collective level of action.

• Emotional Sustainability: Sustainable educational practice has as a central
tenet the evoking of inspiration and hope so as to create emotionally
sustainable learning cultures which privilege relationships and purposeful
engagement with learning over simplistic outcomes based teaching.
Emotional sustainability is directly related to the long term life chances of our
youth. To tackle this issue squarely is to really begin to engage with education
as a purposeful building of human beings with emotional strength and
maturity.

• Spiritual Sustainability: This is foundational to the concept of sustainability as
it supplies a sense of meaning and purpose to all human activity. By
embracing mystery and offering a deep sense of interconnection through
meditative and reflective practices spiritual sustainability creates the emotional
reserves at both an individual and collective level to sustain human activity
and struggle through the most difficult of times. From this purpose comes the
value base to give form and force to the ethical sustainability that shapes and
directs human intellectual enquiry and ultimately directs human activity in
physically sustainable ways.

I frame my personal engagement with sustainability in considerations that involve all
five layers. Put simply: I am what I eat; I am what I think; I am how I act; I am how I
feel; and I am spirit. The verbal nature of being, captured in the term itself is what
counts – hence what I say counts for little, it is always what I do that comes first. In
the teaching context this is absolutely true. Students learn little from words and a lot
from presence. The microvita we transmit, the lived energy of relationship, insight,
understanding and inspiration is rooted in this deeper reality of presencing the
possibility. Thus the endeavour to bring sustainability into our own lives is embodied
through a conscious engagement with the aspiration. This embodiment makes us
vulnerable to the judgements of others. You know, the “Look at him, he talks about
sustainability all the time but he drives over 80kms a day – can’t call that sustainable
can you?” kind of remark.

The interesting thing I find is that it is in being vulnerable that teachers become real to
students. Judith Butler (2004, p.19ff) argues that physical vulnerability is a core
aspect of our humanity; that it breaks down the barriers of difference and allows for a
space to emerge in which we can, in shared vulnerability, identify with the other. I can
relate to this as it allows me to recognise the embodied quality that comes with
making the effort to live sustainably. I, as a unit being, must recognise the limits to
my Being. I must inhabit this limitation, make it my own, bear the burden of Self and
practice the sustainable as it is the key to a profound social and ecological shift. This
is the first step and leads me to the following assertion.

Sustainable Education is not a Didactic Process
It is my basic proposition that sustainable education is not a didactic process but an
embodied and relational engagement with life. As such, it happens everywhere, not
just in the school and university. For me teaching is a direct expression of the
teacher’s life-world. As I teach I mine my cultural, emotional and spiritual resources
and my body and heart are the terms of reference that define what is possible and how
the learning happens and is processed.

This is not a one-way process; teaching is not about unilateralism. That in itself is an
unsustainable position. The learning culture we create as teachers is heavily
dependent on the input of all stakeholders. Teaching is thus a political activity as it
mirrors the macrohistorical processes that are testing the world today. Furthermore,
building on Ian Lowe’s assertion that sustainable science can only be meaningful
within an awareness of complex nonlinear systems (2006) I see that teaching, as
pedagogical science, must be similarly attuned to such complexity. Lowe’s statement
here is as pertinent to education as it is to his own field:

The problems are complicated by our inability to stand outside the naturesociety
system, meaning we cannot even in principle be objective observers
of the system (or our own teaching). We have to accept that our engagement
with complex natural (pedagogical) systems can’t be based on the model of
objective science (or pedagogy). The traditional sequential steps must
become parallel functions of social learning, additionally incorporating the
elements of action, adaptive management and policy as experiment. (Lowe
2006, my comments in parentheses)
So when thinking about sustainable teaching I am forced to allow for the other, not
just as ‘student’ but as ‘fellow traveller’. The life world is not hermetically sealed and
as a result, we are liberated from constraint. Learning becomes reciprocal and the
collective consciousness of the group is enriched.

The intersection of complex systems thinking with layered sustainability allows me to
think about broad processes as personal issues (see Bussey 2006a, pp90-91). The
layered self offers an ecology of consciousness and pedagogy that embraces the
entirety of the process of education. It leads to the following observations. Firstly,
education is not simply about knowledge transfer. Knowledge is no longer simply an
5
abstraction, it is a process that integrates physical expression with understanding and
meaning, creating a network of fluid and self-sustaining systems of shared power that
involve the knower in a community, what Knorr Cetina (1999) calls an ‘epistemic
culture’. Secondly, knowledge in such a world is contested. Though there is a
hegemonic centre that attempts to stamp out dissent, divergence is now a necessary
component of knowledge creation and vitality. This leads to what Latour (1991)
identifies as ‘hybridity’, a quality which can be seen as a defining feature of
postmodern knowledge creation and validation. Thirdly, this second point leads to the
understanding that we are now sites of this contestation. This struggle is experienced
as stress, confusion, doubt, repression and fundamentalism. Finally, this contestation
is expressed at the systems level as a reaction against multiplicity and in an increased
effort to control and define all aspects of education under the sway of the state
(Bussey 2006b).

