This is not just a pandemic, this IS climate change: Linda, who is teaching the foundations for the new Economics (#7)
Now that we’ve figured out when to wear masks, the “coffee break” button in Zoom meetings, and how to navigate one-way aisles in the grocery store, conversation here in Hawaiʻi is turning to rebuilding a more diversified, sustainable, and equitable post-tourism economy. A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Covid 19 was released this week by the state’s Commission on the Status of Women. “Rather than rush to rebuild the status quo of inequality,” begins the plan, which is titled “Building Bridges, Not Walking on Backs”, “we should encourage a deep structural transition to an economy that better values the work we know is essential to sustaining us.”
Coincidentally, this week I interviewed a newly-tenured Associate Professor of Economics, as part of my current study on Teaching Climate Change, in which I’m looking at cross-disciplinary pedagogies and how the climate crisis is changing the role of faculty in higher education. We are at a generational pivot point, with our disciplinary experts (economists, biologists, poets, social workers, philosophers, anthropologists, engineers, mathematicians, geologists, ecologists, linguists) suddenly carrying an additional responsibility for translating complex, and mostly terrifying, information to students about the shifting nature of reality. Each of us carries a piece of the future, and we’re putting it together along with our students. (Imagine if you bought ten jigsaw puzzles at the Goodwill, and they were all in different boxes but you mixed them together, and even though some of the pieces were missing, but you still occasionally find that satisfying “click” of pieces that fit together perfectly through some miracle of trial, and error, and luck.)
I asked my colleague, whom I’ll call Linda* (a pseudonym, since this is an ongoing research endeavor), “What is it like to be teaching in the middle of a climate crisis that is all around us, but at the same time, invisible?” Covid 19 has certainly changed the scope of these interviews, and the way that faculty are teaching to this moment.
She answered, “Well, I hate to say ‘I told you so’ in a dreadful end-of-the world kind of way, but I do mention to my students that this has been happening — the floods, hurricane scares, and our community’s reaction to those. I hate the phrase ‘new normal’ (what does that even mean?), but this is not just a pandemic—this IS climate change. So it’s like, ‘Ok, here we go…do we believe it now?’ I’m trying to usher them into planning for the future and realizing that it’s not going to be how it always has been.”
The big idea she’s been teaching for the past few years in her first year Microeconomics courses is not just supply, demand, and market equilibrium, but the importance of networks. Speaking like an economist, she explained how you have physical capital, which is like machinery, human capital, which is intellectual know-how, education, and experience, and what economists call social capital. “But this is really just people, in a community of support that you can rely on when you need information, or in times like these, when you need the actual support of a community.”
Her teaching draws on her own extensive social capital, utilizing field trips, guest speakers, entrepreneurial projects like making soap out of biofuels, and a new innovation that she calls a Pop Up Learning Community.
“I don’t like the connotation of the word capital; like you’re putting a monetary value on it or that’s the purpose they serve, like a one way street.” She quotes indigenous scholar Kamuela Enos, who talks about “Mana-tizing,” where mana = life force energy.
“Manatizing is when you foster abundance and you put in your energy and time to creating real wealth, actual relationships. When you focus on real things, that’s when people can thrive. You can have a bank account full of dollars but your bank account isn’t going to buy anything when there’s nothing on the store shelf, so let’s focus on those things of real value.”
What economics is this? Could we be teaching the new Feminist Economics? The Greek root of economy: to manage the household. Could we be teaching Sustainable Economics? Is it Donut Economics, or the Circular Economy? The tricky bit is that we are teaching our way through a paradigm shift. We literally live inside overlapping realities and as faculty, have become responsible for teaching to the current moment, with its established syllabus and set of learning outcomes, while laying the cognitive foundations for an unknown future.
Linda is an extraordinary teacher. She wears nice dresses, always looking put-together. She’s “local”, having attended public high school in Hawaiʻi, growing up as part of a halau that helped to build her social networks in sectors from aquaculture to agriculture to healthcare. She did her undergrad “in Boston” and had some experience “on the Hill” during the Bush W presidency. She recalled hearing about climate change during that time in Washington, but then, she said, 9/11 happened and it was all about homeland security. It’s important to remember how “shift happens” and where the “new normal” comes from.
