paired with “Asters and Goldenrod”

This activity invites students to expand on Kimmerer’s chapter with a podcast interview which could be used as either in-class or at-home reading and writing.

Introduction

ET: Kimmerer’s work comments directly on how a disciplinary field and Western-centric educational practices observe and validate the world around us. While her comments are pointed, they open toward alternative ways of knowing that augment and decenter assumed truths about knowledge baked into academia, such as objectivity and the primacy of measurement and observation. In some ways, scholars and students choose a discipline for its own way of seeing even if that choice is not interrogated. That is why I’ve had many students say such things as “I’m more a one-right answer math person” when they feel overwhelmed by the openness of many of my assignments.

But, when I get such a student in my office, I implore them to talk to their math professors about the “one right idea” mentality, warning them that mathematics is also creative and interpretative. On the other hand, I also remind them that English (or writing) has its rules too. Sentences have certain syntactical patterns that aren’t flexible, for instance. Helping students see that each disciplinary field is a very specific way of seeing, but despite that there are interesting overlaps between all fields even within the Western tradition that open opportunities for them to access ways of knowing that they’ve often written themselves out of before they arrived at the university.

Listening to Kimmerer expand on her thinking about science and beauty alongside Western and indigenous ways of knowing and how those perspectives play into linguistic features shows us that there is more we do not pay attention to than that we do.

Guide

Listen: Ways of Seeing through Epistemologies and Language

Start listening to the On Being podcast episode “Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence of Plants” at the below timestamps. Write openly in response to a question for each segment for a couple of minutes or assign questions to groups of students to discuss. Once you’ve completed all three segments, sum up your thoughts in a one-sentence statement about ways of knowing.

5:38 to 9:36 – What does being objective mean, and why is that seen in generally positive ways? How does Kimmerer challenge the neutrality of scientific objectivity? How does objectivity help science? How does it hurt science or the broader society? How do you feel differently about a scientific explanation of the beauty of asters and goldenrod and a more poetic or aesthetic explanation?

20:13 to 22:18 – Why does science focus so much on the visual? More broadly, how does science pay attention to our senses? Why does science exclude the intuitive, emotional, and spiritual ways of knowing? How does science help us transcend the limits of the human? How does it instrumentalize humans and other living things?

27:05 to 31:02 – He and she are gendered pronouns. Many languages have noun cases like the masculine (le libro) and feminine (la cancíon) that sort nouns into categories. Some languages have dozens of categories. What would it mean to have a category and so a pronoun that differentiates living from non-living beings as Kimmerer proposes? How does our language instrumentalize and care for life?