Travel as Education for Ecophilia: A Rural Teacher Educator's Thought Experiment

Abstract

John Locke writes "the last part usually in education is travel." John Dewey advocates educating for "the one great common world," meaning the life force that connects lessons to the world outside the classroom making learning relational. This project invites conversation about the educational value of educational travel for rural preservice teachers in light of Locke\'s, Dewey\'s, and others\' philosophical thought. Educational travel, going away on a journey spawned by questions with the intent to return home, may be a way to educate and to enter into the one great common world. Joining the one great common world is especially challenging for rural teachers due to the physical, geographical, and intellectual isolation they often face. If society expects teachers to have a worldly perspective, where are rural teachers going to get it? Educational travel might be a way to confront the problem of isolation and to educate for the one great common world.

The purpose of this project is to take Locke\'s ideas on travel for higher education and combine them with Dewey\'s thoughts on educating for the one great common world in order to build a travel plan for rural preservice teachers educating for ecophilia. The etymological sense of ecophilia is defined as "love (philia) for the abode (oikos)." To explain the journey from ecophobia, or fear of the natural world, to learning ecophilia, I tell of my own personal metamorphoses from a young boy terrified of the natural world into a man who embraces the wilds of nature. Further building the concept of ecophilia, I closely examine the well thought-out ecophilosophies of deep ecology and ecofeminism, and the ecojustice framework. I also explore both ecophobic and ecophilic examples of travel writing.

This study is a response to the problem of isolation that many rural teachers experience while answering why and how educational travel can confront this problem. The main research questions are, How can educational travel be constructed as an integral component of teacher education for ecophilia especially in isolated settings? How can educational travel teach an ecophilic perspective on one\'s place in the one great common world? How can educational travel give an ecophilic purpose to education in an ecophobic culture?

The culmination of this project is the construction of a travel plan that builds an experiential and self-directed approach to travel for ecophilia in northwest Oklahoma for preservice teachers. To do this I conduct a thought experiment, building a travel plan as part of a four-week summer course titled Orientation for Ecophilia in Northwest Oklahoma, to be taught at Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU). This plan is designed to confront specific characteristics of ecophobia (individualism, anthropocentrism, and ethnocentrism), so that my students may begin to learn specific characteristics of ecophilia (biocentric realization, ecopolitical gender sensitization, and ecoethical acculturation). The outcome of the proposed travel plan is to spawn an educational metamorphosis in my students from ecophobes to ecophiles so that they may look beyond the physical, geographical, and intellectual isolation and join the one great common world.