On Bewilderment, Education and Opening Spaces for Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue for the importance in education of space for bewildering questions: questions for which no-one yet knows the answer and where letting-go of certainty and acceptance of ambiguity is possible. This is especially important in this era of climate and ecological emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and being are urgently needed. In addition, there needs to be space for positive conceptions of ‘the wild’ and a be-wilder-ing of education processes themselves towards more demanding, rebellious, ruptive educational futures. This is a challenging move for Westernised pedagogy and its increasing desire to ‘sanitise’ knowledge.

I examine how encouraging aporia—literally lacking a poros, a path—can contribute to opening up ruptural spaces which embrace doubt and see within doubt ‘the questions that make a new understanding possible’ (Burbules, 1997, p. 40, Aporia: Webs, passages, getting lost, and learning to go on. In Philosophy of education 1997: A publication of the philosophy of education society (annual) (pp. 33–43). Philosophy of Education Society). I then draw on a range of thinkers including Arendt, Buber, The Crex Collective and hooks to foreground encounters, creative entwinings and care-ful, attentive listening which can re-centre more-than-human voices and forge new relationships. I argue that such embodied practices have potential to open relationships based on ‘aimance’ (Khatibi, 1995, Le livre de l’aimance. Editions Marsam) and what Snaza (2020, p. 108, Love and bewilderment: On education as affective encounter. In B. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S. McCall, & A. Niccolini (Eds.), Mapping the affective turn in education: Theory, research and pedagogies (pp. 108–121). Routledge) calls ‘possibilities of love beyond the limit of the human’.

Introduction

Fig. 4.1

Artwork by Tijana Velikinac for Edulab, Institute for Philosophy and Social Policy, University of Belgrade’s (2022) Third International Conference: Why still education?

I was once firmly told in a college administration department: ‘Just tell those trainee-teachers to stop asking questions and teach.’ I was somewhat taken aback by this comment but it also got me thinking. What is teaching if it is not about asking questions? (Fig. 4.1) Moreover, what kind of questions are teachers asking? If they already know the answer is this really questioning? There are situations where transmission of existing knowledge is vital—ranging from learning to read to how to fly a plane. In these instances, asking questions when the teacher knows the answer—often called Socratic questioning—is valuable. However, is this all education can or should be, especially in this era of climate and ecological emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and being are urgently needed? There needs to be space for bewildering questions where no-one yet knows the answer; space where letting go of certainty and acceptance of ambiguity is possible; space which encourages creativity and new ways of knowing and being in the world together. In addition, there needs to be space for positive conceptions of ‘the wild’ and a be-wilder-ing¹ of education processes themselves towards more demanding, rebellious, ruptive educational futures which can burst through framings of the world dominant in current Westernised education. This is a challenging move for such Westernised education, dominated as it is by anthropocentric, androcentric and Eurocentric conceptions of ‘man’ (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013) and an increasing desire to ‘sanitise’ knowledge (Suzawa, 2013). Moreover, such Westernised pedagogy is not geographically limited. Instead, as Braidotti (2013, p. 2) highlights, ‘it is a structural element of our cultural practices, which is also embedded in both theory and institutional and pedagogical practices’ which have spread around the world, driven by colonialism and its continuing effects.

