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In Praise of Radiant Beings

A Retrospective Path Through Education, Buddhism and Ecology

By:
David W. Jardine, University of Calgary (Retired)

A volume in the series: Current Perspectives on Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Education. Editor(s): Hongyu Wang, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa. Jing Lin, University of Maryland. Heesoon Bai, Simon Fraser University. Xin Li, California State University-Long Beach.

Published 2016

This text is a collection of essays by noted curriculum scholar and philosopher of education, David W. Jardine. It ranges over twenty-five years of work with teachers and students in schools. The main purpose of these essays is to provide teachers with new ways of thinking about their circumstances that side step some of the panic and exhaustion that is all too typical of many school settings. Using ideas and images from Buddhism, ecological thinking, and hermeneutics, the author shows how these lineages help with the practical work of thinking and acting differently regarding the knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools. It offers the image of living fields of relations as an alternative to the fragmented, industrial-assembly machinations that drive much curriculum thinking and practice. It roots this alternative in solid scholarly work, both inside and outside of the orbit of educational literature. This book can provide encouragement and example to those working in schools who have sensed the shifting of human consciousness and conscience over the past decades towards issues of sustainability, interrelatedness, diversity, ancestry, ecological well-being, and dependent co-arising. It provides solid classroom-based examples coupled with substantial scholarly delving into the roots of such work in long-standing streams of thinking that are born outside of the usual orbits of educational theory and practice, but that provide that practice with a refuge and a relief and an alternative. This book can also provide examples to those doing graduate work in education of how interpretive research into classrooms can be conducted, and how this work is must be solid, well-rooted, scholarly and meticulously thought out. It is useful as a handbook and sourcebook for interpretive research or hermeneutic research, and provides a wide array of sources and themes for the conduct of such work.

CONTENTS
Introduction: It Only Makes it Better. PREAMBLE 1: We Twist Fibre on Fibre. CHAPTER I: To Dwell With a Boundless Heart: On the Integrated Curriculum and the Recovery of the Earth (1990). PREAMBLE 2: Don’t Say ‘There Must Be . . .”. CHAPTER II: The Fecundity of the Individual Case: Considerations of the Pedagogic Heart of Interpretive Work (1992). PREAMBLE 3: The Deeply Experiential Ecology of ‘Just This’. CHAPTER III: The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (1995). PREAMBLE 4: Kids Running From Place to Place. CHAPTER IV: Under the Tough Old Stars: Meditations on Pedagogical Hyperactivity and the Mood of Environmental Education (1996). PREAMBLE 5: So, Here We Are. CHAPTER V: All Beings Are Your Ancestors: A Bear Sutra on Ecology, Buddhism, and Pedagogy (1997). PREAMBLE 6: Subjectivity is a Distorting Mirror. CHAPTER VI: Birding Lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas (1998) PREAMBLE 7: Remembering This, You Will Weep. CHAPTER VII: It’s All One Meditation (1999). PREAMBLE 8: Self-Abnegation. CHAPTER VIII: Filling This Empty Chair: On Genius and Repose (2004), David W. Jardine and Jennifer Batycky. PREAMBLE 9: Guarding Waterways. CHAPTER IX: Translating Water (2008). PREAMBLE 10: Every Secret Loses Its Force. CHAPTER X: The Sickness of the West (2008). PREAMBLE 11: A Temporary Medicine. CHAPTER XI: An Ontological Delusion (2012). PREAMBLE 12: Keep Radiantly Well. CHAPTER XII: Sickness Is Now ‘Out There’ (2012). PREAMBLE 13: Hells. CHAPTER XIII: Time Is Always Running Out (2014). PREAMBLE 14: Well, Lyle. CHAPTER XIV: Introduction: We Are Here, We Are Here, Jackie Seidel and David W. Jardine (2014). PREAMBLE 15: If You Are Frightened. CHAPTER XV: Just This Once: An Introduction to the Pedagogy of Suffering, David W. Jardine, Graham McCaffrey, and Christopher Gilham. PREAMBLE 16: The Unspoken Vow. CHAPTER XVI: Thoughts on Thinking Through Regret and How Afflictions Can Be Teachers (2015). PREAMBLE 17: A Halt in the Rush of Things. CHAPTER XVII: Time Is a Bringer of Gifts (2015). PREAMBLE 18: This is a Degenerate Time. CHAPTER XVIII: An Ode To Xmas Present (2015). PREAMBLE 19: The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters. CHAPTER XIX: A Failed Attempt to Finish a Thought Left in Mid-Air by Christopher Hitchens (2015). PREAMBLE 20: These Things Are Fantastic. CHAPTER XX: In Praise of Radiant Beings (2014). References

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