Once personalised, sustainable education becomes more rigorous but less orderly. It
might challenge curricula prescriptions but it offers depth and meaning. This leads to
the following thought.

Teaching is The Most Natural Thing
Teaching is the most natural thing in the world. It is something human beings do as
part of being human. When done naturally it is simply a generous moment when
experience is shared either verbally or through demonstration. Teaching only became
‘unnatural’ when it was institutionalised and consequently professionalised (see
Miller 2006). With the invention of the classroom something fundamentally human
was lost. Heidegger would say that we had imposed a technical rationality on a human
process (Heidegger 1992). Foucault would have it that teachers became jailors of the
mind (Foucault 1995) while Sarkar would claim that love was missing from the
classroom (Sarkar 1998). Postman, on the other hand, would say teaching had lost its
deeper meaning (Postman 1996) and O’Sullivan confirms this, pointing to the
impoverished worldview that underpins materialist educational culture (O’Sullivan
1999). However we construct it, teaching has been diminished and its spontaneity, its
creativity and its joy drained away.

Such a depiction of course, can be said to be romantic and ahistorical. Premodern
teaching, as Ivana Milojević demonstrates, could often be violent and dehumanising -
associated with the whip and authoritarianism (Milojević 2005). Similarly, the
‘natural’ tag can be challenged – after all what is natural? Jim Dator asserts, nature is
dead and dying everywhere (Dator 2005). As a category it has perhaps only
aspirational potential; though it does purport to delimit that part of existence
untouched by human hand this is unhelpful, as even observing existence imposes the
categorical upon it. For me the ‘naturalness’ of teaching in non-institutionalised
settings arises simply from its uncomplicated and relatively uninhibited expression.
To transfer such ‘naturalness’ to an institutionalised classroom is not beyond the reach
of teachers. Such an endeavour turns the practice of teaching from an craft to an art,
or, as Johnson (1999) reminds us, into a sacrament. One thing we can do when
seeking to reclaim teaching and embody it within the artificial environment of the
classroom is to reinstitute joy – give people permission to play, experiment, get things
wrong and laugh and ponder on this. To start the ball rolling I take risks: I might tell
stories, sing songs, question, imagine, role-play or whatever is appropriate. In doing
this I have found I need to situate my stance consciously within a narrative that resists
the dominant paradigm. Here of course paradoxes abound. To be within an institution
yet to situate oneself either beyond it or in opposition to it is the first challenge. Yet,
as Parker Palmer (1998) reminds us, paradoxes are our friends. His teaching method
deliberately builds paradox into each classroom session. Thus he observes:

The principle of paradox is not a guide only to the complexities and
potentials of selfhood. It can also guide us in thinking about classroom
dynamics and in designing the kind of teaching and learning space that can
hold the classroom session…Teaching and learning require a higher degree
of awareness than we ordinarily possess – and awareness is always
hightened when we are caught in a creative tension. Paradox is another name
for that tension, a way of holding opposites together that creates an electric
charge that keeps us awake (ibid: 73-74).

The paradox of joy is complex. Not only do I bring it into a setting which in many
ways distrusts joy, I also must balance it with the need for creative discipline, and
harness it in productive ways that channel it towards synthesis. This is my ‘creative’
tension as well as the tension that underpins any learning event. Furthermore, each
event is unique. Palmer’s teaching from paradox enables him to integrate the
complexity of being with the reasonable expectations of any learning context: that we
learn. Sustainable education thus plays the hyphen between self and structure (Hattam
2004: 26). My identity as a teacher dwells with the hyphen; how I see myself and how
others perceive me is all linked to this interplay.

Labels help me here. Labels tell us and others stories about ourselves. Hence I am, in
different contexts, a Suzuki music teacher, a Montessori teacher, a community school
teacher, a yoga teacher, a university teacher. All these labels tell something about me
and my journey. Ultimately I sum them up under the collective term neohumanist
teacher, which says for/of me: someone committed to a new holistic humanism
(Bussey 2006a).

