ASSIGNMENT: For week one, please consider the following questions: In what ways

ASSIGNMENT: For week one, please consider the following questions:
In what ways might defining or describing our positionality influence doctoral-level learning?
How do we learn (scholarly learning)?
How do we see/interpret the world (worldview)?
How do we perceive sustainability education?
How does your positionality shape your learning?
How does your positionality shape your teaching? How might our students’ positionality be important as educators? Can you describe an example of this showing up in your work?
3. What are your interpretations of brown’s idea of fractals? How might this idea relate to your dissertation work?
Introduction
While Emergent Strategy: Shaping Changing, Changing Worlds is a relational and adaptive framework intended for organizations, we can use these elements to rethink teaching and learning for sustainability education. adrienne maree brown used the metaphor of fractals to speak to scale: looking at patterns that emerge from the inward to the outward. brown remind us, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system…to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet” (p. 53). Before we can re-envision education (sustainability education in the broadest sense) for transformational change, it’s really important to have some inward self-reflection, introspection. One term or approach is called positionality.
Describing your positionality is the practice of reflecting on or exploring your personal, professional, and scholarly experiences as well as your ecological interrelationships. Your positionality is the lens through which you see and move through the world and how your studies are influenced by that complex and entangled stance. As you have likely explored in other courses, positionality statements are often unpacked to ground research design. However, in this course, we will explore how our positionality relates to all of the learning and teaching we do—both formally in a scholarly capacity and informally in everyday situations as it relates to sustainability education. As we examine our positionalities and identities, we begin to see how every individual is multidimensional, and often has multiple, intersecting marginalized identities that might shift in different contexts. How might understanding this be important for teaching? In what ways ought educators understand learners’ positionalities? For brown “compelling futures have more justice, yes; and right relationship to planet, yes; but also must allow for our growth and innovation. I want an interdependence of lots of kinds of people with lots of belief systems, and continued evolution” (p. 57).
Learning Objective
1. Evaluate positionality in relation to learning
Activities
1. Each week I encourage you to take 10 minutes to ground yourself in Nature.
2. Read and view the resources in the resources folder.
3. Consider the dialogue questions in the forum to engage with your peers.
4. “Ok, But Who Are You?” -a.m. brown: Create a 2-5 minute social and ecological positionality visual story that includes audio, images, and video (e.g., Vimeo, YouTube). Post a link to your visual story here. To prime your creative pump, consider these guiding questions:
Where am I from and/or where do I currently live? What are some places that I feel most connected to?
Who are my ancestors?
With whom or what am I entangled..