Gaia: “thinking like a planet” as transformative learning

Abstract

Transformative learning may involve gentle perspective widening or something more traumatic. This paper explores the impact of a transformative pedagogy in a course that challenges learners to “think like a planet”. Among six sources of intellectual anxiety, learners worry about: why Gaia Theory is neglected by their other courses; the removal of humans from “crown of creation” status; Gaia's unfamiliar multibillion-year timescales, comprehending the world system as a whole; the array of weaker and stronger Gaia concepts; and the diversity of viewpoints among classmates. Analysis finds that most learners coped with this exercise although some achieved this by compartmentalization.

Keywords::

• transformative learning
• learning thresholds
• learning journals
• Gaia
• Physical Geography
• Deep Ecology

Notes

^1. Interestingly, one anonymous peer reviewer of this paper also scoffs at this author's molly-coddling approach: “boring out new thought channels is exactly what we should be wishing upon geography undergraduates. … if we're not trying to get students over multiple tipping points and transforming how they think and view the world… what we are here for? … I find all this talk of ‘well being’ to be rather overstating the case. Can the author provide an example of where an undergraduate student's well being has been adversely affected because of the stress of being exposed to new intellectual material and perspectives?” Obviously, the answer is sadly yes, several examples, but then undergraduates run into trouble by many means and for many reasons. Of course, a major part of the discourse about the well-being of international students concerns exactly this problem. Haigh (2013) reviews this theory ahead of using the journal of the Mahatma Gandhi as a case study. Haigh (2009) also describes a case where an experimental attempt to internationalize a Geography curriculum by building it from non-Western foundations overstepped its mark with negative consequences.