From Precarious Present to Evitable Future

In a previous post that explores themes from our co-authored Planetary Pedagogies paper, Professor Wendy Steele wrote that, “Creative and collaborative work – whether real or fictional – helps us regenerate.”

In my own teaching, I note to students that such collaborative work is important because action and change are needed to address a wide array of concerning issues and threats to wellbeing, at scales from the individual to the planetary. In my experience, however, students need no convincing of this.

What we often need significant help with instead is understanding that not only can creative and collaborative work sometimes make a positive difference, but that such work regularly succeeds in doing so.

The fictional creative and collaborative work to which Wendy refers is important in reinforcing the message of the efficacy of collaborative action, and expanding the ways in which, and the issues about which, we might focus our efforts.

As I explore in my chapter, ‘Teaching for Buoyancy in the Pre-carious Present for an Evitable Future’,* co-authored with Kaye Quek, Aya Ono, Anna Branford and Sam Carroll-Bell, educators should seek not only to critique, but also to enable students to participate thoughtfully in change-making action, aware of an array of factors such as their positionality and the wider context and history of the issues they seek to address.

What I wish to underscore in this post, however, is the importance of making visible the accomplishments of so many collaborative projects and endeavours, which are regularly international and global in nature, and have planetary impacts and implications. These successes often struggle to compete with more spectacular and dire news. We must not deny or turn away from such news, but nor should we let it wholly occlude the stories of real accomplishment. Bringing these stories to visibility, which organisations such as Future Crunch and others do, are so important in enabling people to believe that creative and collaborative work has impact, that change is possible, and that they have a meaningful role to play in these efforts.