Such labels sustain me. This is important. To educate for sustainability we must know
how to sustain ourselves on this journey. When we choose to step outside the
dominant paradigm our sense of identity can be lost. Our values can be challenged,
our social validity questioned, and our integrity eroded. This is not easy and often the
most obvious resistance comes from our own disowned selves. But before we look at
this it is important to recognise that those closest to us can doubt our choice to dissent,
they can actively undermine us. I think we have all experienced this.

The Resisters
Certainly I have taught many children and adults who desperately want to have
agency taken from them, they will resist freedom, choice, wonder and awe. Kelly
(2007) describes such individuals as ‘resisters’. They constitute about 9% of most
groups and can be both powerful and destructive.

I have found that the older the students the more challenging sustainable and holistic
approaches to learning can be for both of us. Some adolescents can be cynical and
negative, harbouring a deep feeling of betrayal (Bussey 2003). For them learning is
competitive and disconnected from their reality. Parker Palmer, again, captures this
clearly when he observes:

There is a simple reason why some students resist thinking: they live in a
world were relationships are often quite fragile. They are desperate for more
community, not less, so when thinking is presented to them as a way of
disconnecting themselves from each other and from the world, they want
nothing of it. (Palmer1993, xvi)

Undergraduates, on the other hand, tend to be utilitarian and pragmatic about their
studies and thus seek information rather than deeper transformative narratives. This is
understandable when we consider how universities and other post secondary
education providers have been challenged and transformed by the ‘knowledge
economy’ and the increasingly utilitarian conflation of education and training (Snyder
2006). One example of this is how undergraduate students in Great Britain are
drawing up charters in which they demand ‘value for money’ from their universities
(Asthana 2006). Asthana reports that:

Baroness Ruth Deech, the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, who
deals with student complaints, said students had adopted an increasingly
confrontational approach since fees were introduced. Going to university, she
added, was not like buying a package holiday. "It is more like joining a gym,"
she said. "You pay money and they provide the facilities and trainers.
Obviously they have to meet the quality promised, but after that it's up to
you."

This is a powerful metaphor – if education is to be likened to the gym and teachers to
trainers then Freire’s image of the banking system of learning (still) reigns supreme
(Freire 1972). Yet deeper resisting comes from my own divided consciousness. Those
deeply conditioned responses that sustainable practice must work so hard to debug. I
must acknowledge the following point.

I am a Fractured Being
As an aspiring neohumanist teacher I feel myself to be caught between two worlds.
This is a hard place to be. It means that there is a biological as well as an intellectual
rebellion and struggle forever churning within me. I am a contested site because I
inhabit two worlds: The modernist one that is powerful and repressive, that chides and
worries, rewards and punishes, elevates and castes down; and the neohumanist one
which is postmaterial, holistic and integrated, healing, strengthening and loving, this
world embraces the other and is patterned and multifaceted, it shifts and moves like
water around the modernist monolith.

I feel myself to be stuck in between, playing the hyphen. This of course is a real
space, a space of becoming, what Michel Foucault calls a heterotopic space (1986). I
teach from this decidedly ambiguous context. Yet I bring to my teaching the lessons I
gain from both the personal struggle and also from all those who share this struggle
with me, and thankfully there are many. My bookshelves are heavy with their words
and my relationships rich with their presence. This sense of community sustains me
by affirming my own experiences. Yet, I have no doubt that the self, my self, is
fractured.

It has been shattered by the driving attack of western empiricism and material
progress on mystery. At the root of this attack is the urge to reduce everything to its
minutest part in order to gain control, dispel disorder and replace it with certitude. Yet
my soul yearns for mystery, not simply as a panacea (the opiate that Marx derided) for
modern ills but because I have an intuitive understanding that in this mystery lies
some unquantifiable ingredient that is essential to my own humanity.

Starhawk (1989) makes this point beautifully: The mysteries are what is wild in us,
what cannot be quantified or contained. But the mysteries are also what is most
common to us all: blood, breath, heartbeat, the sprouting of seed, the waxing and
waning of the moon, the turning of the earth around the sun, birth, growth, death and
renewal. Sustainable, holistic, neohumanistic teaching is alive to these mysteries.
Why? Because it is mystery that leaps over the narrow boundaries between
disciplines and mocks the divisions that the knowledge brokers, disguised as
educators and experts, have sought to establish in order to domesticate the wild in our
hearts. The modern education system is founded on industrial rationality.
Inadvertently is creates alienation, and this alienation can only be overcome with love.

Thus Bonnett notes:

Thus alienation from nature and from self are highly interrelated and key to
our ability to knowingly despoil the environment. If we love (value)
ourselves, we will love (value) that which we believe supports us. This view
suggests that part of education for sustainability as a frame of mind will be
to reconnect people with their origins and what sustains them and to develop
their love of themselves (2006: 271).