In this chapter, I explore how a shift towards bewildering/be-wilder-ing education can be nurtured. I examine how encouraging aporia—literally lacking a poros, a path, a passage—can contribute to opening up educational spaces where creative, holistic thinking and new ways of being in the world can burst through: ruptural spaces which embrace doubt and see within such doubt ‘the questions that make a new understanding possible’ (Burbules, 1997, p. 40). I find it hard to pin down in words what such ruptural spaces are but suggest that they are combinations of physical spaces and the physical actions and mental responses arising in these physical spaces. For me, Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of ‘lived spaces’ is helpful here. Lefebvre posits that space is not a neutral, empty entity. Instead, it is constituted from ‘perceived space’, ‘conceived space’ and ‘lived space’. Perceived space is what (Westernised) humans experience with their senses as they move through the world. Conceived space is how the original designers and political powers conceptualised and planned a particular space. Then there is ‘lived space’ which, as Zhang (2006) highlights, can be harder to understand. To help here he turns to Elden (2004, pp. 186–188 cited in Zhang, 2006) and his discussion of Lefebvre’s early work in which Lefebvre critiques the seventeenth-century Western philosopher Descartes’ binary—res cogitans (the realm of the mind) and res extensa (the physical realm of matter). Elden argues that Lefebvre may have first formulated his conception of conceived space as a response to res cogitans, with Lefebvre denoting such abstract knowledge with the French word savoir. Perceived space, on the other hand, corresponds to res extensa. Pursuing this line of thinking Elden suggests that in his later work, Lefebvre introduced his conception of lived space to form his triad as a way to reconcile his own thinking and Descartes’ binary. Lived space combines (Westernised) human external experience of the space and the power relations within it with (Westernised) human inner mental life as one responds to these perceptions and conceptions of inhabited space around one. Lefebvre denotes knowledge in these lived spaces with the French word connaître—the things a person is acquainted with and knows locally. These three spheres—perceived, conceived and lived—are not separate ‘slices of a pie’. Rather they act, shift, flow together, forming experiences of space in everyday life.

In this chapter, I argue that ruptural ‘lived spaces’ have potential to emerge when students can play with bewildering ideas and questions without expectations of reaching pre-set outcomes or solutions and when there is openness and attentiveness to others, both human and more-than-human, within the space. I also like the word ‘wallow’ here: space and time to wallow, to deep-dive into ideas and feelings, luxuriate in them as well as time to share these ideas with others in an unhurried atmosphere. There is a sense of indulgence. Wallowing is something which humans, especially those in fast-paced Westernised societies might even have been bidden not to do. Playful, attentive actions as well as wallowing with ideas can occur in activities often called ‘creative’ such as art, craft, music, dance and creative writing but also stretch beyond and are not limited to these. As Ken Robinson (Mindshift, 2015) highlights, ‘creativity is in everything… in science, the arts, mathematics, technology, cuisine, teaching, politics, business, you name it’. It involves ‘putting your imagination to work’ and is something which can be cultivated and honed, including, crucially, in educational settings. Cremin and Chappell (2021) identify that key characteristics of creative pedagogies include opportunities for student playfulness, independent thinking, problem-solving, risk-taking (learning by ‘mistakes’) and co-construction and collaboration as well as teachers demonstrating their own interest in creative processes. I argue in this chapter that exploring bewildering questions has an important role to play in creativity understood in this broad sense. Such creative approaches have potential to combine and ‘open a window’, as a friend of mine put it: a window through which novel ideas and ways of being can break free and contribute to living in the new ways so needed in this era of biodiversity loss and climate emergency.

Embracing Bewilderment and Aporia

According to the Merriam-Webster (n.d), ‘bewilderment is the quality or state of being lost, perplexed or confused’. Such confusion has long been accepted as a starting point for education with the aim to then lead students to places of certainty. Adopting the approach Socrates used in Plato’s Meno (circa 385 BCE/1961), bewilderment can also be a mid-point of the educational process. A student is nudged by a teacher along a pathway aimed to undo their previous certainties. This leads the student to a place of puzzlement, a place of embodied discomfort as well as mental uncertainty—an aporia—where they do not have a path or passage forward. The teacher can then show the student a path out of this place of confusion towards an accepted answer. What happens, however, when there isn’t a solution or where it is hard even to form a question as language and existing dominant conceptions are insufficient to allow its articulation? Can teachers and the curricula and policies which frame their practice tolerate such ambiguity where there is no ‘answer’, where students’ bewilderment, confusion, puzzlement cannot be addressed and solved by the teacher?