Linda returned to Hawaiʻi for a PhD in Economics, and started out as a Teaching Assistant, eventually getting her own big lecture classes of 175 students. “You’re always a little nervous and you’re just teaching economic theory two or three levels above where the students are at, but I was never uncomfortable. It felt kind of natural.” After juggling a lectureship and an economic research job downtown for a few years, she applied at Community College of the Pacific* (a psuedonym) and went “all in”.
“It’s just so different to be full time. It becomes all of you. You have the luxury of your full effort, and the more you teach the more you realize ‘oh this needs to be better developed’. I have so much more to offer when teaching has my full attention.”
I ask all the faculty members that I interview how they first learned about climate change, and when they began teaching about it. Like most, Linda said, “I’m 99% positive that i went my entire undergraduate career without ever hearing about climate change or anything related to it, and climate change was never mentioned in my entire graduate career in economics.” (She completed a BA in 2003, double majoring in Political Science and Economics and a Ph.D. in 2008.)
“My focus was health economics, population economics, labor, international trade, public finance. In none of these classes was climate change ever mentioned, not environment, not anything. I look back and I think how every single one of the fields of those classes that I took are immensely impacted by climate change. To not study it and not teach it to the next generation of economists is just mind-blowing to me.”
If you are a rational person, if you know these changes are coming and what we are doing is not working then something’s got to be modified.
Yeah, it’s about time for something like this Feminist Economic Recovery plan!
She continued, “It was 2017 when I first used the words ‘climate change’ in class, but it’s so big of an issue and so far reaching into every discipline that I was very uncomfortable in communicating that to students. I couldn’t even articulate it myself, even though I know in my mind it’s this big red flashing light.” So, how do you turn an emergency into a learning outcome?
It’s hard to describe the magic that can occur in a college classroom. It’s magic that doesn’t always translate neatly into Student Learning Outcomes reporting. I want to describe the Pop Up Learning Community that Linda designed with an English 100 teacher’s poetry unit. Learning Communities are described by the Association of American Colleges & Universities as a High Impact Practice where a pair or group of faculty team-teach with a common cohort of students. (I have written about them here.) While fun for faculty and effective for student learning, they are generally not feasible with a standard workload and scheduling bureaucracy. However, Linda and this English teacher, whom we will call Adam, discovered their classes were both scheduled at 10:45am, so they planned two class meetings where the writing students and the economics students would have class together.
“The real learning outcome was to bring students from two disciplines together to see the same concept through a different lens, or how you could see it in two different disciplines, and that I’m confident we accomplished, but what else we got out of it, was kind of … let’s just see what happens.”
They met in the campus garden for one of their Pop Up meetings. Adam, the English teacher, presented a poem about a garden, and asked the group to unpack metaphors for life out of the poem.
“My economics lesson was supposed to be about happiness —what is it, how does it affect consumer behavior —and it’s so interesting how you go in with this plan and come out with something totally different because what it turned into was actually more connected to our unit on the circular economy. Instead of extracting resources, using them, and disposing of them “away” we can make it a regenerative cycle and then make natural cycles and how “waste” becomes a resource. I wasn’t expecting this from the garden class, but I was happily amazed by it, so I actually ended up using that poem on their exam!”
The garden visit was in October, and the final exam in December had this same poem, asking students to find two areas in the poem that illustrate a concept or an element of a circular economy. “80% of the students found two areas and it was one of the highest scoring free-response questions.”
I thought that was a real win because they recalled the circular economy, reflected on the poem they had seen once before, and could still articulate it several months later, without practice.
Linda pointed out that Covid 19 is giving teachers an entry for talking about what they see people doing differently, whether it’s business, or schooling, cooking, growing food, being a family. Things that wouldn’t have been done the same way without this crisis.
That innovation that gets sparked has a lot of power and potential for dealing with what is coming with the planetary crisis.
And here’s the poem by Marge Piercy that that served as a bridge between gardens, English, metaphors for life, and concepts of the circular economy. Who knew? And what’s next?
The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