Joanna Macy, makes this point in her profound book, World as Lover, World as Self.
There are so many ways to engage in this process. Sustainable educators do so many
things: they care (Noddings 2003), they transgress (hooks 1994), they inspire
(Sheldrake & Fox 1996), they love (Palmer 1993; McWilliam 1999), they enlighten
(Sarkar 1998), they question (Inayatullah 2002), they challenge (Eisler 2000), they
reconfigure (Milojević 2005), they reinscribe (Foucault 1995), the weave grammars of
possibility (Giroux 1997), and so the list can go on. They do all this and more by
living their teaching, by embodying their passion for learning, for living and for
humanity and the planet. For me they are all, one way or the other, knowingly or
unknowingly, connected to mystery. They help us see things not just as they are but as
they could be, and they provide the skills and foster the confidence to move
individually and collectively in these more desirable and sustainable directions.
Collectively such educators enable me to live with irony. Hence I try to teach across
time and beyond time. I, like the French philosopher Rousseau (Whitrow 2003: 4),
have thrown away my watch. In this sense I am a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. I am
disinterested in slots of time devoted to this or that subject. To invite mystery into the
human world we must eliminate the walls that shut it out. Time is one such wall and
must be reinvented in order to sustain timeless classroom experiences.

Zeus and Odin, Hanuman and the Rainbow Serpent share my teaching space with
computers! When I work with primary students we talk about cells and mitosis and at
the same time I tell stories about life dragging itself through the primeval slime, and
the gods of old struggling with titanic forces. My teaching has its emotional roots in
the mythic exploration of meaning and scales the walls of techne, and is soon to be at
play in the cybernetic Elysian (I hope it is not Tartarus) fields of the internet and the
web3. I use a lot of story, but also some very high level academic ideas in which kids
are handling concepts in math and language that are usually reserved for much older
students. It has been my experience that their exposure to the abstract and value
challenging world of myth develops imaginative will and the depth and subtlety to
handle cognitively complex ideas with relative ease.

In this way the knowledge base needed to take on our world at the physical level is
imparted without the fuss and repressive practices that normally accompany such
learning. Story also leads child and adult alike to develop their visioning ability thus
equipping us all with visionary material and skills to generate more positive images of
the future. In this sense I am engaging a deep futures process to develop
consciousness of purpose and agency. This goes a long way to reverse the constructed
pessimism Nagel (2005) identifies as a product of mainstream environmental
education programmes. One way that myth conveys this deep futures sense is by
linking us all in a shared story, the story is of course richly archetypical, but it is also
a direct link with the ancient world and the future as the story transcends temporal
definition and parameters. This leads me to another reflection.

Teachers are links in the great chain
I, like all teachers, and all beings, am a link in a chain that goes back to the dawn of
time. As a teacher (and human being) I am part of a multitude of traditions some
broad, like the maths tradition and the language tradition. Others more specialized like
the guitar tradition or the history tradition, and others more esoteric but rich and
mysterious like the Tantric and yogic traditions. I am a vector of specific cultural
strands and I happily go around infecting as many people as I can.

In this sense we are all links in learning chains. This, however, is not a linear process.
These chains/traditions function more like the rhizomes described by Deleuze and
Guattari (1988). These rhizomes consist of chains of meanings that are forged from a
myriad traditions and experiences going back into prehistory, chains steeped in the
mysteries that make us human. Current learning patterns are seeking to blind us to
much of this inheritance by prescribing what and how we learn. By reducing the
parameters of what is worthwhile knowledge, modernity has greatly suppressed the
broad and beautiful experience of being human.

So as a teacher attuned to community both past, present and future I carry my students
some way into this world; myth is the vehicle for the young, for adults I communicate
the same through an acknowledgement of debt. Today’s prosperity is built upon
centuries of exploitation of indigenous cultures, the working class and the natural
resources of the planet. Today we continue this process under the banner of
globalization, yet we are so inured to the imbalances that they seem innate features of
the modern landscape. The future, too, is also being exploited with the physical and
social resources of future generations being strip mined for the benefit of a generation
that will never have to pick up the tab.

This over-arching vision links us all, implicates us all, makes us all vulnerable. The
only response is to take sustainability personally, to begin the slow process of
remembering who we are and activating the multilayered strands that underpin an
integrated sustainability that can generate transformative educational practice. The
will to live (and teach) sustainably is constructed. It is anchored in physical
commitment, driven by intellectual clarity, sustained by emotional resilience,
empowered by ethical integrity and unified with spiritual depth. This leads me to the
following reflection.