Suzawa (2013, p. 234) argues for the value of embracing ambiguity and bewilderment, rather than merely tolerating or actively avoiding it. He stresses the importance of ‘being open to alternative ideas, never being very narrow in our thinking as we practice the art of teaching’. Reading this reminded me of an experience from my own teaching practice which has spanned over 30 years in vocational, adult and university sectors, teaching languages, economics, business studies and teacher education. In an observation I undertook in my role as a teacher-educator of a plumbing lesson in an inner-city vocational college the students were revising for a multiple-choice exam. One question, on energy generation, asked which option was carbon neutral. The answer required was ‘wind turbines’. A student challenged this, saying that due to the transport of turbines as well as the materials needed for their construction and maintenance it is disputed whether they are carbon neutral. I sat forward, interested to see how the trainee-teacher would handle this dilemma. He paused for a moment then responded ‘Well, in your exam please select “wind turbines” but I take your point, these things are complex and there isn’t a simple answer. You could, however, research this for the presentation you are doing for your communication module’. The teacher could so easily have closed this student down but instead embraced this opportunity to encourage students to grapple with bewildering issues and sought ways that this could be done within the constraints of his tightly packed, highly regulated curriculum. His attitude of mind kept a space open for exploring bewildering concepts such as carbon neutrality, reconciling the restrictive modes of thinking and classification imposed by multiple-choice assessment with opportunities within the communication module for more ‘holistic modes of thought opened by dialogical reasoning and artistic practices’ (Suzawa, 2013, p. 232).

Burbules (1997) highlights how artistic creative practices can open spaces to explore bewildering questions. He considers how dance has potential to open an embodied ‘gestural space’ for exploring bewildering issues as an alternative to deductive cognitive thinking with its tendency to classify and move from A to B in a straight line. Other creative choices such as musical composition/performance, art/craft, poetry and creative writing also have potential for embodied holistic exploration of aporia and topics across subject boundaries. As a teacher-educator I was privileged to observe such a creative activity which was part of a vocational music qualification. Students aged 16 to 18 had been tasked with creating a song and music video as well as reflecting on the experience. One group of teenage students had produced a song called Shadows, which explored thoughts and feelings around love and relationships. I found their song, video and reflection very moving. These activities highlighted their creative, musical and technical skills but in their reflection they also drew in another, unexpected aspect. They explained that whilst filming they became very aware of the movement of the sun and the physical shadows it created in their video. They had to re-record certain scenes as the shadows cast by the sun did not match up with the words in particular verses. They realised that they were approaching ‘shadows’ as metaphor but the physical act of recording opened up their awareness of existing in a physical world. This allowed them to explore what this meant for their relationship with and responses to physical phenomena. They also became more aware of the transient nature of long shadows and what this could mean for coping with the often-bewildering relationship challenges, explored in the song, which they faced as they entered adulthood. The creative processes of music and film-making enabled the students to explore these challenges which are hard to articulate in existing language and where there are no clear solutions.

I am not suggesting that all teaching needs to engage with bewilderment. This could be overwhelming for students as well as neglectful of certain existing useful skills and knowledge. However, exploratory spaces are important if, as the thinker Hannah Arendt (1961a/2006a, p. 193) argues, education is where:

we decide whether we love our children [and young people—my addition] enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chances of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us.

Arendt and the Potential for Opening Spaces of Appearance Through Intersubjective First-Hand Encounters

Drawing on Arendt introduces another dimension to exploring bewildering questions. For Arendt, rather than being pre-formed ‘selves’, who one is emerges intersubjectively (between subjects) in first-hand encounters when one speaks and acts with others under what Arendt terms ‘conditions of plurality’. Such conditions can potentially occur in encounters when others are receptive to one’s speech and actions and one is receptive to theirs. This opens potential for ‘spaces of appearance’ through which who one is as a unique being emerges, bringing possibilities for new ways to be, know and act in the world (for further discussion see Chave, 2020). Creative activities exploring bewildering questions provide time and space for such intersubjective encounters, for sharing one’s positioning and for openness to the speech and action of others: encounters through which who one is can begin to emerge anew.

I experienced such an encounter at a craft workshop I had co-organised as part of an arts-based project in higher education. Adults were making notebooks from recycled paper using the Japanese craft of momigami. The slow creative, embodied repetitive action of crumpling and smoothing paper central to momigami opened a lived space and time for sharing different ideas and perspectives. A wide range of bewildering issues connected to climate change was discussed. As the session progressed, a respectful atmosphere, a more secure space opened up. One issue which arose was more sustainable farming methods: a complex bewildering issue with many different opinions and possibilities for change. As the activity progressed, a participant from a farming family spoke up to explain how her brother was committed, for various practical and emotional reasons, to a single breed of cattle he had kept on his farm for 40 years. Moving to a different breed would be a huge challenge, and understanding such starting points needs to be taken on board in any change processes. This perspective inserted a new way of thinking about change. It caught my attention and stayed with me, humbled me, encouraged me to find out more, challenged and changed me and took my thinking and actions in relation to nature-friendly farming in new directions. Creative activities had opened a space for speaking and being open to others and a window in my existing framings through which new ideas and ways of being could bubble.

Arendt focuses her thinking on encounters within the human realm. However, it is important to remember that she died in 1975 and it would be unfair to judge her for not engaging with recent posthuman ideas. Arendt emphasises the importance of engaging with thinking of the past, learning from these ‘threads’ without letting them become ‘chains which fetter us’ (1961/2006b, p. 94). I would like to believe she would be interested in extending her theorising in response to recent posthuman developments and the possibility of intersubjective encounters with(in) the wider natural world. This possibility is complex, bewildering for several reasons. In Western Modernist thinking only humans possess subjectivity—which it defines narrowly as having a sense of self, of who one is, and capacity to reflect and have higher-order (abstract) thoughts and feelings (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013). However, Lyvers (1999, p. 5) makes what is for me a key point, when he comments that to acknowledge subjectivity beyond the human does not demand that it is ‘similar in all respects to one’s own’. This poses a challenge for many of how to approach the more-than-human without categorising them or fitting them into Western understandings of the world. Buber provides a helpful insight here (1958/1923) with his idea of I-it and I-Thou relationships. In I-it relationships the other is an object—an ‘it’. In contrast, in I-Thou reciprocal relations ‘I’ recognises the other as a subject with whom one engages in their entirety rather than as a sum of their qualities. He highlights how:

The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; and as I become I, I say Thou.

All real living is meeting (encounter). (24–25)

Buber does not limit I-Thou relations to the human realm, giving the example of contemplating a tree: He recognises how in Western thinking there are several different ways to understand a tree—as an object to be used/consumed, as an object for contemplation or as an example of a particular species category but to address the question of whether a tree has subjectivity Buber comments:

I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (59)

Reflecting on Buber’s ideas, Walsh et al. (1994, p. 151) argue that ‘now the [Western] worldview that presupposed an objectified nature has run its disastrous course… we are open to a different way of relating, a different way of life, beyond the subject/object dualism, beyond the I-it relationship’. All, both human and more-than-human in this our shared planet can strive towards what Buber (1958/1923, p. 79) called “tenderness” and an acceptance of the ethical responsibility this then places on each of us.

It was with these ideas on intersubjective encounters in mind that I set out to walk beside meandering River Thames² between Lechlade and Buscot in Oxfordshire, UK, recording the experiences in a c/artography (Fig. 4.2) and reflection. These cannot fully capture encounters which happen between ‘I and Thou’—but are an attempt. It might seem strange to explore bewilderment and aporia (the lack of a path or passage way) by following a river. However, rivers are vital forces, life-givers, they meander, flood, change: new routes, and habitations emerge.

Fig. 4.2

C/artography: Meandering, encountering, attending with Thames (2023)

Meandering, Encountering, Attending with Thames

Stepping down onto the riverside path my husband, Peter, and I are enveloped by the tall grasses and reeds that flourish near the bridge which stands beside the Trout Inn near Lechlade. The hubbub of people quickly fades and, on this sun-filled day, we enter a world of insect buzz and bird call—surprised to hear immediately the distinctive sound of a woodpecker. Eager to see if this is still a place where damselflies thrive, we make our way to where a wooden bridge crosses a lily pond. We stop, filled with joy and wonder to see the iridescent deep blue of the male banded demoiselles with distinctive dark spots on their wings and the smaller, lighter common blues darting above the lily pads and settling on the reeds. As we look closer, we begin to see more—the well-camouflaged green females as well as entwined mating pairs. We feel the ‘tenderness‘ that Buber (1958/1923, p. 59) describes. We are drawn into attentive caring relation with these damselflies who cease to be ‘its’ – mere examples. Instead, it is with these damselflies ‘on this occasion that I engage into a relation and this fills my world’ (59). We follow Thames as he meanders across the flat plain, forced to slow down and take a circuitous route, laughing at the short distance we would have covered by travelling in a straight line. Along the way we enjoy birdsong—the repetitive calls of jackdaws and chiffchaffs and melodious blackbirds, goldfinches, wrens and reed warblers. We pause to appreciate the alders and willows leaning outwards from the bank, the waving teasel heads, the yellow wild brassicas, tiny pink geraniums and vivid blue alkanets. Damselflies and butterflies flit across the path. Reaching Buscot Lock we resist the urge to power on to Kelmscott where William Morris once lived, pausing instead beside Thames to enjoy the sunshine and the moorhens swimming between the reeds. We retrace our steps, hot and tired now but still open to this special place and the calls of the more-than-human all around us. We stop once more at the lily pond, sad to leave the damselflies as they dart, settle, entwine, but heartened that this place still exists for them and aware of the importance of protecting it and other places like it.

Such embodied encounters open something beyond articulation. Spending time with these damselflies on this occasion opened a new way for me to be in the world. Returning home, I learnt more about them from the British Dragonfly Society website. I became more aware of damselflies and many different coloured bees, butterflies, moths, greenfly and ants in my little garden. I am now less afraid of these creatures, more absorbed in their never-ending dance. I tend flowers which support them and which the insects in turn support through pollination, an ecosystem in which humans are both entangled and dependent. I have learnt the shocking statistic that flying insects have declined by almost 60% in the UK over the last 20 years (Ball et al., 2021). I have investigated actions to reverse this trend and support their lives such as nature-friendly and regenerative farming. On sun-filled days, damselflies sometimes enter my home through the open kitchen door then become trapped against the windows. On one such day, I stand on tiptoes and reach across the worktop, all the time aware of the frantic damselfly beating his delicate wings against the glass. I manage to push open the stiff window and joyfully watch as the damselfly flies free: an embodied happening for us both and a reminder too of other lived spaces where caring inter-actions can open a window through which new ideas can take flight.

A Pedagogy of Be-Wilderment

Intersubjective encounters and the ethical responsibilities these raise, for example with Thames and with all that live within and beside his water, open space to explore what Snaza (2013, 2020) calls a ‘pedagogy of be-wilderment’: an approach which aims to rupture existing educational framings and open possibilities of new educational futures. Snaza highlights how Westernised education is a humanising project. In this framing, children are not fully human and education is a way of bringing them to a fully human state. Snaza outlines how this conception is seen in educational writing dating back to Plato’s Republic (1961) first published in the fourth century BCE. In this work by Plato, Socrates refers to the ‘uneducated’ as an ‘unintelligent philistine’ who has ‘no use for reasoned discussion and [has] an animal addiction to settle everything by brute force’ (177). The ‘philistine’ needs to be brought out of this state through educational processes. Almost 2000 years later, although at first sight more sympathetic to the wildness of Emile, Rousseau (1972) argues for the necessity of forming ‘man’ through education and emphasises the importance of doing this according to human nature rather than social institutions. For Kant (1960, 3), man needs to be ‘turned aside from his animal impulses’ and through education be led towards ‘humanity, his appointed end’.

Snaza (2013, 2020) challenges this conception of education where the telos—endpoint— is to learn to be fully ‘human’, particularly where what it is to be human is based on Western conceptions of ‘Man’—white, European, male, heterosexual and able-bodied. Such centring of Western Man has been performed for so long in education it has become normalised, disappearing from view. Snaza calls instead for education in which the concept of Western man is taken as a starting point for enquiry, for exploring what it would mean to let go of being human as separate from and superior to all that is more-than-human and what it would mean to accept, reconnect and value the part of ourselves which is animal. This be-wildering is itself a bewildering process—a letting go of a clear path towards Westernised conceptions of becoming ‘fully human’. Yet, it is this unsettlement and the doubts this engenders that open up ‘the possibility of love beyond the human’.

As an academic I feel that perhaps I should reach here for some learned texts such as bel hooks’ (2000) reflection on love, compassion and healing; Freire (2000) on love as a commitment to others; Donna Haraway (2007) on our entanglement with the more-than-human and Snaza’s recommendation of Education out of bounds (Lewis & Kahn, 2010). I do encourage you to explore these texts and I will examine hooks’ ideas later in this chapter. However, it is the film Paddington (King, 2014), particularly its ending, which comes strongly to my mind at this moment. In the film, the taxidermist Millicent Clyde wants to kidnap Paddington from the Brown family who have taken him into their home, then kill him, stuff him and place him in a museum. Judy, the Brown’s daughter, defends Paddington passionately, declaring that even though Paddington is from a different species he is still a member of their family. The film is problematic in many ways, for example it does anthropomorphise bears and use species classification. However, it also allows for possibilities of humans encountering bears, learning from bears, resisting killing bears and other animals for human glorification and advancement. It challenges limiting notions of kinship. These are all issues which can be discussed with students as starting points for exploring the possibilities of love as forging a ‘new kinship bestiary that is strange, and in that strangeness opens itself up to new forms of learning out of bounds’ (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. 147).

Be-Wilder-Ment and ‘Wild Pedagogies’

The Crex Collective (2018, p. 6), who include The Hebrides as a co-author, provide another interesting way to consider bewilderment/ be-wilderment, exploring opportunities for what they call ‘wild pedagogies’. They argue that:

If we take seriously the notion that the natural world is not made up of inert entities; but rather, it is filled with active, self-directing, and vibrant participants, then our attention towards the affordances of place-based education changes. In seeking to teach with nature, educators become open and available to the range of facts, knowings, and understandings that places have to offer.

They highlight how ‘Such attention involves carefully listening to available voices and building partnerships … and it will, at times, involve actively de-centring the taken-for-granted human voice and re-centring more-than-human voices’ (6). A starting point for such listening can be as simple as encountering, attending to a plant breaking through the tarmac in a school playground. Opportunities to be found further afield could include at an urban or rural farm, a river meander, a local or national park, a forest, a seashore. The Crex Collective provide what they call six touchstones, or jumping off points, for wild pedagogies. These are nature as co-teacher; engaging with complexity, the unknown and spontaneity; relocating the wild (which can be found everywhere); the need for time and practice; socio-cultural change (and the recognition of education as a method of political activism) and the need to build alliances within the human community and beyond. They emphasise that these are starting points rather than a prescriptive list. They include questions to encourage teachers to reflect on their existing practices in relation to these touchstones. Wild pedagogies foreground a role for intersubjective first-hand encounters, for care-ful and attentive entanglements with the more-than-human, for embracing the wildness within each of us and the bewilderment and doubts this can engender. This is not an easy move, or one that is guaranteed. However, with encouragement, fleeting moments can emerge, moments to treasure rather than shut down, moments which open possibilities of rupturing existing Westernised educational framings and supporting the bursting through of new ways of knowing, being and acting in the world.

Returning to the River

I place my feet in the cooling water of Thames. I see the flowing water glittering in the sunshine, the spikey reeds, the mossy stones and thick trailing weed. I am lulled by birdsong, the buzz of insects and the occasional distant sound of a car. Reflecting on The Crex Collective’s touchstones my mind turns to the poem At the River Clarion (2009) by Mary Oliver. In this, Oliver emphasises the importance of giving time and patience to listening to the voices of the more-than-human, highlighting how one does not hear them in a mere hour or day. As she comments, it is as though ‘selfhood has stuffed your ears’. Whilst visiting the countryside I have seen primary-aged (four to eleven) and secondary-aged (11 to 18) students on field-trips, busy, busy, busy in the landscape, measuring, weighing, making notes, urged on by their teachers. But even amongst this busyness, moments of encountering, entangling and care-ful listening emerge when a student is caught up in the intricate pattern in a stone, the smoothness of a rock shaped thus by a river, the swaying movement of grasses rustled by the wind. As teachers we can encourage such moments and support students to find ways to respond holistically, tenderly, creatively to these in ways which, to use Suzawa’s (2013) phrase, exceed narrow cognitive processes. As I continue to listen, I feel the love, stretching back through deep time, that this life-giving river gifts. I reflect on Arendt’s (2006a) words, introduced earlier in the chapter, that education is a place where, as teachers, we decide whether we love our children enough neither to abandon them to their own devices nor ‘to strike from their hands something new, something unforeseen by us’. Introducing love into education runs a risk of sentimentality but here Khatibi’s (1995) conception of aimance—which brings together friendship (philia) and love (eros) is helpful. Zembylas (2017, p. 23) describes how Khatibi’s aimance is a ‘constructed term for affinity, affection, tolerance and friendship’ and a ‘powerful concept for invoking love as a force for social change’ (23). Love, understood as aimance—‘opens possibilities for affective solidarity toward and with otherness’ (Taylor & Gannon 2021, p. 120) and introduces ethico-political practices in education by encouraging educators to develop pedagogies that attempt:

to address wound, injury and suffering within a frame that takes into consideration histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice. (Zembylas, 2017, p. 23)

These ideas resonate with The Crex Collective’s (2018) touchstone six which emphasises building community with others and ‘extending the number of communities to which each of us belong’ (33). The Collective highlight the importance of reflecting on ‘the complex inter-dependent composition of those communities that always implicates the more-than-human’ (33). One is both supported and challenged by the members of these different communities. Such communities are ‘lived spaces’, to use Lefebvre’s (1991) conception, which combine one’s external conceptions and one’s perceptions of a space, including the power relations within them, with one’s inner mental life. They are spaces where one can depart from the status quo and find ‘belonging, friendship, and joy’ and the supportive communities we all need ‘as we attempt to re-wild our lives, pedagogies, and the places where we live’ (The Crex Collection, 2018, p. 34). They are spaces where together, as members of such supportive communities, we can take risks; where we can explore bewildering questions which do not have ready answers and also find embodied, creative ways (understood in the broad sense discussed in this chapter) to explore questions and issues we cannot even put into existing language. Such, supportive communities have potential to open ‘an orientation to the future that admits of the possibility of future transformations that exceed and resist colonisation by the constraints of the present’ (Facer, 2016, p. 69). Such transformations can open unexpected, unforeseen ways to address the ecological and climate threats currently destroying both more-than-human and human life and flourishing. Supportive communities can be spaces to practice what hooks (1995) calls ‘beloved community’ where ‘loving ties of care and knowing bind us together in our difference’ (hooks, 1995, pp. 263–264 cited in Snaza, 2020, p. 119). As humans, especially those raised with Westernised conceptions of the world, we need to extend this love to include the more-than-human as well as challenge the so-called boundaries between the self and the other. ‘Saturating’ spaces of learning with love (Snaza, 2020) opens potential for students to overcome the possible fears and barriers which bewildering and be-wilder-ing education can engender. Practicing beloved communities can encourage students to respond attentively and affirmatively to the opportunities which can burst through when existing androcentric, anthropomorphic, Eurocentric (Westernised) educational framings are ruptured. This is not an easy move, but as hooks identifies in Teaching to Transgress (1994, p. 207):

The classroom [and other learning spaces - my addition], with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.