the use of fire by various Indigenous, Aboriginal, and tribal peoples to: (1) modify fire regimes, adapting and responding to climate and local environmental conditions to promote desired landscapes, habitats, and species; and (2) to increase the abundance of favored resources to sustain knowledge systems, ceremonial, and subsistence practices, economies, and livelihoods. (2019, p. 1)

Amy Christianson (2015) draws a fundamental distinction between wildfire and fire resulting from the burning practices of Indigenous people. As she explains, wildfires can be from natural processes or human activities and generally occur in the summer months or at other times when vegetation is dry and conducive to burning out of control. In contrast, Indigenous burning is highly controlled and generally takes place during low-risk conditions: decisions about where and when to burn are guided by a deep understanding of climatic cycles, ignition sources, fire behaviour, and landscape factors, such as how the topography and vegetation/fuels contributed to the natural fire regime and associated landscape fire effects (Huffman, 2013; Lake & Christianson, 2019; Steffensen, 2020).

In Australia, Aboriginal peoples applied fire to different ecologies, at different times, shaping their surroundings for more than 65,000 years (Neale et al., 2019; Pascoe, 2018). Bruce Pascoe (2018) cites evidence from palynologists, which suggests Aboriginal Australians began using fire as a tool as long as 120,000 years ago. Before colonisation, Indigenous fire stewardship on Country (a term commonly used to describe Aboriginal homelands, and which encompasses entangled relations between ancestors, spirits, species, and place), worked on five principles: (1) the majority of agricultural lands were burned on a rotating mosaic, which controlled intensity and allowed animals and plants to survive in refuges; (2) the time of burning depended on the type of land (e.g., soil type, dominant species of vegetation) and the condition of the bush at the time; (3) the prevailing weather was crucial to the timing of the burn; (4) neighbouring clans were advised of fire activity; and (5) the growing season of particular plants was avoided at all costs (Pascoe, 2018; see also Steffensen, 2020). Importantly, as Victor Steffensen (2020) describes, not every ecosystem was burned: he refers to "no-fire ecosystems" and cites wet rainforests and riverbanks as key examples. Engaging with Country in this way provided many benefits and resources, including food, water, medicine, access to key areas, fibres for basketry, and protection from dangerous bushfires, sustaining human life on the continent for millennia (Huffman, 2013; Pascoe, 2018; Russell-Smith et al., 2003; Steffensen, 2020).

The Aboriginal ontological concept of "the Dreaming" embeds fire within a metaphysical context (Eriksen & Hankins, 2015). Aboriginal people generally do not separate synergistic relationships between fire and other aspects of the physical and metaphysical: rather, those relationships are interdependent and interconnected. The scaling of those relationships extends from the individual to the universe, and is inclusive of the feedbacks within those levels (Eriksen & Hankins, 2015; see also Steffensen, 2020). Aboriginal fire knowledge is applied to the landscape to nurture and maintain those relationships, and the knowledge is passed from one generation to next through lore and cultural practice (Steffensen, 2020; Pascoe, 2018): "cultural fire helps prevent fire risks, rejuvenate local flora, [and] protect native animal habitat, all while restoring the kinship to the land" (Oliver Costello, cited in Higgins, 2020).

The process of colonisation severely limited Indigenous fire stewardship practices in countries around the world (Eriksen & Hankins, 2015; Lake & Christianson, 2019; Mistry, 2000), including Australia (Gammage, 2011; Neale, 2018; Neale et al., 2019; Pascoe, 2018; Weir et al., 2020). When the British invaded the Australian continent in 1788, colonial interests disrupted the Aboriginal use of fire through the forced removal of people from their sovereign lands and a policy of fire prohibition (Eriksen & Hankins, 2015; Gammage, 2011; Vale, 2002). The colonial worldview was that fires were destructive to the timber supply and dangerous to communities (Pyne, 2007). Interestingly, when the colonists invaded, they found what historian Bill Gammage has referred to as "the Greatest Estate on Earth"—vast park-like environments in which large trees were carefully situated within pampered grasslands, providing sustenance and shelter to an array of grazing animals. Ironically, these landscapes, so appreciated by the colonists, were created by the very fires they feared (Turner, 1999). Kohen (cited in Pascoe, 2018, p. 165) put it best:

While Aboriginal people used fire as a tool for increasing the productivity of their environment, Europeans saw fire as a threat. Without low intensity burning, leaf litter accumulates, and crown fires can result, destroying everything in their path. European settlers feared fire, for it could destroy their houses, their crops and it could destroy them. Yet the environment that was so attractive to them was created by fire.

#### Fire and the Australian Curriculum

Such nuanced understandings of fire as part and parcel of life on this flammable continent, and something to be embraced, celebrated, and respected, is largely absent from Australian culture, which aligns with broader Western cultural relationships with fire. According to Pyne (2019),

Fire disappeared as an integral subject about the time we hid fire into Franklin stoves and steam engines … It lost standing as a topic in its own right. As with the fires of today, its use in history has been to illustrate other themes, not to track a narrative of its own.

An analysis of the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2019) supports this observation. Combustion is not covered as a topic in Science (or anywhere else) until Year 9. Here the Content Description statement is "chemical reactions, including combustion and the reactions of acids, are important in both nonliving and living systems and involve energy transfer," and the two Content Elaborations are "recognising the role of oxygen in combustion reactions and comparing combustion with other oxidation reactions" and "describing how the products of combustion reactions affect the environment." Fire is also not discussed in Science until Year 9, and here it is only a "such as" in an Elaboration. The Content Description statement is: "Ecosystems consist of communities of interdependent organisms and abiotic components of the environment; matter and energy flow through these systems" and the associated Elaboration is "investigating how ecosystems change as a result of events such as bushfires, drought and flooding" (ACARA, 2019).

The most comprehensive location for the study of bushfires in the Australian Curriculum is in Year 5 Geography. Here the Content Description statement is: "The impact of bushfires or floods on environments and communities, and how people can respond," and this is elaborated as.

Climate change does not fare much better in the Science curriculum. It only appears in three Elaborations in Year 9 Science. The Content Description statement says, "Scientific understanding, including models and theories, is contestable and is refined over time through a process of review by the scientific community," and in the Elaboration there is "considering the role of science in identifying and explaining the causes of climate change." The Content Description "advances in scientific understanding often rely on technological advances and are often linked to scientific discoveries" includes "considering how computer modelling has improved knowledge and predictability of phenomena such as climate change and atmospheric pollution," and the Content Description "people can use scientific knowledge to evaluate whether they accept claims, explanations or predictions and advances in science can affect people's lives including generating new career opportunities" includes the Elaboration "considering the scientific knowledge used in discussions relating to climate change."

These silences around fire and climate change in the written curriculum are very concerning, as teachers increasingly only teach what is going to be assessed (Popham, 2001) and are less likely to teach that which is not explicitly written into the curriculum (Earp, 2019). This affects what is then taught and learned. The implementation and effectiveness of this curriculum has not been reviewed at a state, territory, or national level since it was developed. Given the curriculum isn't always taught in the same way as it is written, we should not assume bushfire education is being delivered as intended, or that it is being delivered at all.

One problem with the Australian Curriculum content statements is that they are relatively abstract and detached from children's lived experiences (Towers et al., 2020). Towers (2015) interviewed Australian children aged 8– 12 to find out their knowledge of bushfire emergency responses and found many misconceptions about bushfire safety, which often came from a lack of knowledge about bushfire behaviour. For example, children often assume bushfires only travel through direct flame contact and think a nonflammable physical barrier (such as a river, a road, or a brick wall) will prevent a bushfire from reaching their property. But burning embers can travel many kilometres ahead of the fire front, and ember attack is a major cause of home ignitions. Such misconceptions are best addressed by making bushfire education more relevant to their own lives. Children need to explore and understand vulnerability to bushfire in their own communities as well as their capacity for reducing risk.

Bushfire education in schools is more effective when taught across the curriculum, rather than as isolated topics. One example is the bushfire education programme at Victoria's Strathewen Primary School for students in grades five and six. It incorporates science, art, civics and citizenship, design, English, and geography. An evaluation of this programme (Towers et al., 2018) showed it increased children's knowledge of local bushfire risks and the actions people can take to manage them. It also helped increase children's confidence for sharing their knowledge with others, gave them a sense of empowerment, and reduced bushfire-related anxieties. The programme's benefits extended to families, including increased bushfire planning at home with more participation from children in the process.

Traditionally, school-based disaster risk reduction and resilience education (DRRRE), such as bushfire education, has tended to adopt a transmission model of education, where a specific body of knowledge is transferred from adult to child. In this model, children are positioned as passive receivers of information as opposed to critical thinkers and problem solvers. This model also tends to be information driven rather than action oriented. Even when children are encouraged to take action, adults often prescribe the action, and there are limited opportunities for children to creatively address other issues that might concern them and for them to feel empowered to act at critical moments. What is needed is a more child-centred approach that is more holistic, place-based, and participatory. Such approaches not only provide children with essential knowledge and skills, but also empower them to actively participate in disaster risk reduction and resilience-building activities. We also need a pedagogy that embraces becoming-with fire: one where the boundaries between the students and fire "move, blur, dissolve and/or are (re)established due to their on-going intra-action" (Nakagawa et al., 2020, p. 11; see also Verlie, 2018, for an example of becoming-with climate, and with fossil fuels).

#### Pyro-Pedagogies of Becoming-With

"Our house is on fire" proclaimed Greta Thunberg (2019), and following her, thousands of young people around the world protested governmental inaction on climate change. These words reverberated ever louder as children and young people around Australia mobilised in public spaces with atmospheres thick with the airborne remains of native forests throughout the southern summer of 2019/2020 (Wahlquist, 2019; Regan & Yeung, 2020). Shouting from behind their P2 masks, we saw young people standing up for their futures, and becoming activists in the process. Exploring young people's lived experiences of bushfire within a colonial, carbon-intensive economy, pushes us to consider potentials for alternative pyro-pedagogies. The Black Summer demonstrates that fire operates pedagogically well beyond the confines of the classroom, and exerts agency exceeding the bounds of curriculum statements that dictate how to teach "about" fire. In multiple, intersecting, and reverberating ways, fire affects who we are and can be as humans. Our relationships with fire are changing, meaning that we are changing at a fundamental level of who we are, how we understand what it is to be human, and how we can live in this hot, dry, colonised country. Thus, we are calling for pyro-pedagogies founded on a notion of becoming-with fire, our unruly kin.

Reconsidering "what" "where" and "when" fire is, is a preliminary move towards this. As noted previously with respect to some children's recent lived experience of bushfire, fire is not just "in" the curriculum but is inside, throughout, and outside the classroom. Indeed, combustion co-composes what the classroom is: what it is made of, where it is, whether and how it is heated, how students and staff get to school, what they eat, and how flammable and at risk it is, etc. And classrooms co-compose fire, reciprocally: the school system more broadly is embedded in fossil fuel economies, and it positions children as future workers in capitalist systems. The material economies that build classrooms literally contribute to emissions which fuel fires. Classrooms and fire are much more closely and intimately related than we might typically think.

We are also advocating for understanding fire not just as something to be learned about, but as a pedagogue that operates through its role as unruly kin. Across Australia's Black Summer, children were kept home, sent home and evacuated from school, kept indoors, sent to hospitals, evacuated from holidays, evacuated with their families, participants in recovery efforts, and more. For young people who led their families to safety (Towers et al., 2020) this was surely a life-changing moment, and their sense of self will be affected in profound ways, even if we cannot anticipate that or even trace it with accuracy. That these experiences occur outside of classrooms does not mean they are not pedagogical or curricular. We don't know exactly what students are learning, or who or what they are becoming through these processes. The point is that fire is a pedagogue that exceeds the capacities of teachers, parents, and humans more broadly—it is unruly, and it changes us in significant, species- and society-changing ways. Further, even within "climate controlled" classrooms, and when mediated through imagery and narrative, fire acts pedagogically (Verlie, 2019a), especially in affective ways. All of this considered, we know that after this Black Summer things will not be the same: Australian culture will not be the same, and summer itself will not be the same. For example, people have gone from counting down the days until summer holidays start, to counting down the days until summer is over, indicating a significant affective change in our relationships with weather, seasonality, climate change, and our forests.

Part of fire's pedagogical capacities is its ability to shape who and how we become. Our focus on "kin" and "becoming" emphasises that human relationships with the non-human world are dynamic and open to the agency of the nonhuman world. Such a pedagogy does not provide clear-cut, practical suggestions of how and what to teach, but emphasises the need to continually be attuning to the agency of the world and how it interacts with and affects students' whole lives (Verlie, 2017; Nakagawa et al., 2020). However, we can become-with fire in different ways, and educators can play a role by "sparking" such changes and directing pyro-pedagogies in certain ways. For example, in traditional DRRRE, children might become hazard managers, replete with the reductive, top down, resource management approach to trying to keep nature in its place. Alternatively, they could become cultural burners and stewards of fire, if supported to learn from and engage with Aboriginal culture and ecological practice—such as through Marcia Langton's (n.d.) *Resources in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures for Teachers*. An Aboriginalled pyro-pedagogy could be our moment for rejecting human exceptionalism, through attending to fire's unruly, massive, and terrifying but also beneficial and healing qualities.

A pyro-pedagogy of becoming-with fire would also be situated and placebased. As CSIRO bushfire expert Justin Leonard (in *SBS News*, 2016) said, "there's a way to live in every part of the landscape and it's this integrated way of understanding what, what fire is in that location, how to find the balance and manage the bush in the right way, and that easily unlocks how you build and live and behave and understand." Rejecting colonisers' logics that there is one right way to live in all places, and focusing on how particular combustive ecologies intersect with particular cultures and experiences will be fundamental to cultivating education that is relevant to children's whole lives. A situated and relevant pyro-pedagogy would also contribute to the transdisciplinary and participatory modes of education that Teresa Lloro-Bidart (2015) argues are necessary in the Anthropocene. This pedagogy also needs to adopt a wholeschool approach, in line with Steffensen's (in *SBS News*, 2016) suggestion that we need to involve "communities in understanding fire. Not in its vicious form or its threatening form but understanding fire and its nurturing and... how beautiful it really is."

Briony Towers' (2019) research on bushfire education offers important insights for such pyro-pedagogies. For children to develop a coherent understanding of bushfire risk that is sufficient for identifying problems and solutions in their own local context, Towers argues that a holistic learning framework that incorporates the environmental and social dimensions is needed. "This requires teaching and learning activities that systematically build children's knowledge and awareness of the various dimensions of risk—the physical hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacities—and how those dimensions interact to cause hazard impacts and disasters" (2019, p. 72). Towers also argues that there needs to be a.

place-based pedagogy of bushfire risk, [where] the surrounding socioenvironmental context serves as the learning ecosystem: abstracted environments are substituted with local landscapes; textbooks and worksheets are replaced by local experts and experiential activities in the field; and generic information about bushfire risk is augmented by local knowledge, data and predictions. (2019, p. 73)

Such an approach, that situates children in their specific worlds and sees them as active subjects who interact with and become-with fire, demonstrates that understanding fire as unruly kin that our children are unavoidably entangled with can generate pedagogies responsive to the conditions of the Pyrocene. Through acknowledging and teaching about fire's unruly capacities, we can steer students towards more ecologically attuned and responsive and resilient ways of being.

#### Conclusion

Robert Glasser (2019, p. 4) was quite prescient when he wrote in early 2019, "This emerging Era of Disasters will increasingly stretch emergency services, undermine community resilience and escalate economic costs and losses of life." What the bushfires of Australia's 2019/2020 Black Summer have shown us is that we need a different relationship with fire in the environment, one that recognises fire as our unruly kin and which foregrounds the agency of human and more-than-human materiality (i.e., "nature") and their entanglement. We see a pyro-pedagogy of becoming-with fire as building on each of our previous writings—Annette Gough's (2019) on more-than-human scientific inquiry in education, Blanche Verlie's (2018) on becoming-with climate change, and Briony Towers (2019) on child-centred DRRRE—and more. In doing this we have much to learn from Victor Steffensen and other First Nations peoples. We also hear young people's refrain, *our house is on fire*, calling ever more loudly for education to recognise that climate change is radically reconfiguring the fundamental conditions of children's lives today and in the future. Thus, we believe that thinking much more broadly about humanity's entanglement with fire—the histories, futures, geographies, and affective ecologies of various kinds of combustion—is necessary if we are to enable our young people to learn to live with climate change (Verlie, 2019b). This is very different from the current abstract, teacher-centred approaches to bushfire and climate change education in the Australian Curriculum, but one that is sorely needed.

**Acknowledgements** We acknowledge that this chapter was written by Annette and Briony on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation in which Melbourne now is located, and by Blanche on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation in which Sydney is now located. We pay our respects to the Elders both past and present, and to those emerging.

#### References

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### Decolonizing Anthropocene(s)

# Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene(s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity Through Thinking with Kim Tallbear

#### *Priyanka Dutt, Anastasya Fateyeva, Michelle Gabereau, and Marc Higgins*

What does it mean to respond to the *Anthropocenes*, plural, when doing science education? As Davis and Todd (2016) query, "if the Anthropocene is already here, the question then becomes, what can we do with it as a conceptual apparatus that may serve to undermine the conditions that it names" (p. 763)? What is gained and what is lost through the rallying cry of the naming of this epoch after *humankind* (i.e., the Anthropos), particularly if and when such a naming of a shared catastrophe masks the uneven responsibility for this contemporary moment, as well as the unequal ways in which it is felt? More pointedly, can we critically engage with *the* Anthropocene, singular, without acknowledging the multiplicity of moments in which

P. Dutt (B)

A. Fateyeva Edmonton Public Schools, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022 M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_7

University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Gabereau Ehpewapahk Alternate School, Maskwacis, AB, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Higgins Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Indigenous Land and its ecology of humans, other-than-humans, and morethan-humans were at risk of extinction from "Man"? Within this chapter, we contend that if the ways of thinking and practicing both science and science education continue to be rooted in the same *settler*<sup>1</sup> colonial, capitalist, and toxic ways-of-knowing and -being that have and continue to produce Indigenous erasure and support the acquisition of Indigenous Land, that responses to *the* Anthropocene, singular, will be fraught (e.g., Bang & Marin, 2015; Liboiron et al., 2018). As Davis and Todd (2016) state:

without recognizing that from the beginning, the Anthropocene is a universalizing project, it serves to re-invisibilize the power of Eurocentric narratives, again re-placing them as the neutral and global perspective. By linking the Anthropocene with colonization, it draws attention to the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the selfdetermination of other communities and societies violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene. (2016, p. 763)

Beginning from the recognition that both science and science education are most often premised on *othering* Indigenous peoples (Bang & Marin, 2015; Tallbear, 2013), we leverage this unusual turn towards *a* shared identity as a means of provoking new ways for the Anthropocene(s) to be felt. In this work, we take seriously Davis and Todd's (2016) call for the "consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes … as necessary political corrective" by engaging in a citational politics: we privilege and think with Indigenous thought-practices that have been working within, against, and beyond Western humanism since the beginnings of colonization. Notably, we turn to Dakota scholar Kim Tallbear (2013), drawing on her work illuminating and troubling the relations between identity, science, settler colonialism, and Indigeneity. Following this, we offer a series of aesthetic provocations as a means of making the Anthropocene(s) felt otherwise.

#### Troubling Shared Identity as a Settler Move to Innocence

Western modern science, from its very beginnings, operationalizes processes through which some are deemed "non-scientific" as a means of legitimizing and lifting those that are "scientific." Such logics extend more broadly to Western modernity and through colonial logics: dichotomously framing some as having culture, civilization, knowledge, and rationality, amidst other things, because others have not. While these culturally shape(d) who can and could

<sup>1</sup> Settler colonialism is a structure, and not only an event, through which settlers continue an ongoing project of Indigenous erasure and Land acquisition (see Tuck & Yang, 2012).

participate in science, as well as how, it also affects the kinds of sciences practiced.

While the genetic science of race is largely discounted today, Tallbear (2013) reminds us that "gene discourses and scientific practices are entangled in ongoing colonialisms. What 'they' [settlers] think and do have always determined how much trouble 'we' [Native Americans] have" (p. 9). Despite science's distancing from race, we continue to see contemporary examples of how science is entangled in practices of defining, categorizing, policing, and perpetuating identities through practices such as direct-to-consumer DNA tests. In turn, science continues to inherit the responsibility to face the ways in which it has had and continues to have a part in defining *identity*, as well as how DNA continues to be systematically used to (re)direct power and privilege towards some (e.g., white settlers) at the expense of others (e.g., Indigenous peoples). For example, Tallbear (2013) invites us to consider the ways in which genetics is leveraged in the U.S. political system through property rights:

Property rights accorded to whiteness are protected by the U.S. legal system. One of those rights is control of the legal meanings of group identities. Whites have legally defined who counts as black or Indian. This is an important right, for the racialization and subordination of those black and red "others" has been necessary to solidify the exclusive parameters of whiteness. (TallBear, 2013, p. 136)

This difference has become so normalized and normative that white settlers can unironically approach the question of difference vis-à-vis a stance of "helping" Indigenous peoples without recognizing their own complicity: such as the colonial impulse to improve or introduce new technologies, framing traditional ways-of-knowing and -being as backwards. One such dubiously helpful techno-scientific extension is the genetic theory of the mitochondrial Eve, which would have us all originate from Africa, and the notion that if we could come to realize that we were all connected that racism would end: racism is incompatible with knowledge of genetics.

Challenging the notion that scientific knowledge is enough for change to occur, Tallbear (2013) reminds us that "racism does not need to be scientifically 'correct' to thrive. … [It is an] ahistorical … hope that scientific knowledge can make the crucial intervention of halting centuries of race oppression" (p. 149). As Tallbear (2013) suggests, it may not even be enough to halt racist and oppressive myths proffered by the same scientists who offer "we are all African" as corrective: genetic research *on* Indigenous peoples continues under the guise of "preserving" the DNA of "vanishing" Indigenous peoples. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully unpack *why* this is problematic (e.g., not acknowledging the colonial complicities that accompany the production of the image of Indigenous peoples as vanishing, either culturally or physically), we are wary of what calls to shared identities make visible and what they mask in terms of colonial logics and practices.

In turn, while we agree that we are *all* affected by and need to respond to the Anthropocene, we wish to attend to what the illumination of shared culpability serves to conceal. Since the 1950s, the period in which *the* Anthropocene is often stated to have begun, "carbon dioxide levels, mass extinctions, and the widespread use of petrochemicals, … and radioactivity left from the detonation of atomic bombs" (Davis & Todd, pp. 762–763) have been (re)shaping the globe. However, while we are all are impacted by and inherit the Anthropocene, it is irresponsible to frame the issue as one that impels and affects us all equally, as this serves to "mask power with innocence" (McKinley, 2001). *The* Anthropocene does not and cannot account for the ways that the responsibility for this current moment are unevenly distributed or how it unevenly impacts diverse groups: the Global South, endangered animals and species, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized urban and rural folk of colour, amidst others. Rather, not unlike Tallbear's (2013) lines of questioning of colonial complicities of genetic science, Tuck and Yang (2012) invite us to consider such actions as *settler moves to innocence*:

Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. (p. 10)

Here particularly, the settler move to innocence is one of equivocation. Through equivocation, "or calling everything by the same name" (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 17), the intent is to signal the ways in which we are all affected and must respond to this shared catastrophe. While not wholly untrue, equivocation serves to mask the ways in which settlers have conveniently ignored and have actively participated in *Anthropocenes* which precede and come to constitute the present one. For example, the "Orbis spike" of 1610 (Lewis & Maslin, 2015) in which atmospheric CO2 levels drastically dropped as a result of the genocide of Indigenous peoples, having planetary consequences.

Further, Tallbear (2013) helps us to think about the ways in which colonial logics fetishize origins (e.g., *the* Anthropocene). Complicating the notion that Indigenous identity *originates* in DNA, Tallbear (2013) offers an Indigenous conception of being that is relational. Not only is such a means of honouring longstanding and ongoing Indigenous philosophies, but it is also a means of calling into question and understanding the ecology of settler colonial thought-practices which constitute problematic extractivist genetic practices through which Indigenous peoples continue to be the *object* of science. In turn, we believe that choosing to observe *this* Anthropocene (as *the* Anthropocene) has much to do with how the world's settlers have displaced and destroyed through extractivism (i.e., the production of "value" through ever accelerating extraction of resources).<sup>2</sup>

<sup>2</sup> It is also worth noting that even *positive* identity construction can also be in the service of settler colonial logics within. For example, Indigenous peoples who take up the

After Davis and Todd (2016), we want to take seriously the notion that "the Anthropocene betrays itself in its name: in its reassertion of universality, it implicitly aligns itself with the colonial era" (Davis & Todd, 2016, p. 763). However, rather than offer a corrective identifying (beyond the plural form: Anthropocenes), we turn to more relational forms of meaning-making in response to the ways in which *a* meaning, like *an* identity, often works to reassert and reproduce settler colonial ways-of-knowing and -being. Specifically, we take seriously Tallbear's (2013) call to not make Indigenous peoples the object of study when discussing the manifestations of settler colonialism in science but rather invert the gaze back onto science itself. Further, an important move in not offering a corrective is that, as Plains Cree scholar Cash Ahenakew (2017) states, "the work of decolonization is not about what we do not imagine, but what we cannot imagine from our Western ways of knowing" (p. 88). We, as science educators, may need to sit with and in the difficult question of *why* we cannot or have not been able to respond to the Anthropocene(s). In turn, we recognize the need for new ways to (re)open what we can even imagine within science education as we respond to Anthropocenes. As Ahenakew states, "using metaphor and poetry to disrupt sense-making and prompt sense-sensing in the experience of readers" (2016, p. 337) because "modern academic literacies and technologies can make what has been made invisible by colonialism visibly absent, but they cannot make it present" (2017, p. 89). Accordingly, not only do we avoid offering *the* meaning because it risks reasserting and reproducing settler colonial ways-of-knowing and -being, but also because it may not be heard: science education has had and continues to have an active part in rendering unintelligible Indigenous ways-of-knowing and -being. Nonetheless, in endnotes, we offer *a* meaning as a means of engaging the possibilities that the aesthetic provocations below make possible.

Below, you will find a series of image-texts<sup>3</sup> that are intended to invite an unpacking and undermining of the problematic ways in which Indigeneity, settler colonialism, science education, and the Anthropocene(s) intersect and coalesce (e.g., producing non-Western epistemologies and ontologies as lesserthan). Inspired by diverse influences such as Indigenous storywork (e.g., Archibald, 2008), political cartoons, and meme culture we wish to produce a field of meaning-making that implicates the reader within the question of the Anthropocene(s) in the every day as well as its settler colonial and neo-colonial implications.

roles of Land protectors, while perpetually positioned as enemies of economic progress, are simultaneously positioned as stewards of the Land in ways that can and do let settlers *off-the-hook* in terms of their ecological responsibilities (El-Sherif, 2020).

<sup>3</sup> All of the following images have been illustrated by Anastasya Fateyeva.

#### Turtle Island: A Haudenosaunee Creation Story4

*Long before the world was created, there was an island in the sky inhabited by sky people. One day, a pregnant sky woman drops through a hole created by an uprooted tree and begins to fall for what seems like eternity.*

*Coming out of darkness, she eventually sees oceans. The animals from this world congregate, trying to understand what they see in the sky. A flock of birds is sent to help her. The birds catch her and gently guide her down onto the back of Great Turtle. The water animals like otter and beaver have prepared a place for her on turtle's back. They bring mud from the bottom of the ocean and place it on turtle's back until solid earth begins to form and increase in size.*

*Turtle's back becomes Sky Woman's home and the plants she brought down with her from Skyworld, including tobacco and strawberries, are her medicine. She makes a life for herself and becomes the mother of Haudenosaunee life as we know it today.*

#### Unpacking Everyday (Neo-)Colonialisms5

Let's talk about unpacking your recent purchase from Whiteazon. We can see that you're either in the pursuit of achieving a level of whiteness as defined and dictated by present-day, settler colonial society because you may not be white passing or perhaps you're educating yourself on the privileges that are associated with the notion of white passing and what that means. In the off chance that you're making this purchase as a white person, please leave a review when you can!

About: *Colonialism Illustratedby Wyatt Mehn* **Avg. Rating** *⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*

<sup>4</sup> The first provocation is a depiction of Turtle Island, the name used by many Indigenous peoples when addressing what is colonially known as North America, followed by a Haudenosaunee creation story (Niro et al., 1999).

<sup>5</sup> The second provocation is a satirical approach to the understandings of "belonging" in Western contemporary society. At once, it speaks to the requisite participation in consumeristic materialism: acquiring and holding valuable assets such as property, goods, and other forms of capital (which are then read as social capital). Simultaneously, it expresses a relation to whiteness and settler colonial logics: belonging often requires conformity of those not presenting in the image of Man (e.g., changing or altering one's behaviour through speaking one language over another, changing the dress or traditional adornments one chooses to wear, etc.).

Further, this provocation also helps to exemplify the ways in which colonial science excludes contributions to the field of STEM from the East or from different origins. Finally, there is the notion of identity and what that means, how it is defined, and how we use said definitions to create laws. Of particular note here is the tendency to dictate identity based on direct-to-consumer DNA tests, which may be used to govern bodies, but may also be used as ways to validate (or invalidate) certain identities over others, or invalidate them altogether (TallBear, 2013). It also begs the question: does one need a quantitative measure to know their identity or can identity be rooted in something else altogether?

Wyatt Mehn knows just how confusing colonialism can be. In his illustrative piece, Mehn attempts to depict the ways in which one can attain a colonial body short of bleaching one's skin. This can be done by "acting white." In this piece, Mehn shows examples of the colonized person, i.e., straightening otherwise naturally curly hair when it is on a brown body, reducing the number of cultural or traditional adornments worn by a brown body, or negating accents or heritage-related tonal changes in order to establish a "white" voice. Mehn also shows the converse for each example, highlighting the spectrum of which these dichotomies exist.

#### *Important White Men by Ano Therwy Atman*

#### **Avg. Rating** *⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*

Perhaps you need to establish your place in a predominantly Eurocentric Western society. To do so, Atman has created a comprehensible guide to the Important White Men whose names replace the contributions from Eastern societies or from non-male bodies. From Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA and not Rosalind Franklin to the erasure of Ibn al-Haythem's contributions to the understanding of light and optics, this book will create space to understand and internalize the ways in which Eurocentrism and Western ideologies actively work against non-white, non-male bodies.

#### *Property Management by Sam Guy*

#### **Avg. Rating** *⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*

Owning property is a tough endeavour but Sam Guy has created a simple, multi-step approach that any person of colour can follow. In it, he speaks to the Five Fundamentals of Owning Property: Having means and money, Nepotism, Blankets laced with smallpox, Treaties that may or may not contain loopholes in which Indigenous peoples are tricked into giving up their livelihood for the sake of their nations, and general Whiteness. Guy's work also emphasizes that the fifth fundamental, whiteness, is perhaps the most precious and valuable property to have and hold in Western society.

#### *Principles of Debate, Vol. 1—10by Al SoSam Guy* **Avg. Rating** *⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*

While the connections and sense of community we make on a day-to-day basis are valuable, Al Guy believes that the one true way to create identity is through the definitions posed by raw data or otherwise cultivated by science. In his inspiring collection of historical data and journal articles, Guy creates a map from genetic markers to the definitions and depictions of identity. No longer is a total of 7% Japanese DNA markers irrelevant to your identity. Further, Guy provides explanations into the world of defining and labelling identity while also providing insights into what is or isn't part of those leading definitions, complete with an interview from presidential candidate Melizabeth Twarren and her embracing of her Cherokee DNA.

#### Indigenous Erasures: Supersessionism and Scientific Origin Stories6

Long before the world was created, there was an island in the sky inhabited by sky people.

Coming out of darkness, she eventually sees oceans. The animals from this world congregate, trying to understand what they see in the sky. A flock of birds is sent to help her. The birds catch her and gently guide her down onto the back of Great Turtle. The water animals like otter and beaver have prepared a place for her on turtle's back. They bring mud from the bottom of the ocean and place it on turtle's back until solid earth begins to form and increase in size.

Turtle's back becomes Sky Woman's home and the plants she brought down with her from Skyworld, including tobacco and strawberries, are her medicine. She makes a life for herself and becomes the mother of Haudenosaunee life as we know it today. (Niro et al., 1999).

*When the solar system settled into its current layout about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become the third planet from the Sun. Like its fellow terrestrial planets, Earth has a central core, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust* (NASA, 2020).

<sup>6</sup> The third provocation is a revisiting of the first, a newly rendered version of Turtle Island, but now with red pen and altered definitions. Following the previous "unpacking" of whiteness in settler colonial Western societies, we suggest that these settler colonial, Eurocentric, and strict views of science begin to produce particular ways-of-relating within and across places and communities. Specifically, we understand the project of "identity" and "origins" as being entangled in the production of hard and fast definitions which shape how the North and the rest of the global population is "mapped out" and understood. For example, the need to define a people: in the ability to quantify, by per cent, their DNA, or by the presence of haplogroups, or by the defined borders that we draw between societies, or by the hypotheses we create regarding a nation's potential migratory patterns (e.g., Bering land bridge theory). These ways-of-defining are inseparable from and entangled with settler colonial ideas of science and the larger project of Western modernity which desires the creation of lines and boundaries rather than bridges and connections between the self and the other, the observer and the observed, as a means of privileging settler colonial lifeways (e.g., lifting Man, the subject of modernity, be they a scientist, educator, or other).

Within this provocation, the stark contrast between the Haudenosaunee creation story and NASA's explanation of the formation of the universe is included in order to truly show not only the dichotomy that exists within our present-day teachings of science and the stories by which Indigenous elders and other communities disseminate knowledge. It is also meant to invite a consideration of the way in which Western modern science supersedes other-ways-of-knowing and -being, erasing or devaluing them in the process. The question lingers: why does or must science education value one (Western modern science) so highly above all others?

#### Indigenous Erasures: The Genographic Project7

The Genographic Project cannot, for example, tell me how I am related to my various Dakota tribal kin, the ultimate set of relations in tribal life. … The question of how we as Dakota got to where we are has already been answered, and the answer does not lie in genetics. I could reference Dakota creation stories that give us values for living, narrate our common history, cohere us as a people with a common moral framework, and tie us to a sacred land base. … "Who we really are" is not a question that most, if any, Dakota think can be answered by finding out that they have mtDNA markers that "originated" in Mongolia. (TallBear, 2013, p. 152)

#### Conclusion

The Anthropocene is the epoch under which "humanity"—but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism—have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide, and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata. (Davis & Todd, 2016, p. 765)

The Anthropocene(s) are a time in which our present geological age is significantly defined by the impact of *Man* (e.g., the white, masculine subject of Western modernity). While the notion and framing of *the* Anthropocene is not wrong—increasing human influence has led to greater impacts on climate change and the surrounding ecosystems—we suggest that this admission of culpability masks more than it reveals: *the* Anthropocene cannot be separated from the scientific production of identity which upholds and reproduces settler colonial thought practices. Importantly, when 100 companies produce 71% of the world's pollution, the creation of a shared identity may divert attention away from addressing the "petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism" (Davis & Todd, 2016, p. 765) who hold primary responsibility for the contemporary moment.

It is our desire that the above aesthetic provocations will generously generate different configurations of pedagogy which will allow for new ways to attend to the interconnected matrices of power and privilege which shape this contemporary Anthropocenic epoch that is predicated on so many

<sup>7</sup> The fourth provocation illustrates the Manhattan plot: data that is extracted from a sample of one's DNA. Within a single sample, there may be dozens of genetic markers depicting dozens of differing identities within a single individual. However, as TallBear (2013) puts it, these tests cannot define who she is because her personhood emanates from her relations, rich culture, long-standing traditions, and passed down stories. Further, rather than a shared identity, TallBear (2013) speaks to how her Dakota kin are connected through their experiences, not by a direct-to-consumer DNA test that spits out an array of percentages based on genetic markers tied to Mongolia.

other Anthropocenes. With this, we hope that these might allow for open, vulnerable, self-reflexive dialogue around the problematic ways in which the Anthropocene(s), Indigeneity, and science education intersect.

In refusing the ways in which we are discursively called to leave behind our relationalities in the universalizing project of the Anthropocene, we suggest turning to Indigenous thought-practices to break the cyclical storm of anthropogenic violence: to remember that the same land we begin to separate, colonize, commodify, and pollute is also the land in which we may find coalition and community.

#### References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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### Decolonizing Healing Through Indigenous Ways of Knowing

#### *Miranda Field*

The field of psychology is embarking on a process of interrupting the historical colonial cycle of harm and beginning to work with and alongside Indigenous communities to understand the healing journey (Drees, 2013). Understanding the healing journey provides a foundation for both those who seek and guide healing. As a society, disconnection with the land influenced how psychology teaches those who guide healing, the practices the field establishes as evidenced-based, and what elements contribute to positive outcomes. Exploring healing from a decolonizing perspective provides insight into the essential understanding where learning and healing coexist along this journey. Researchers, mental health service providers, and educators alike move towards acknowledging that challenging and displacing hegemonic Western knowledge systems is required to engage and enable multiple forms of literacy and knowledge to coexist (Kermoal & Altamirano-Jimenez, 2016). This work is not possible without the guidance of Indigenous communities, ensuring that healing is engaged in a strength-based, ethically responsible manner and for those guiding healing, an individual process of decolonizing Western psychology practices can begin.

To better support trajectories of decolonizing practices in psychology, this chapter aligns with the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada (TRCC) Calls to Action (2012); specifically, Call to Action (Legacy, Health) 22, which calls upon "those who can effect change within the Canadian health-care system to

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M. Field (B)

University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022

M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_8

recognize the value of Aboriginal healing practices and use them in the treatment of Aboriginal patients in collaboration with Aboriginal healers and Elders where requested by Aboriginal patients" (TRCC, 2012). Acknowledging the notion that mental health healing may not occur without learning, and vice versa, shifts the paradigm to one where healing and learning coexist through meaningful relationships.

This chapter seeks to answer the call put forward by McGinnis et al. (2019), which calls on mental health practitioners and educators to recognize, support, and incorporate Indigenous knowledge systems in to practice and to consider the ethical implications of integrating and supporting Indigenous ways of knowing into current psychology practice. Through decolonizing land-based healing experiences and drawing on my personal journey—as an educator trained in psychology—I seek to integrate lived experience with supporting academic literature to provide an understanding of the historical, relational disconnection from land. Through Indigenous ways of knowing, the field of psychology can begin to decolonize individual practice and begin to integrate traditional ways of healing into current practice and embark in the process of interrupting the historical colonial cycle of harm. A foundational understanding within decolonizing psychology is understanding relationships through Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The personal journey is the beginning of reconnecting relationships through learning and healing.

I acknowledge the ways in which my upbringing as a European-descent Christian from rural Canada has a foundational influence on how I see myself, my community, and my world. I have dedicated friendships, education, and travel to allow myself the opportunity to broaden my understanding of the world and those around me. I understand and acknowledge that I do not know everything there is to know about any topic and seek support and further understanding in many areas. My network of personal and professional relationships continues to grow as I seek ongoing and continued support, which establishes a foundational network which I can draw upon when professional guidance and additional knowledge is required.

I acknowledge my minimal lived experience with oppression, racism, discrimination, and stereotyping and understand that my foundation is built around my world (growing up and now) being situated among the dominant ethnicity, culture, and belief systems of my surroundings. I continue to seek support, guidance, understanding, and patience from those knowledgeable in education and health care practices. I seek to engage in decolonized Indigenous understandings in areas from academia to land-based healing.

My training in both education and psychology has been greatly influenced by legally defensible writing and not that of nuance or publicized self-reflection. To decolonize my practices and understanding in psychology, I must disrupt the colonial influences of my foundation and embrace Indigenous ways of knowing and connecting to these lands. By acknowledging my settler influences and teachings, exploring Indigenous worldviews and the interconnectedness to wellness, and engaging in strength-based approaches guided by Indigenous communities, I have initiated personal and professional steps towards reconciliation.

#### A Path of Decolonizing Healing Through Learning from the Land

Indigenous Peoples have lived for thousands of years in harmony with the land, where deep spiritual connections to the land impact overall health and wellbeing (Alt, 2017; Kingsley et al., 2013). Through colonial disruptions, Indigenous Peoples experienced and continue to experience a disconnect from traditional ceremonies, traditional medicines, and traditional land uses. To connect further, McGinnis et al. (2019) bring attention to the impact of colonialization through the fragmenting of relationships among humans and more-than-humans. Colonization has influenced the detachment of traditional connections and relationships with humans, plants, animals, and the land (Elder B. McKenna, personal communication, May 4, 2019). The deep connections include both learning and healing from and with the land. The process of decolonizing healing involves reconnecting and engaging with the land to situate healing and learning. This chapter will operate with the following definitions offered by Indigenous scholars and teachers:

Styres (2019) defines decolonizing as "an unsettling process of shifting and unraveling the tangled colonial relations of power and privilege" (p. 30). Furthermore, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) provides guidance on the careful consideration and critical thinking of each act of reading, writing, and research one partakes in when engaging with decolonization. Contrary to many thoughts on decolonization, Smith explains that:

Decolonization, however, does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about centering [Indigenous] concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from [Indigenous] perspectives and for [Indigenous] purposes. (p. 41)

From an Indigenous perspective, this healing journey has no definite beginning—it is not linear. It is based in meaning-making and relationships along the journey. The field of psychology may begin to move away from pathologizing healing to a strength-based healing process with this understanding when the focus shifts to relationships; relationships with self, relationships with community, relationships with the more-than-human, and relationships with the land. Elder Alma Poitras shares that from an Indigenous perspective, healing incorporates more than the physical recovery (personal communication, May 4, 2019). Indigenous healing includes the physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental aspects of one's being, which includes the use of ceremony and traditional medicines. Western medical practices have incorporated physical modalities, and Western psychology practices have incorporated emotional, mental, and spiritual healing modalities. From an Indigenous perspective, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing exists through relationships which occur alongside the healing journey.

Learning is often understood as the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. But as Indigenous teacher Dustin Brass shares:

If [Indigenous people] go back to [their] roots and we look at where education started for us as Indigenous people, it interacted with the land. . . . The basis of the education is delivered through the land. It's a way to interact with learning from the land, learning from the environment, the things that surround us. (Blue Sky, 2020)

Centering Indigenous voices and definitions of healing work to decolonize the Western understanding of the healing journey. The definitions reinforce that the land, relationships, and spiritual connections are essential to understanding the healing and learning journeys for Indigenous peoples.

The following chapter is informed by my personal journey of decolonized land-based healing through learning experiences and supporting literature. This integration intends to illuminate the historical influence of human's disconnection with the land through articulating the experiential relationships. Through my personal learning journey via decolonizing practices, it is apparent that healing and learning coexist through engagement with the land.

#### Learning and Healing from the Land

The journey of healing begins with acknowledging a crisis—a crisis in the current practice of psychology and Indigenous Peoples (Johnston Research, 2010). Throughout colonial history, Indigenous peoples have not been given the opportunity to heal with dignity through their Indigenous ways of knowing and being (Raphael, 2018). To begin the journey of decolonization is to acknowledge our collective history. If it is called upon to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing into the field of psychology, an overall understanding of and critical engagement with current psychology practices must be present. Many current psychology practices are grounded in the Western psychology which refers to psychology influences of Europe and were established as the normative behaviours all cultures were to be judged and examined against. Western psychology integrates ideals of colonial cultures—explorers, conquerors, and settlers—where the goals of the perceived dominant culture enforced their policies and processes over the people (Raphael, 2018). Behaviours and views towards self, community, more-than-human, and land varied greatly and continue to contribute to a historical colonial cycle of harm.

Jordan (2015) shares the historical work of Levy-Bruhl and Jung, which describes how "Indigenous peoples do not distinguish themselves sharply from the environment, believing that what went on outside also went on inside of self" (p. 17). This exemplifies how the natural environment and Indigenous peoples are interwoven. "It is a culture so intrinsically linked to the land that what the [Indigenous peoples] saw (and still see) was not an environment with different geographical aspects, but a profoundly metaphysical landscape capable of expressing their deepest spiritual yearnings" (Jordan, 2015, p. 70). This interwovenness includes physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wellness and provides affirmation that the natural environment is imperative for Indigenous wellness and healing.

Each human has experiences with the land, whether they recognize or acknowledge them as valid (Ball, 2013). The beginning of awareness is to explore and acknowledge each experience with, on, and within the natural environment—the land. These interactions with nature are important in our relationship to nature and to our healing (Jordan, 2015). Jordan continues that "it is through the presence of the natural world that the therapeutic process is facilitated; nature in this sense acts as another presence which both guides and provokes the therapeutic work" (p. 50). This awareness is not only for those receiving treatment, but for those providing support throughout the healing process.

#### Building on Strengths of Relationships

McGinnis et al. (2019) build upon previous literature which promotes the requirements of strength-based healing approached when working with Indigenous peoples. With the understanding that postmodern approaches move away from pathologizing people and move towards discovering an individual's strengths and connections, solutions are created in the present and in the future (Corey, 2016). Indigenous approaches are distinctly different from postmodern approaches but share strength-based foundations of individuals creating meaning in their lives through relationships. Strength-based approaches include connections to self, community, more-than-human, and the land and promote a balanced care approach which includes physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental healing. Strength-based approaches are clientcentered and include client choice, user-center environments for the client and families, and remained focused on the relationship (Alt, 2017; Elder A. Poitras, personal communications, May 4, 2019).

The continued integration of strength-based approaches requires an understanding of the social and cultural contexts of behaviour. Viewing behaviour and individual actions through this lens, assists in moving towards the present and future without situating solely in the past. Clients are not to blame for their problems; rather they are involved in creating solutions in moving forward in a positive direction (Corey, 2016). Stories assist the client with honouring their unique journey, both socially and culturally, and anchor this understanding in the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experiences within their story (Archibald et al., 2019).

Within healing processes, reciprocal mutual relationships focus on the meanings given to experiences rather than focusing primarily on the biological influences of disorders. This lens provides an important understanding of the experiences of the client, which impacts the therapeutic process (Jordan, 2015).

#### Relationship with Self

To further articulate my journey of awareness, I share a story of my journey learning alongside Indigenous healers and how, through experiences such as this, I embarked on my journey of awareness and understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing. My personal journey of reconnecting with the land was solidified in a retreat which served as a foundational period where I actively engaged in addressing my own worldview and opened myself to exploring Indigenous connections to the land:

I had the opportunity to participate in an autumn retreat at Wanuskewin (the name *wanuskewin* means gathering place), located in Saskatchewan, Canada. Wanuskewin is known to be a deeply spiritual place where, for more than six thousand years, Indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains gathered to hunt buffalo, gather medicine and food, and escape the winter winds. Archaeological dig sites located at Wanuskewin have been dated to before the time of the Egyptian pyramids, and artifacts such as tipi rings, pottery fragments, plant seeds, and projectile points give insight into the ancient societies (Wanuskewain Heritage Park Authority, 2020).

This retreat was my first immersive experience which joined Elders, Indigenous students, non-Indigenous students, and researchers through workshops, lectures, and speakers, which were held in conjunction with hands-on land activities. Traditional foods, nehiyawak (Plains Cree) language lessons, snaring, bow shooting, beading, plant and medicine walks, campfires, sleeping in tipis, and archeology hikes were activities I took part in during this immersion retreat.

An archeology student gifted her time to the retreat participants to share her current work located at Wanuskewin. We began our walk into the small valley on the warm autumn evening. The leaves had begun to change colours from green to golden brown, orange, and red; the grass was damp at our feet. As we descended into the valley nearing sunset, we followed the winding path in and among the bushes and trees, over the creek, and came upon the open clearing. In the center of this clearing sat a blue tarp and wooden pit cover. As the archeology student opened the wooden cover, she shared stories of the discoveries of ancient tools, toys, and cooking ware. What I was not aware of in the stories she shared, was the ethical application of archeology digs. To learn of the ethics surrounding excavation, to leave items along the edges untouched, illuminated the great respect that occurs within this practice. There is great respect for sites that are explored and are specific rules in place to ensure voyeuristic exploration does not occur. Even when these items may benefit or further our understanding of the ancient peoples, these rules apply.

As I took part in the gathering of medicines, grasses, and berries alongside Elders I listened to them; the teachings continue to only take a little and leave a lot. I take these teachings into practice, and with respect to the teachings about the animals and their need for food, these support sustained growth of the plants and animals. The notion of not taking all of a plant is understandable in the literal sense. If you take it all, it will be gone (Kimmerer, 2013). But, to observe and practice these understandings offers a profound respect to the teachings offered. This immersion experience was my first dedicated step in actively engaging with the land.

As researchers, scholars, and teachers, the want to know more is always present. My personal journey is no different. To be ok with not knowing everything is a teaching in and of itself. To know it is not your place, or your story must be understood and accepted.

Gaining awareness of how our inner processes can be represented in relation to our outer reality can be facilitated through focusing on the land (Jordan, 2015). Gaining awareness of self is essential and being in the natural environment facilitates healing for both the practitioner and the client. Elder Vee Whitehorse shares that "wisdom can not be given, it has to be experienced on your own" (personal communication, May 11, 2019). Through this, individuals are honoured as the experts of their own lives. The awareness that is gained along this journey is based on the understanding that the individual is not the problem; the problem is the problem (Corey, 2016), and knowing this works towards building healing capacity, which is facilitated through learning about one's self.

#### Relationships with the Community

Healing in isolation is difficult; clients heal with the support of their community (Alt, 2017). Relationships with other communities and people who enjoy wellness and health and who have connections to others, nature, and the spiritual world have been indicators of individual healing (Canadian Collaborative Mental Health Initiative, 2006). These relationships create collaborative dialogues where solutions are co-created (Corey, 2016). Collaborative dialogues establish clear and observable goals which work towards creating a self-identity based in culture, individual strengths, and community resources to address present and future concerns. Incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the healing journey may move forward through Marsh et al.'s (2016) recommendation for future studies to include and focus on the importance of collaboration between mainstream and Indigenous healers.

#### Relationships with the More-Than-Human

As a white settler, I have begun to establish and reflect on my personal connections to healing and learning from the land. I acknowledge I will never be able to comprehend the extent of Indigenous peoples' interconnection to the land, but I seek to ethically engage my personal and professional practice.

The idea of a neutral space exists when working in the natural world; it operates as a space where neither the client nor therapist own or control the space (Berger, 2006; Jordan, 2015). A neutral space facilitates the concept of a transitional space which "exist[s] within and between geographical and relational 'spaces,' and between mind and nature" (Jordan, 2015, p. 54). This transitional space integrates Indigenous ways of knowing and being—the transition space represents the spiritual connection. Taking time to observe, listen, and engage in the natural environment is the natural way of healing (Elder A. Poitras, personal communication, May 4, 2019) and provides space to connect with one's self, one's community, the more-than-human, and the land.

My personal experience with transitional space occurred while observing the join up of a Curly Horse and a human. Curly Horses are considered Indigenous to North America and in this experience, the Curly Horses are participants in Equine Assisted Learning and Animal Assisted Therapy. This experiential learning opportunity is grounded in non-violent, trust-based partnerships between human and horses. A join up refers to a bonding method during the first formal time a horse interacts with a human and through this process is where I was able to observe this transitional space. A space where the human and more-than-human create a connection, a bond, that is true and real. This bond between horse and human occurs through body language, body positioning, and eye contact and this connection invites the horse to approach.

To observe the respect and trust that is required for any form of connection to occur between human and horse is difficult to describe. To see this in person is a piece of indescribable beauty. The most significant observation from my experience with Curly Horses is the human allowing and providing the opportunity to the animal the option to retreat (to move away physically and emotionally) when overcome. Not only offering the retreat but honouring the retreat. The relationship is built upon trust and respect that allows space when it is needed, but to always welcome them back when they are ready. This is a teaching which honours the relationship and the spirit of both humans and more-than-humans.

In contrast to many Western notions of land, Indigenous understandings situate spirit as a central component of knowing and recognizes the spirit's innate existence in all life forms (Dell et al., 2011). To understand the connection between human and horse is to understand the spirit works in relation with the natural physical environment—animate and inanimate—and is central to Indigenous ways of knowing. Where spiritual and physical realities meet is described as a space where spiritual exchange occurs (Dell et al., 2011). This space is described within First Nations, Inuit, and other Indigenous languages throughout the world. In Dell et al. (2011), Te Pou references a concept of the Samoan peoples of the Pacific Islands. The concept of "Va" refers to the "space between", which maintains respect to scared space, harmony, balance, and the importance of relationships between our physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental dimensions. Te Pou elucidates that "relationships are not unidirectional, but mutually linked and reciprocal, and the space between, is not space that separates, but space that relates" (Dell et al., 2011, p.9). The foundation to individual and communal healing is formed upon the understanding that space recognizes the culture and creates meaning which is informed by spirit (Dell et al., 2011).

#### Relationships with the Land

Many Indigenous worldviews express that all must live in harmony with nature, which entails taking care of the earth—and not controlling it (CCMHI, 2006). Jordan (2015) believes "an understanding of the human problem of need and dependency can help us more fully understand why we… have developed an insecure, avoidant and ambivalent relationship to nature and the planet" (p. 52). Within Indigenous cultures the natural environment, including plants, animals, and the land, has played a primordial role within traditional knowledge, ceremony, and healing (Gendron et al., 2013). Generations of Elders, adults, youth, and children have and continue to spend time learning with and from the land.

Experiential approaches to learning and healing build upon strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and being in relation with the land (Greenwood et al., 2018). Having opportunities where one can authentically interact with the land begin to initiate healing effects. Elder Alma Poitras (personal communications, May 4, 2019) shares that that natural way of healing includes seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the natural environment. Through these acts, Elder Alma guides those to ask: What I am supposed to learn from this? My understanding in this is where meaning-making interconnects with learning and healing.

Exploring current mental health practice, design, and experiences creates discussions around how the land is or is not integrated into healing practices. In psychology, what do we value as important along the healing journey and how does this impact our clients? Along my journey, the interconnection between healing and learning became evident when reflecting on how my own children see and experience nature. Here I will share a personal story of observations during my children's play.

Endless piles of rocks and sticks. Wherever we travel, the park, the school, the driveway, the beach, or across Canada, little pockets return full of sticks and stones. These objects caught my children's eyes in a way that my own eyes could not. The colours, the sparkles, the flecks, and patterns along with the bends, twists, and bumps become an irresistible desire. These objects become items of barter and negotiation to determine how many of these treasures will be allowed to make the journey to our home. It is easy to dismiss these perceived treasures as such. With the dirt, sand, and bugs, it is easy to ask for them to be tossed aside and left where they are. But to the children, these are the finest of treasures that have been found on the most enduring of archeological digs. These sticks and stones are the tokens, the glorious prizes of the adventure that was had. To the children, sticks and stones represent their accomplishments, a sense of pride and a sense of wonder to the events of the day. When we, as adults, quickly dismiss these treasures as dirty and not worthy, we begin to tell our children that what they see as valuable is not. What they work hard for is not important. And if it is not pleasing to an adult, it does not matter. These sticks and stones, as small as they might seem, teach us lessons of value and difference, and as adults, we very quickly exchange what is valuable, what is worthy, and what is to be treasured.

#### Building Healing Through Learning

The healing journey is not intended to be linear. Decolonizing personal and professional practice involves acknowledging where the crisis is, moving from awareness to understanding, and organizing these understandings into action. Similar to the healing journey, the decolonizing journey is not linear and involved a process of learning. To clearly identify my personal learning and healing experiences, Ritchhart et al. (2011) present a starting point to make thinking visible and to articulate the learning process. A numbered list highlights my journey of identifying the steps which I have taken to describe how my understanding is developed (Ritchhart et al., 2011).

#### Healing Through Learning About Self

If healing occurred with my relationship to self, then I speak to that healing as being assisted by decolonizing learning from the land. Along a private walk during the retreat, I came upon the most beautiful old rocks covered in various kinds of moss. I wanted to know their story, their purpose. This experience allows me to (1) observe closely and describe what is there (Ritchhart et al., 2011). Sitting, listening, feeling, and smelling—those were the stories I was given. Through this, I begin (2) building explanations and interpretations (Ritchhart et al., 2011) of what I have been given. Although, being OK with not knowing has to occur. Reflection time allows for the individual to be present in the experiences and the space to learn about and from the land. Unrestricted reflective time fosters additional focus for connections, meaningmaking, and clarity. Knowing there may not be answers, or connections may not be evident, allowed me to reduce my feelings of nervousness and insecurities towards the need for answers. The acceptance of the not knowing brings comfort in the healing process.

#### Healing Through Learning About Community

If healing occurred to my relationship with community, then I speak to that healing as being assisted by decolonizing learning from the land. Within the Indigenous communities (students, scholars, peers, Elders) I have been working alongside, many have granted me the gift of acceptance within the community. To be welcomed within a community has reignited my interest in many topics where I felt as though I could not continue. Community members have aided in my understanding and acceptance of my own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual limits—both professionally and personally. Through (3) reasoning with evidence (Ritchhart et al., 2011), the community has assisted me in strengthening my connections to the community. I am more confident in who I am and where I belong in this community. These strengthened relationships have supported and guided me through the process of decolonizing my personal and professional practice. I am more confident in the work I partake in and more willing to accept the challenges life offers.

#### Healing Through Learning About the More-Than-Human

If healing occurred through my relationship with the more-than-human, then I speak of this healing as being assisted by decolonized learning from the land. While observing Curly Horses, it was evident trust was an essential component of the human and more-than-human relationship. This relationship requires respecting the spirit and journey while establishing safe forms of communication. (4) Making connections (Ritchhart et al., 2011) between how the Curly Horses and humans form relationships, Nadasdy (2007) draws on literature from anthropology which chronicles Indigenous world views regarding human and more-than-human relationships as reciprocal. This reciprocation involves both learning and healing existing and moving through the space between. Understanding that the spirit is a central component of knowing, having practitioners acknowledge and recognize the spirit's innate existence in all life forms is essential to integrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being into current practice.

#### Healing Through Learning About the Land

If healing occurred with my relationship with the land, then I speak of this healing as being assisted by decolonized learning and active engagement with the land. The experience of observing my own children and their interactions with the land encourages the (5) consider[ation of] different viewpoints and perspectives (Ritchhart et al., 2011) and allows all to analyze why these items, topics, and relationships are of importance to the individual. This time allows space to accept the unknown or understood and through trust and respect, honour and value the significance of these relations. Fostering our relationship with the land is the act of healing in relation (A. McGinnis, personal communication, May 11, 2019). A sense of pride is felt when I observe the unadulterated wonder and joy my children have when interacting with the land. These relationships have created an ongoing reciprocation involving both learning and healing existing and moving through the space between.

#### Honouring the Journey

The final step to making my thinking visible is step (6), capturing the heart and forming conclusions (Ritchhart et al., 2011). To decolonize healing is to embrace the notion that healing and learning coexist through relationships with the land along the journey. Within the journey lies a reciprocal, interwoven relationship between learning about self, learning about the community, learning about the more-than-human, and learning about the land. Through acknowledging and understanding our colonial past and taking action to begin decolonizing ourselves, actively engaging in this process will facilitate an open space to promote and integrate Indigenous ways of healing and learning into ethical psychology practices. Through these relational experiences, the space between facilitates healing effects through spiritual connections for both the practitioner and the client and begins to address the historical relational disconnect with the land.

It remains an ethical responsibility for the field of psychology to include, incorporate, and provide opportunities for the integration of the natural environment to support Indigenous ways of knowing and being in current practice (Elder A. Poitras, personal communication, May 4, 2019). The journey for practitioners begins with acknowledging the crisis in our relationship with the natural environment. The journey continues through bringing awareness to our understandings and teachings about the world, and through the ownership of our ways, practitioners can view the natural environment as actively supporting Indigenous wellness.

Through this perspective shift it is possible to release colonial influences. Utilizing a strength-based understanding the field of psychology can practice in collaboration with Indigenous communities to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, working with and within the natural environment, into our practice. When practitioners begin on this journey of meaning-making, it may contribute to the reconciliation process of decolonizing individual practice, understanding, and move towards authentically supporting, respecting, and integrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the therapeutic process.

Building healing capacity through learning elucidates the understanding of the past, the needs of the present, and lays foundations for the future to work towards restoring integrity and prompting ethical balanced care. In confidence, healing with dignity may be facilitated through relationships with self, community, more-than-human, and the land. McGinnis et al. (2019) eloquently concludes that "reconciliation across Western and Indigenous contexts requires learning to work together with the more-than-human world and developing ethical spaces for health research in which holistic wellness is appreciated and understood in the context of all our relations" (p. 1).

#### References

Indigenous holistic wellness. *Ecopsychology*, *11*(3), 162–173. https://doi.org/10. 1089/eco.2019.0003.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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CHAPTER 9

### Still Joy: A Call for Wonder(ing) in Science Education as Anti-racist Vibrant Life-Living

#### *Christie C. Byers*

In this chapter I share a meta-assemblage research-creation (Manning, 2016): a researcher-created experimental exhibit of found poetic assemblages about wonder, joy, Black life, neurodiversity, love, science, and science education. The intention of this meta-assemblage research-creation is to explore the affective flows of the phenomenon of wonder, while also inviting consideration of how the multiple forces and co-components of the body(ies) assembled here move together in an uneasy and historically traceable tension. These comovements suggest how "traditional" science and school science education are not only complicit with, but also may be directly implicated as primary protagonists in the violent anti-Black racism and planet-wide suffering happening in our world today.

As an emerging science education researcher and long-time elementary science teacher in the United States, I have been thinking about and dwelling with the phenomenon of wonder for many years. I will share here an overview of some of my theorizing about the concept thus far as a means of providing

<sup>1</sup> I attach the (ing) to the base word "wonder" to denote one of the many nuanced dimensions of this complex phenomenon/affect: it assumes the form of both a noun (e.g., an object of wonder, a state of wonder, or the concept of wonder itself), and a verb—a dynamic process of wonder*ing*—movement that includes thinking-feeling through encounters, becoming aware of the extraordinary in-of the ordinary, connecting/integrating, exploring, imagining new possibilities, and creative improvisation.

135

C. C. Byers (B)

George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022

M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_9

context for engaging with the meta-assemblage that follows. Through a slow and transdisciplinary study, I have come to think-feel wonder(ing)1 as a dynamic, multidimensional, multimodal, and somewhat sensitive and slippery *affect* (Byers, 2021); a common, ubiquitous, and catalytic force that works to open up possibilities and make felt potential in and through everyday events and encounters. Further, I have been wondering about the relationship of wonder with what psychologist Daniel Stern (2004, 2010) has termed "vitality affects"—affects we feel and sense in others, that permeate our everyday lives, and "are felt experiences of force, in movement – that have a temporal contour, and a sense of aliveness, of going somewhere" (Stern, 2010, p. 8). In a similar vein of thinking with movement and felt *aliveness*, biologist, philosopher, and biosemiotician Andreas Weber has developed the concept of *enlivenment*, a feeling of aliveness experienced in reciprocal relationships with other feeling beings in his books *Enlivenment: A Poetics for the Anthropocene* (2019), *The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science* (2016), and *Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology* (2017). Rosi Braidotti, in her intellectually rigorous work mapping the proliferation of posthuman knowledges and scholarship, discusses an *ethics of joy* embedded in feminist posthuman thinking, related to vitality and increased capacities of bodies to affect in her many works, including *Posthuman Knowledge* (2019) and the co-edited volume *Posthuman Glossary* (2018, pp. 221–224). The concept of vitality affects has also been taken up by Felix Guattari as central to his ethico-aesthetic paradigm in his text, *Chaosmosis* (1995).

In coming to think of wonder(ing) as an opening-up and enlivening vitality affect, I have noticed that the phenomenon, as experienced, is never quite *containable* within human bodies or singular categories or disciplines. It resists enclosure, capture, and narrow or flat representation as it emerges in and through encounters (or perhaps it is always already there) and moves around and across "things" or "bodies" in a trans- (and transformational) manner. Wonder does move through and can be felt by human bodies, and even linger there for a little while, but this affect, like all affects, tends to behave more like a fleshy ghost (Stewart, 2007); sometimes appearing, moving through, between, and across bodies (Brennan, 2004), and then quickly vanishing again. Wonder(ing) has a habit of entering into and fleeting across encounters, popping up, or perhaps mediating the popping up, of little shocks of semi-awareness (Byers, 2021; Massumi, 2015). Wonder is also sometimes experienced as an intensity of feeling that slides across bodies more slowly, like a warm washing-over, registering as moments of clarity or awareness, deep presence, and a comforting sense of connectedness; *the felt reality of relation* (Massumi, 2002, p. 17, emphasis in original), with and across other bodies in the world (Di Paolantonio, 2018; Washington, 2019; Weber, 2016). The three main points that I am interested in focusing on here are that as an affect or intensity that is felt emerging in and through encounters, wonder(ing) (1) is always available (like an open invitation), (2) is always on the move (across), and (3) carries with it the powerful potential *to move bodies* (Ahmed, 2015; Braidotti, 2019; Irigaray, 1993; Massumi, 2002). This capacity to move bodies might be expressed as increasing bodies' capacities to affect (Braidotti, 2019; Massumi, 2002, 2015; Spinoza, 2009). Wonder has indeed been linked with joyful exploration, imagination, creativity, and becoming inspired to take action (Gl˘aveanu, 2020), and is increasingly being thought in association with the concept of human flourishing in education (Schinkel, 2020). Importantly, this increase in capacity to affect and association with human flourishing is always relational, and not individual; it involves co-created and co-moving intensities enabled through reciprocal relations with other bodies—regardless of whether these bodies are human or more-than-human matter (e.g., ideas, objects, animals, institutions, forces, organizations, plants, water, books, etc.) (Bazzul & Kayumova, 2016; Braidotti, 2019; Haraway, 2016; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2015; Weber, 2016).

The increase in capacity activated through wonder(ing) is quite palpable and is likely even measurable for those inclined toward measuring things and valuing things that are measurable. A few empirical studies have initiated efforts in this area (Hadzigeorgiou, 2012; Gilbert & Byers, 2017; Girod et al., 2010; Girod & Wong, 2002). In an empirical study I am currently grappling with writing up (Byers, 2021), for example, preservice elementary teachers who explicitly engaged with wonder(ing) in a science methods course through wonder journaling and digging into and sharing their wonders with one another science-fair style experienced the phenomenon as related to:

The future teachers in the study exclaimed: "I am much more creative than I ever thought I was!" and "I learned I have so many ideas and they are not stupid!" and "I want to wonder more in my life!" in addition to dreaming up ways to promote and welcome wonder(ing) in their future teaching practices with elementary children.

Some of the data shared by these preservice teachers is included in the poetic meta-assemblage research-creation that follows. I juxtapose these with other forms of data that move with similar rhythms from scholarly texts, conversations, video recordings, photos, memos, etc. The exhibit, titled *Still Joy*, is an attempt to illustrate how wonder(ing), as an enlivening/enabling and life-affirming force/affect, is present, and has been moving, and continues to move in and through all areas of life-living, including troubled and racialized spaces. With respect to the wicked and ongoing problem of racism and anti-Black violence in the US, this assemblage attempts to provoke thought about how wonder(ing) carries with it the possibility, if intentionally attuned to, foregrounded, and allowed, of both calling out and troubling this trouble, while also (always) opening up new possibilities for vibrant and richly variegated life-living. Reflecting on this particular exhibit as it emerged through my experimental writing (Massumi, 2002) has me wonder(ing) whether foregrounding wonder in science education contexts may be a critical component of an anti-oppressive, life-affirming, plurality-celebrating mode of living science education otherwise.

Though I might have chosen to create this experimental, rhythmic collage of process philosophy and wonder thinking with any of the many rich areas of critical scholarship that work to interrogate and critique hegemonic violence wielded against marginalized "others" as my entry point, for this particular assemblage, I chose to focus on Black thought, highlighting especially the exact words of Black feminist, Black pedagogical, and Black philosophical and critical scholars. I make this intentional choice as a move toward taking on more responsible action in my scholarship—given the urgent need to directly address the current (and lengthy historical) circumstances of racial unrest and ongoing violence against Black people in the United States (Hattery & Smith, 2018). My intended audience is mainly US teachers who teach science, elementary teachers especially, the majority of whom are white women like me. It is urgent that they/we recognize that doing things differently, by making decisive, ethical, and responsible moves in our classrooms is both possible and immediately necessary.

It is important to point out that this crying out for doing differently in science education is not an urging for yet another way of "helping" Black, Indigenous, Latinx, neurodiverse students, etc. through some kind of an assimilation project, where these "others" are deemed broken, behind, or less than and in need of being fixed, saved, and/or helped along by/through initiation into white Western structures of knowing and being. Rather, this work represents a call for caring for and valuing (and thus making space for) the rich and varied experiences, perspectives, ideas, modes of being/becoming, and diverse sense-making repertoires (Bang et al., 2017) that all children enter learning spaces with; an expansion of what it means to be "scientific"—and a pointing out that much of Western (white) science and traditional school science education is getting it wrong in the life-affirming department. Much (science) education today works to actively still, snuff out, and police any "out of bounds" movements. Attempts are made to tame the vibrant, reciprocal, relational life-living and joyfully active learning that is constantly emerging and trying to move and thrive in education spaces. A great deal of harm and suffering in the form of closing off capacity happens as a result of this stilling and policing. The argument here is that science learning, as a part of life itself in all of its ongoing emergence, diversity, playfulness, feeling, and vibrancy involves bursts of exuberance, difference-in-relation, creative and supernormal improvisations (Massumi, 2012), movements toward and through joy, and the forging of often unexpected and caring/reciprocal relations. If allowed, learning science could be and become so much more than the forced fragmentation, siloing, neutrality, stillness, hierarchical, distancing, and inert/static "rational" objectivity promoted today (Visvanathan, 2002; Weber, 2016, 2019; Whitehead, 1929). There is no view from nowhere (Haraway, 1988), no evolutionary hierarchy (Marks, 2017). I see this project as resonating with the marginal and minor yet ubiquitous transdisciplinary idea that vibrant, diverse, plurality of learning-as-life-living, and improvisational becoming-with others is always already moving and happening in and through encounters, through ongoing reciprocal processes of influx and efflux (Bennett, 2020), within locally situated ecological webs of relations (Braidotti, 2019; Cordova, 2007; Escobar, 2017; Haraway, 2016; Weber 2016, 2017, 2019). What I am attempting to amplify here is that wonder(ing) is a catalyst or primary force involved in a non-erasable life process: the ongoing ontogenesis of lively, movement-moving and becoming; movements that are always working with and gesturing toward what else is possible (Gl˘aveanu, 2020; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2002). What emerged for me (and continually moved me and moved through me) while creating this meta-assemblage is that policing and regulating Black life is intimately related to policing and regulating wonder. Both of these acts involve the violent disruption and attempted regulation and control of vibrant and precious life processes. What would happen if we valued and cared for these ongoing, relational emergences of difference and attempts at mutual flourishing? What if we moved with and followed these indeterminate *felt elsewheres* and *otherwise possibilities* (Vossoughi, 2021), instead of persistently enclosing, policing, and snuffing them out?

What I aim to make felt through this work is that making the time and space for wonder could be a relatively simple move to allow for these vital, deeply relational and emergent/divergent processes to do their work of (re)energizing bodies toward new and healthier/livelier modes of living, becoming, and creating together. Thriving. Not just surviving (Love, 2019). Notably, wonder(ing) is particularly powerful in that it registers as both critical *and* creative (Braidotti, 2019; Byers, 2021; Gl˘aveanu, 2020). Welcoming wonder(ing) always carries with it the potential for a beginning again, for new beginnings; for a re-viewing (Gl˘aveanu, 2020) and a re-newing. An opening-things-up that as Sara Ahmed (2015) points out "allows us to see the world *as made*," a world "that does not have to be" (p. 180), and "can be unmade as well as made. Wonder energizes the hope for transformation" (p. 181). Following this thinking, recognizing and welcoming wonder(ing) might allow educators and students to move together with (instead of constantly fighting against) the already-happening, relational, inclusive, affirmative, generative, joyful, and socially-just (science) education potential squirming around, putting out tendrils, and trying to thrive in the everyday; right there in plain sight.

Wonder already has one foot wedged into the proverbial science education door (well, perhaps just a winding tendril or a toe) through a couple of brief mentions in the Framework document underpinning the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and appendix H of the NGSS document itself (see p. 28 of NRC, 2012 and p. 1 of appendix H, NGSS Lead States, 2013). Additionally, it gains support through scientists themselves who name wonder as central to their work and one of the greatest rewards they experience (Cantore, 1977; Carson, 1965; Hadzigeorgiou, 2014). The key for science educators is to allow for the time and space, and to be willing to create the necessary conditions (Byers, 2021) that would enable a full, multidimensional, and multimodal version of wonder(ing) to be welcomed and supported. As far as I can tell thus far in this wonder-tracking project, it is only a very narrow, known-facts, standards-based, and anemic version of wonder(ing) that is currently allowed in our current, impoverished version of (science) education (diAgnese, 2020; Visvanathan, 2002); something more akin to curiosity. Although curiosity is important, it represents a single, rather limited and superficial (Kingwell, 2000; Opdal, 2001) dimension within a pool of related concepts and phenomena that fall under the umbrella of wonder (Gl˘aveanu, 2020). Even then, when curiosity, or a single-dimensional aspect of wonder(ing) is deemed allowable for children in (science) education contexts, it is too often with the intention that this phenomenon might be "captured" and/or (re)directed for exploitive, and/or predetermined, instrumental purposes, rather than for the opening up, exploratory, and trans-connective and enlivening possibilities that a fuller version of wonder(ing) might activate.

Importantly, these imaginative and connective possibilities catalyzed through wonder(ing) can never be fully anticipated in advance. This is perhaps one of the most challenging obstacles to foregrounding wonder in education today. Though the simple acts of slowing down, allowing and/or curating encounters, valuing diverse movements, and hesitating to regulate and police thought might promote wonder(ing), how do these kinds of moves align with the goals of education as they are conceptualized and enacted today? The common cultural approach in modern US schools is to speed up, standardize, fragment, and regulate knowledge for predetermined outcomes (diAgnese, 2020). In order to accomplish this, it is imperative to maintain authority and control, to "civilize" the perceived feral nature of children, perhaps most seriously affecting non-white and/or neurodivergent children (Shalaby, 2017). This regulating process results in the dampening of interest, (en)forced homogenization, and the bounding and swaddling of creative thought (Cant, 2017; Gilbert & Gray, 2019). Notably, this control is often maintained through policing and punishing children's lively, moving bodies (Leafgren, 2016; Shalaby, 2017).

And now, finally, hoping the phenomenon of wonder(ing) has begun to take on a shape for readers through this overview, I turn to the metaassemblage research-creation itself. Although some portions of the work shared here might look and sometimes read like poetry, I am not quite a poet, and the work does not carry the trained artfulness and musicality of the kind of beautiful poetry those with poetic gifts are able to create. I am a (becoming) science education researcher who has been following wonder around and reading/thinking/tinkering with concepts that appear to resonate and relate with it. The forms presented here are researcher-data cocreated assemblages; an experimental exhibit of my thinking-in-progress put in motion along with the thinking of many others. This research-creation (Manning, 2016) is composed of and with snippets of found data, found texts, conversations, research memos, intuitive juxtapositions, photographs, and the following of creative impulses (Ulmer, 2018). The exact words I cut and pasted from other works into this moving collage are those that I felt resonating with the flow of the project. These works are cited in the footnotes. For copyright reasons, brief analysis notes of how I retroactively made sense of the inclusion of these words and works is included, though I do worry about the potential of these notes to foreclose thought and "capture" meaning—a move that does not align with spirit and movement of wonder(ing). During the actual event of the creation of this exhibit, the bits and pieces flowed together in ways that I, as the researcher-composer, did not feel entirely in control of; or as Erin Manning (2016) might describe it: The material intuited its relational movement, and edged its way into form. These snippets of thought, or data scribbles, came together in an exhibit that (hopefully) works to make felt some of wonder(ing)'s meandering affects and effects, connections to contemporary social justice concerns, and movements toward more generative and affirmative modes of living out (science) education.

I also see this project as aligning with and gathering inspiration from Jasmine Ulmer's poetic call for critical qualitative inquiry is/as love (2017). Although this assemblage ends on a mournful note, this is the tragic reality of where we are in the United States today. Working for wonder, however, is, at its core, about making space for hope, for dreams, for play, for affirmative movement, for the joyful, vibrant, and deeply connected and mutually-flourishing existence that at some level we all know (feel) is possible.

Still Joy

*Insurgent Black life exceeds the bounds; it moves too much.*<sup>2</sup>

<sup>2</sup> Manning (2016, p. 5). *There are policed boundaries and norms for movement in US culture (including schools); Black life is perceived to exceed these, and thus is actively regulated/policed.*

142 C. C. BYERS

*My son likes to move and talk a lot, but his school required stillness, silence*<sup>3</sup>

*(it's like the monkeys are running the zoo)* A white teacher I know actually spoke these words, referring to a new school initiative to not punish or expel Black children quite as much.

*I mean, it steals joy. I think school steals joy it crushes wonder, stifles imagination*<sup>4</sup>

*It happened with my son he's so curious about everything, and yeah, he loves to move and talk.*<sup>5</sup>

*He's at home with me now, it's been a gift for both of us—creating and feeding curiosity together. We've really been co-learners, and it's been joyful, absolutely full of wonder.*<sup>6</sup>

*I'm sorry, did you say steals joy, or. stills joy?*

*My Southern/midwestern Twang can be confusing but I was musing … I said steals, but stills works too.*<sup>7</sup>

<sup>3</sup> Wendi Manuel-Scott, professor and scholar of race, gender, the African American experience, and the history of Black women in the Atlantic world, personal conversation. *There are policed boundaries and norms for movement in US culture (including schools); Black life is perceived to exceed these, and thus is actively regulated/policed.*

<sup>4</sup> Ibid. *Wonder is thought here as a life process at the heart of ontogenesis/emergence of becoming: ongoing relational movements toward joy, imagination, creativity, and difference. There are policed boundaries and norms for movement in US culture (including schools); wonder exceeds these, and thus is actively regulated/policed.*

<sup>5</sup> Ibid. *There are policed boundaries and norms for movement in US culture (including schools); Black life is perceived to exceed these, and thus is actively regulated/policed.*

<sup>6</sup> Ibid. *Outside of the (highly regulated/policed) school environment, wonder has been allowed to move around and flourish, with positive outcomes for both mother and child.*

<sup>7</sup> Wendi Manuel-Scott, personal conversation. *There are policed boundaries and norms for movement in US culture (including schools); wonder(ing), as movement, exceeds these, and thus is actively regulated. I/we connect school's stilling/stealing of wonder with stilling her (Black) son's movements back when he was in school.*

Steals. Stills.

"A rich science education has the potential to *capture* students' sense of wonder about the world and to spark their desire to continue learning about science throughout their lives."<sup>8</sup>

#### *Capture?*

"If a child is to *keep alive* his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in."<sup>9</sup>

#### *Keep Alive?*

"I don't even know where to start. At what point did wondering become so difficult? It's almost as if that part of my brain is just *locked away* very deep, and I'm so structured and I'm so used to, 'no, this is how it's gonna be, so this is how you should do it.'"10

*Locked Away?*

#### \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

So Intimidated about Teaching Science11

Science is a source of a lot of anxiety

<sup>8</sup> National Research Council (2012, p. 28). *Science education is poised to capture (and thus potentially exploit and regulate) the life process of wonder(ing) as expressed and experienced by children.*

<sup>9</sup> Carson (1965, p. 55). *Adults can help prevent the stilling/stealing of wonder (and thus keep wonder "alive") by attending to, encouraging, and sharing in children's wonder.*

<sup>10</sup> Preservice elementary teacher, science methods course, 2017. *Policing/regulating wonder might lead to wonder, as a life process, being forced to become "locked away" or hidden from view and replaced with the performed repetition of the normative order of things (receiving knowledge, not creating it), the traditional, acceptable mode of living/learning in schools.*

<sup>11</sup> Byers (2021) Found Poetic Data Assemblage, 20 preservice elementary teachers, science methods course. All phrases from original data and (re)arranged by researcher, no new words added. *Preservice teachers describe experiences with wonder(ing) being shut down over time (though recognizable in children—both the children they once were, and the children they are now observing as part of their teacher education placements in schools), as well as the regulating, intimidating nature of the kind of science education that they came to know through their past schooling experiences. Though these past experiences and memories have affected their views/confidence about teaching science, engaging with wonder (again) is opening up their thinking.*

for a lot of people, So no, science has never been my strength.

Like back in school, I didn't get it super quickly so it wasn't something I was ever really confident in.

Because to me it's always been a very structured, like there's a black and white answer to everything that you do.

It wasn't even a thing really, it was like—you just filled out a packet. Like, 'this is the answer'—take it or leave it.

I remember being little, being in school— I would get in trouble for getting off task and wondering about something. My mind was always racing, I always had a million questions, a million things running through my head.

I would wonder about them, and ask questions, but no, that was *not* what we were talking about. Like "you're off task, you're off topic." "That is definitely *not* in the curriculum."

 We just shut it down. We squash the idea of wondering.

Kids are taught to just keep it to themselves.

  Everything is new to them!

But, they kind of learn to shut off that wonder. We just shut it down. We squish it. It's like we shut down all these

like interests and fascinations, and it's like *why*?

I know that I am more passionate about things and I'm more interested in things when I like wonder about them and when I'm fascinated by them—

Why shouldn't we like, make *that* the standard?

How can we expect them to do well in school if they're not fascinated by anything? If we don't *allow them* to be fascinated by anything?

And if we stifle wonder, they're not gonna even *want* to wonder any more.

Kids are like, all right, let's get through this, let's get to recess, or like let's get to the end of the day.

I think that's why I was so discouraged my wonders were put on hold.

And yeah, I was really worried, so intimidated about teaching science.

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Science: A Fractured Pilgrimage<sup>12</sup>

My favourite metaphor is of science as a journey a fractured pilgrimage that began as a search for man, nature and God; an attempt to be at home in the cosmos that became a homelessness.<sup>13</sup>

<sup>12</sup> Byers (2021) Found Poetic Data Assemblage in Visvanathan (2002). Phrases (re)arranged by researcher. Minimal wording changes for flow and emphasis. *This assemblage emphasizes Visvanathan's analysis from outside of Western science—detailing the "progress" of science as it became entangled with neoliberal capitalism and Cartesian dualisms, and the harm this collaboration has caused. As a solution, he suggests science might return to where it began: as embedded in (not separate from) life/nature; with wonder.*

<sup>13</sup> Visvanathan (2002). *Science as a discipline started out differently than what it later became. It began in a similar way to how a preservice teacher in the previous section described her own wonder(ing) as a child: as a search for answers to big questions; for finding a home/sense of belonging in the universe. It began with wonder, but later became a fragmenting process of separating self/other.*

The scientific self, an invention, perfected self as spectator; separated from the world, the object becomes a spectacle, a specimen.<sup>14</sup>

The constitution of self/object, self/"other" begins through this constitution of distance.<sup>15</sup>

Science, a hegemonized form of knowledge, reduced a whole series of "others" to lesser orders of being subject perpetually to the scientific gaze.<sup>16</sup>

Science as "neutral" is a lie; science creates its own 'microphysics of power' by determining discourses, by pre-empting the ways one thinks.<sup>17</sup>

And the link between science and market is essential; nature is seen as dead, a resource; a mountain becomes a repository of ore.<sup>18</sup>

We must move from a glossary of distanced objectivity of "other" - to a language of relation and celebration to a dance of possibilities.19

But first science needs to cry.<sup>20</sup>

<sup>14</sup> Visvanathan (2002). *Science became a discipline that separates self/other, subject/object.*

<sup>15</sup> Ibid. *Science became a discipline that separates self/other, subject/object.*

<sup>16</sup> Ibid. *Science has separated self/other in a hierarchical manner, and claimed power/hegemony.*

<sup>17</sup> Ibid. *Science polices/regulates culture/society by claiming power and bounding discourses and thought through the guise of "neutrality."*

<sup>18</sup> Ibid. *Science, as a discipline that separated self/other, subject/object also separated humans from nature, hierarchically, thus enabling the exploitation of ("dead, inert") nature for human purposes. Science is entangled with capitalism, applying market values to living beings and life processes.*

<sup>19</sup> Ibid. *A solution to the suffering caused by the hegemony of science may be through embracing relations and other possibilities beyond those currently narrowly defined, regulated, and policed by Western science.*

<sup>20</sup> Ibid. *Science might open up to the fullness of human experience, including the affective/emotive, beginning with a time of mourning for what it has become and the pain it has caused.*

Crying is essential for the earth and what science has become.<sup>21</sup>

When you cry, you care; caring and crying may inaugurate new social practices.<sup>22</sup>

There is more truth in crying Than in any Cartesian meditation.<sup>23</sup>

And then science also needs laughter to not forget to be playful.<sup>24</sup>

Science should mimic nature in all its playfulness; it is through play that ecology restores by multiplying alternatives, lifestyles, life forms.<sup>25</sup>

And with this crying and laughing and playing, science could begin again in wonder.<sup>26</sup>

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*Black people have always needed the gift of wonder, to be able to imagine, to dream to believe in the impossible to imagine what might be*<sup>27</sup> and move toward that.

*Movement-moving*<sup>28</sup>

<sup>21</sup> Ibid. *Science might open up to the fullness of human experience, including the affective/emotive, beginning with a time of mourning for the pain it has caused.*

<sup>22</sup> Visvanathan (2002). *Science might open up to the fullness of human experience: affect, emotion, care, empathy, etc. may be included as allowable scientific/social practices.*

<sup>23</sup> Ibid. *Crying (and other human modes of being) represent reality more accurately than Cartesian dualities that separate and hierarchize reason/emotion, dismissing the latter*.

<sup>24</sup> Ibid. *Opening up to the fullness of human experience would include laughter and play*.

<sup>25</sup> Ibid. *Play is an ecological principle; a life process that includes exuberance and diversity. This process might be embraced and celebrated as a regular, allowable aspect of what life does; not regulated and policed*.

<sup>26</sup> Ibid. *It is through wonder that science began. Wondering is a primary process of lifeliving. Science might begin again in wonder in order to produce more life-affirming modes of living*.

<sup>27</sup> Manuel-Scott, personal conversation. *Black life, as regulated and policed life, has always needed wonder(ing) for its movement toward imagining what else is possible.*

<sup>28</sup> Manning (2014). *Life, thought here with the phenomenon of wonder catalyzing ontogenesis at the center, is always moving. Movement-moving is central to process philosophy*. dream-dreaming

*Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us.*<sup>29</sup>

*Black women gardeners*<sup>30</sup> Black mothers tending gardens *deep, thoughtful women where music was always on*<sup>31</sup> *She's got to sing, she can't help but sing!*<sup>32</sup> *I know why the caged bird sings.*<sup>33</sup>

*If they ask you, tell them we were flying. Freedom is (in) the invention of escape.*<sup>34</sup>

*The birds they sang at the break of day start again, I heard them say.*<sup>35</sup>

Black women mother gardeners dreaming what might grow in wide open fields, and small brown plots dark rich soil full of dream-drenched seeds.

Virtual possible/impossible *speculative fabulations*<sup>36</sup>

<sup>29</sup> Imarisha (2015). *Black life, as regulated and policed life, needs wonder(ing) for its relation to dreaming, for activation of movement, for feeling and imagining the "what else is possible."*

<sup>30</sup> Manuel-Scott, personal conversation. *The recognition and affirmation of Black women for their lively, joyful wondering, life-affirming dreaming, hoping, and for planting seeds of possibility.*

<sup>31</sup> Fred Moten interview (2018). *The recognition and affirmation of Black women for their lively, joyful wondering, life-affirming dreaming, hoping, and for planting seeds of possibility*.

<sup>32</sup> Ibid. *The recognition and affirmation of Black women for their lively, joyful wondering, life-affirming dreaming, hoping, and for planting seeds of possibility*.

<sup>33</sup> Angelou (2009). *Black women, despite facing regulation/policing/captivity are recognized and affirmed for their lively, joyful wondering, generative dreaming, singing, hoping, and planting seeds of possibility.*

<sup>34</sup> Harney and Moten (2013). *Connecting to birds/flight of the previous passage, wondering is viewed as related to/resonating with freedom/dreaming up escape from regulating structures.*

<sup>35</sup> Cohen (1984). *Following the affective flow of bird metaphors from the lines before; here resilience/persistence is added and woven in*.

<sup>36</sup> Haraway (2016). *Connecting wonder with dreaming, to joyful speculation of what else is possible.*

of dark/bright futures spectral shimmers, *Beloved*<sup>37</sup> *fleshy ghosts*<sup>38</sup> sowing seeds, dispersing, remembering, intuiting.

*The edgings into form of the material's intuition*<sup>39</sup> soil sweat blood Hughes poems dreams laughter grandma *Fitzgerald musical notes playing hide and seek*<sup>40</sup> wings seeds land dance all *vibrant matter*<sup>41</sup>

*Matter intuits its relational movement, the capacity to think the more-than as a memory of the future, a time that makes its own way a time schism.*<sup>42</sup>

A crack, a break *There is a crack, a crack in everything.*<sup>43</sup> *Freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break.*<sup>44</sup>

These cracks, *time schisms* are slower places, fugitive spaces the there-here, then-now of everyday encounters

<sup>37</sup> Morrison (1987). *Wonder evokes spectral, the ineffable*.

<sup>38</sup> Stewart (2007). *Wonder evokes spectral affects, the ineffable.*

<sup>39</sup> Manning (2016). *Manning's process philosophy includes the ontogenesis, or in-forming of material relations; wonder is thought here as being at the heart of this process.*

<sup>40</sup> Fred Moten interview (2018). *These words and affects contribute to the various entities/bodies/materials co-moving and becoming in-through the relational field of ontogenesis.*

<sup>41</sup> Bennett (2010). *Bennett 's contribution here is her theorizing of the agency of matter*.

<sup>42</sup> Manning (2016). *In the midst of events and encounters (where ontogenesis is occurring), there is felt a more-than, an excess, beyond linear or regulated/policed conceptions of time and space; this might be thought of as a crack, or a schism—a place for escape, or where new modes of life-living might emerge and thrive.*

<sup>43</sup> Cohen (1984). *In the midst of events and encounters (where ontogenesis is occurring), there is always felt a more-than, an excess, beyond linear or regulated/policed conceptions of time and space; this might be thought of as a crack, or schism—a place for escape, or where new modes of life-living might emerge and thrive.*

<sup>44</sup> Harney and Moten (2013). *In the midst of events and encounters (where ontogenesis is occurring), there is always a more-than, an excess, beyond linear or regulated/policed conceptions of time and space; this might be thought of as a crack, or schism—a place for escape, or where new modes of life-living might emerge and thrive.*

the in-between here-where time-space opens to the more-than of what it seems. *The extraordinary in-of the ordinary*. 45

*That nothing is quite what it seems in the movement-moving of an event suggests a kind of wonder a wondering in movement, a wondering at the world directly.*<sup>46</sup>

Wonder(ing) here is thought-felt *as liminal—a liminal experience,*<sup>47</sup> *the extraordinary in-of the ordinary.*<sup>48</sup> *An ordinary affect.*<sup>49</sup> *A minor gesture*50*-*gesturing, *disorienting-orienting-reorienting,*<sup>51</sup> *unsticking, sticking,*<sup>52</sup> *disassembling, assembling.*<sup>53</sup> *A sort of shimmering apprehension on the threshold* in *between knowing and not knowing.*<sup>54</sup>

#### A daydreamy schism in place-time

<sup>45</sup> Gl˘aveanu (2020). *These schisms, or thresholds/openings toward other modes of being, are available in the ordinary/everyday.*

<sup>46</sup> Manning (2014, pp. 165, 168). *Manning connects movement and perception of the more-than in-through events with wondering at-with the world, unmediated. Wonder as a life-process, as catalyzing ontogenesis. This thought is developed from the thinking of many process-based philosophers (Massumi, Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, Whitehead, James, etc.)*.

<sup>47</sup> Pearce and MacLure (2009, p. 254). *Wonder( ing ) is thought here as taking place at the edges of experience, in the in-between, the threshold spaces, or the previously mentioned cracks or time-schisms.*

<sup>48</sup> Gl˘aveanu (2020). *These schisms, or thresholds/openings gesturing toward other modes of being, are available in the ordinary/everyday.*

<sup>49</sup> Stewart (2007). *Wonder is common, ordinary; an everyday affect*.

<sup>50</sup> Manning (2016). *Analysis: these schisms, or thresholds/openings, are felt as (minor) gestures, in otherwise regulated/policed spaces (the major). They gesture toward other modes of being.*

<sup>51</sup> Ahmed (2006). *Ahmed discusses how wonder can help reorient what was previously oriented a different way: according to hegemony, power, structures that structure, regulate, police.*

<sup>52</sup> Ahmed (2010). *Ahmed theorizes regulated structures, norms, and affects as "sticky" thus wonder may help to open things back up, to help them get unstuck.*

<sup>53</sup> Deleuze and Guattari (1987). *There is a plurality/multiplicity of potential assemblages in a field of potentiality, or the plane of immanence making up the milieu of every event.*

<sup>54</sup> Pearce and MacLure (2009, p. 254). *Wonder takes place at the edges of experience, in the in-between, threshold spaces, or time-schisms, troubling certainty and knowledge.*

other here-there slowed down deep presence feeling-thinking-moving *where the event is still welling*<sup>55</sup> *where aesthetic cognitive and spiritual* modes *are simultaneously mobilized,*<sup>56</sup> *where force has not yet turned to form,* here, *in the midst there is potential for new diagrams of life-living to be drawn.*<sup>57</sup>

Space for *rhizomatic*<sup>58</sup> sprouting, vining tendrils branching winding bursting forth writhing, thriving

(not just surviving)

See Figure 9.1.

*We want to do more than survive! We want our full humanity recognized with dignity!*<sup>59</sup>

dancing pulsing laughing fullness of life-living *the flux of liveliness coursing through existence unlimited*<sup>60</sup>

*It's about Black joy and always putting love*

<sup>55</sup> Manning (2016, p. 15). *In the midst of events and encounters (where ontogenesis is occurring), there is always felt a more-than, an excess, beyond linear or regulated/policed conceptions of time and space; this might be thought of as a crack, or schism—a place for escape, or where new modes of life-living might emerge and thrive.*

<sup>56</sup> Pearce and MacLure (2009, p. 254). *In the "midst" referred to in the previous line, there are primes mobilized across areas more traditionally thought of as separate (or that science has forced to be separate): spiritual, cognitive, aesthetic, realms, etc. Wonder is thought here as a connecting/synthesizing force, rather than one of fragmenting and separating these.*