Diving into mystery
In order to teach sustainably a teacher needs to be engaged in some form of
transformative reflective practice that creates the inner space to honour their
interconnectedness and debug their conditioned partialistic responses to relationship.
And relationship, as Thomas Berry (1990) reminds us, is central to any sense of our
interconnectedness with this world we inhabit. This is what Sarkar recognized and
placed central to any neohumanist experience of life (Sarkar 1998). We all, in our
own way, need time to reflect, to go deep within. This is essential, and also deeply
personal. There are no hard and fast rules here, I meditate but my wife sings and my
mother paints. We are all teachers. Holistic educator John Miller, has recently argued:
In holistic learning, teachers must also nurture their own deeper selves. I
encourage teachers to set aside time during the day to develop their inner life.
Activities like gardening and meditation allow us to make the transition from a
calculating to a listening mind. Another technique is mindfulness. (1999, p.
48)

When we can find this depth meaning floods us. Everything becomes alive and we
have a relationship, a kinship with everything, and furthermore we come to know and
understand this relational world through a new kind of rationality based on love
(Gallegos Nava 2001). Love is integrative because it breaks down the ego and allows
us to be part of life rather than above it, constrained by the distance that is the
hallmark of intellectual rationality. Love, for the Mexican educator Gallegos Nava,
builds order. It is anchored in the spiritual. This is a spirituality that is lived, not
romanticised and must be communicated through its embodiment in the classroom.

Thus he observes:

Spirituality is the creative energy of the universe and the essence of holistic
(read sustainable) education. Spirituality cannot be taught academically or
linearly, since it transcends the academic disciplines. In education, it is also
a state of awareness, one of inner order that, as educators, we can only
encourage by our own conduct and holistic (read sustainable) dialogue.
(2001, p. 39)
To plant the seed of sustainable holistic consciousness in others through teaching,
requires the teacher to be addressing students, no matter what age, from a place in this
new space. Whatever integrity and authority I have comes from this new place. I
communicate most of this without words, simply by being me, engaged in my own
transformative process, sharing its mystery with those around me. Teaching at this
level is not about proselytising or preaching, it is about being. Embodying, however
inadequately, links to mystery that form as a result of spiritual activity. The reflective,
meditative space is my link with the cosmic. Without this link and the force it brings
to my being, I am unable to overcome the divisive world view that is my immediate
inheritance and the dominant expression of my consciousness - bound and distorted as
it is.

My Sustainable Education Toolkit
This article has largely been a reflection on the subjectivity of embodiment. Yet it
would be incomplete without a brief sketch of some of the things I do in both the
classroom and more generally in life as I weave threads between the physical,
intellectual, ethical, emotional and spiritual layers in an attempt to ground myself in a
sustainable praxis. I do this knowing that to embody sustainable educational processes
is to engage in a deep form of cultural criticism. This is so because education
broadens its mandate from transmission of tradition and the socialisation of the young
into current hegemonic structure to active interaction with the world and individual
and collective consciousness. Embodied education as I understand it therefore has
strong links with Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism. His succinct definition can be
applied here:

Prophetic pragmatism conceives of philosophy (read education) as a
historically circumscribed quest for wisdom that puts forward new
interpretations of the world based on past traditions in order to promote
existential sustenance and political relevance (1999, p. 168).

Embodied education as a prophetic and pragmatic process honours depth, the layered
nature of being, and the traditions that sustain this depth while applying a critical
awareness that power is never so bold or so persuasive as when it is hidden deep
within our social and psychological processes. In short, it takes a critically spiritual
approach into the classroom. And this approach is embodied or grounded in the
teacher’s own life world.

This insight emerged from my passion for critical educators such as Henry Giroux
(1988) and Peter McLaren (2006) whose keen sense of social justice and the fluid and
creative nature of power stripped educational contexts of the veneer of impartiality,
revealing them to be highly political and deeply implicated in the distortion of
knowledge and values that we experience as capitalism. Yet, as a meditator, I felt
something to be missing from their analysis – the life-world is linked to the spiritual
and can be transformed when this realisation becomes an embodied praxis. When this
occurs we move, a Giroux urges us to, from ‘critique’ to ‘possibility’ (1988, p. 204).
This point develops into a process and is expressed through the teacher’s own unique
subjectivity in an infinite range of forms. When I think of the classroom the first thing
that comes to me is the grounding of process, the key assumptions that inform my
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work. As a starting point I try to assume a Zen like stance in which the teacher is the
“unmoved center” as Eugene Herrigel (1953/1999, p. 5) put it.

The following points expand on this and form the basis for a sustainable educational
toolkit. Firstly here are some key elements of process: