The interspecies educator's cybernetic world

Publisher's notice

This article is a reprint of the article “ The interspecies educator's cybernetic world”, published in Kybernetes, Vol. 42 Nos 9/10, 2013. Upon publication it was discovered that a number of errors had been introduced during the typesetting process, which altered the meaning of the article. The Publisher and typesetter sincerely apologize for these errors and for any inconvenience caused to readers.

Introduction

Second-order cybernetics recognizes the active role a knower plays in the systems it knows, breaks down a long standing theory-practice division, and ushers in a concern with consequences. When consequences involve living, learning systems, this concern translates into educational and pedagogical questions, approaches, and experiments. Contemporary semiotic biology reveals that all living beings maintain themselves through learning (and being learned from) so pedagogy should extend into interspecies relationships. The concept of “eduction” can help draw the bridge between a cybernetic theory of knowledge and interspecies pedagogy. If biologists become educators and educators become biologists, both the life sciences and education theory and practice can make important headway in overcoming the human-nature dichotomy and precipitate a healthier, more sustainable epistemology. This has possible implications for educators and conservationists, some of which are briefly sketched here.

1 Connecting cybernetics to education

Although feedback, recursion, and a temporal/historical dimension already set first-order cybernetics apart from linear approaches to science, first-order cybernetics was epistemologically naive as it was based on the premise that perception and knowing do not participate in what is experienced. By contrast, second-order cybernetics, birthed in 1968 along with the American Society for Cybernetics, and pioneered by Bateson (1972, 1979), von Foerster (2003) and Maturana and Varela (1992) and (many) others, can be thought of as a further development that includes the observer in the system that it is trying to observe. Through this epistemological turn, cybernetics shifted from a physicalist ontology to one more open to the constructive role of experience in the continued maintenance of the organism, making lived experience not epiphenomenal but a causally effective process.

The assumption that the act of knowing was passive did not hold within the new epistemology. Coming to know something changes the knower and the known, and changes the relationship between them. A second-order cybernetician would point out that even this very recognition of feedback itself feeds back into the relationship. And so, with the knowing enterprise intimately connected with effects in the real world, cybernetics also came to increasingly connect theory and practice[1]. Researchers would have to take responsibility for what their knowing and their knowledge constructs do, as they recirculate through the world, for better or for worse. Linear models of systems unaffected by participant interaction are only explanatorily sufficient in limit cases, so the premises underlying much of the success of modern science cannot provide a prototype for cultivating responsible human activities. Thus, we are beckoned to put ourselves into the loop, and address explicitly the unfolding political, social, environmental, and intrapersonal effects of our knowledge projects. And through sustained attention to patterns and possibilities of our activities, a cybernetic science of responsibility emerges. Cybernetics, taken in this direction, converges with pragmatic approaches developed earlier in nineteenth and twentieth Century America. Dewey (1916), for example, stressed that knowing was not concerned with an external, passive reality but with the relationship between our activities and their consequences. He urged an active and experimental approach to pedagogy, ethics, and politics, where actions were constantly subject to revision as experimental results were evaluated.

Not all cyberneticians felt comfortable with approaches that relied so heavily on consciousness to formulate and steer our practical affairs. Bateson, for example, saw purpose-driven solutions as inherently misguided, and instead sought aesthetic approaches that place conscious purpose humbly within a larger, more-than-conscious field of interaction (Bateson and Bateson, 1987). Nevertheless, the spirit of Dewey's experimentalism can easily incorporate emotional, aesthetic, and embodied modes of knowing. Indeed, no practitioner works without them. Educators are pragmatic, second-order cyberneticians by necessity, but most of their cybernetic knowledge is procedural, tacit, and embodied. They are concerned with changes that occur in their students' development, which are in turn created, modified, or maintained by how each person interprets the other. Engaging in such an indeterminate and evolving system relies on an exploratory openness and receptivity, though educators are rarely self-consciously cybernetic modelers. They are also seldom concerned with the unchanging, perspective-independent world underlying a classroom situation. To some extent, the capacity to be a good educator is in knowing when to avoid models that abstract and generalize from concrete experience such that uniqueness is swept aside. When models muddy uniqueness, the educator's receptivity to nuance is undercut, leading to constraints on growth for the student. Perhaps this is why many pragmatist philosophers were concerned with education and why many educators are attracted to pragmatic philosophers. As the complexity of cybernetic systems becomes clearer, as the observer-dependence of cybernetic systems become more apparent, and as the sensitive relationship between observation, interpretation, and consequence becomes undeniable, a pragmatic outlook on any research program will be pushed to the fore. Educational questions emerge. It is from within this emerging nexus that I turn to biology.

2 Connecting the biological world to education

There are multiple, causally-entwined “inheritance systems” amongst living beings, including genetic and epigenetic pathways, and behavioral and sociocultural learning (Jablonka and Lamb, 2006), so the complexity and interconnection in ecosystems is no mere epiphenomenal bi-products of causal chains originating solely at the genetic level. In this paper I highlight the role that learning plays as an agent in the formation of ecological communities (and ultimately evolution itself). All living beings live through learning, and so long as they interact with others, through being learned from. This occurs within species and between species. To be certain, many organisms do not realize that they learn from others and are probably still less aware that they teach others. Nevertheless, learning and teaching orchestrate the living dynamic of the Earth, birthing both novel behaviors and perpetuating established ones. We can engage biological systems relationally from an educator's perspective, which is to say cybernetically, as pragmatists concerned with learning outcomes.

It is useful to consider what this perspective offers in contrast to those from which it emerged. Phenotypical inheritance has re-appeared in neo-Lamarkian frameworks that incorporate recursion into understanding life, such as the Baldwin effect (Weber and Depew, 2003), Peircean biosemiosis (Hoffmeyer, 2008), niche construction (Odling-Smee et al., 2003), Maturana and Varela's (1992) “structural coupling”, von Foerster's (2003) “eigenbehaviour” and Bateson's emphasis on the communicative, creatural logic of the biosphere (for an overview of Bateson's distinction between pleroma and creatura, see Bateson (1979)). I owe my initial entry into these issues to the latter, and address it here. Bateson articulated that life's behaviour -but also its physiology- is better understood as the process and product of communicational relations between living beings, so we have to take communicational relations seriously. Life, like everything else, is bounded by laws of energy and matter exchange, but it works on its own energy stores and so can respond to distinctions relevant to it, sidestepping thermodynamic conditions to disclose and live within an informational world of valence and meaning. Further, one creature's distinctions change its behaviour and can, in turn, “make a difference” for other creatures that respond to it based on a similar flexibility provided by their own energy stores.

Bateson focussed on communicational relations, but communication language does not foreground the instability and freshness present in how the one communicated to interprets the communicator. Nor does it intuitively lead us to take responsibility for the outcomes of communicational processes. If we consider these relationships educationally instead, the changeability and indeterminacy of biosemiosis is given more emphasis, as is our responsibility as actors within this entangled system. Focussing on communication leads to identifying patterns and regularities; focussing on education throws the researcher directly into the unfinished loop. The education researcher is enlivened to the unfinished character of the dynamic and to his or her involvement in it. This shift in focus may better serve Bateson's later preoccupations with how humans should act in a cybernetic world.

But is it relevant to talk of “teaching” if other species do not know that they are teaching?

3 The human animal in the interspecies curriculum

Allow me to now paint an overly simplistic picture of curriculum theory to highlight where I think this discussion comes in. At one time, education theorists and philosophers thought that what educators taught was a pre-planned curriculum that had been designed for instruction of other human beings inside a classroom (Tyler, 1949;, etc.). Some realized that what was actually taught included not merely what they intended to teach, but all sorts of other things, coming out through the ways they talked, the clothes they wore, the architecture of the classroom, and so on (Eisner, 1994; Snyder, 1971). An unintended, hidden curriculum became the mischievous meta-context that sometimes complemented but often interfered with what educators were trying to teach. Education theory was blurring the content/context distinction and becoming explicitly second-order. Meanwhile, it became obvious to others that after the teacher left the classroom, and walked to the bus-stop or to the car, it was pedagogically relevant which one they went to. If they went to the bus, they would be teaching a different pattern of “normal behaviour” for their culture than if they went to a car. Curriculum theory was opening its doors to the outside world.

Education is moving outwards, and this level of consideration is still incomplete (Affifi, 2011). As the educator walks to the bus, we also find that he or she is teaching the crow perching on the pine above the walking path. If the educator's manner is oblivious to the company of the crow, the crow will learn different things about its world than it would if that human was treading carefully and attuned to its presence.

This might seem trivial. Does it matter that the crow flies away or stays on the perch? Yes, it does. The crow is not a billiard ball in a Newtonian universe. Whatever it does could, in turn, teach other crows, other species, humans, and itself (because education is also moving inwards) something about the relationship between humans and crows. Consider this example: at the Sai Nyai Eco-School, a school I have been getting off the ground in Laos, sparrows avoid humans. They will rarely be seen within 20 meters of homo sapiens. This is because people in the area are often equipped with slingshots, will project stones at them, and, when successful, bring the birds home to make some delicious Lao food. However, when I cross the Thai border and go to Ubon Ratchathani, I often eat at a vegetarian restaurant where the same species of sparrow will peck rice grains out of the patrons' hands. This difference is surely stabilized not only through patterns of human-sparrow interaction, but through sparrow-sparrow interaction. Other sparrows see how sparrows act in the presence of humans and normalize those patterns of activity. My point is not that we should cultivate relationships that are “warm and fuzzy” in all contexts with other species. Perhaps the wary sparrows at the school are teaching each other a better lesson. Assessing this requires multiple spatial and temporal scales and considerations of who benefits and how through the various curricular outcomes that could emerge. In the face of such complexity, any assessment is tentative and is itself experimental. However, as implicit second-order cyberneticians, educators are aware that the very act of considering what is a better lesson opens up a space -an attentiveness- with consequent relational shifts for those involved. These shifts usually provide flexibility in the dynamics between the teacher and the student, and enable less unidirectional forms of co-regulation. It is the beginning of the possibility of a pedagogical relationship.

Nor are these interspecies relations to be considered solely in the animal kingdom (Affifi, 2013b). Plant biologists, for example, are uncovering many ways that plants respond to, learn, and communicate with their surroundings. Science can help us see the effects of our actions on those with very different lived experiences from us, extending the capacity of our pedagogical consideration (Affifi, 2013a). From an educational point of view, science is useful in opening up possibilities inaccessible to our established perceptual or conceptual filters, but should be approached cautiously because of its parallel tendency to close off our imaginations to alternatives.

4 Eduction in the interspecies curriculum

Humans are capable of realizing that they are teachers and learners, not merely in interaction with other humans but also with other species. We are also capable of realizing that our actions can be considered explicitly as such, opening deep pedagogical questions and possibilities. From a cybernetic perspective, we are not sometimes teachers and sometimes learners. Rather we are always both: our actions are always also the reactions of those we encounter. We can make either distinction for heuristic reasons, but the value of such distinctions is to be assessed pedagogically in terms of what relationships and possibilities of growth are created through them, for us, and for others, in our evolving encounter.

We are also invariably “teacher educators” and “student teachers.” Those we teach, teach others, in an unbounded chain, diffusing like a stone's ripple in a calm lake. And yet, we are also always a response to another's teaching, and in that way, just the first ripple of another stone, that spreads out through those we subsequently encounter. As in any complex system, there will be factors that dampen the possibilities of such spread, but this does not change the essential structure of the experience nor discount the occasional establishment or spread of novelty through such pathways. It is within this experiential space that possibilities of both structure and change emerge.

This process of coming to know through relationships between learners can be called “eduction.” Eduction, rooted in the word “educe”, conveys that knowing is “drawn out” or “led out” in the other through relationship. Inferential modes of coming to know, deduction, induction, and abduction can occur within learning relationships, yet are primed by larger contextual factors that evolve through eduction. What I will induce about you (or with you) will depend on the range of inductive possibilities offered by our evolving manner of eduction. I am not suggesting that eduction is totalizing in its reach. It surely depends on inferential acts to modify or sustain itself. Nevertheless, it sets the context of knowledge-production that schools our evolving relationships. Eduction shares its etymology with “education,” emphasizing the fact that coming to know is not solipsistic, but something that occurs between learners, and is part of the unfurling, epistemologizing of life. It also positions the human learner in a role of responsibility and care: what patterns emerge through eduction are co-constructed through their very own activities.

Eduction is a refining of previous cybernetic insights. Recall the “characterological traits” (or Learning II) that Bateson (1972) described as products of relationship: dependency, aggression, and so on. In interacting with other living beings, we find ourselves in relationships that educe character traits in the other and in us. These are the contexts that become established and govern subsequent knowledge co-constitution. In developmental systems theory, eduction recalls what Fogel describes as co-regulation of consensual frames (1993). Eduction is also in eigenbehaviour (von Foerster, 2003, p. 267), in which equilibrium in the behaviour of two participants is achieved through mutual, recursive co-constitution. In the interspecies curriculum, humans develop specific ways of understanding themselves and human-other relationships, and patterns of self-validating behaviour emerge.

By denying mindedness in the biological world, we generate eductive relationships with other organisms that are akin to plants growing without vital nutrients. We treat other living beings as we do inanimate objects, and assume that they cannot participate in the context setting of the evolving eduction. The resulting knowledge is chlorotic and stunted. The eduction proceeds by bolstering the sense that other living beings are but the mechanical backdrop to the rich drama on the human stage. In turn, this context curbs our openness to co-establishing eduction, further deadening our receptivity to the possibilities inherent in the unfolding dynamics.

Eduction occurs between multiple learner/teachers, so traits fix quickly because there are two sets of eyes normalizing the relationship instead of just one. When we interact with another living being and that being has learnt to act in a way that is consonant with our interpretation of what it is, then our behaviour -and their's- is being re-produced from two different, re-enforcing directions. As Bateson would say, the results are multiplicative not additive. This presents unique pedagogical challenges. However, for the same reason, it can also sometimes be easier to get out of established gridlocks than is the case when a positive feedback dynamic is established between an organism and something inanimate, such as happens a cigarette addiction. If we can change our behaviour, our changed behaviour will be re-interpreted sooner or later by the other being, which will propel the rise of new directions, patterns of action, and re-conceptualization. Such participatory un-lodging is not readily apparent in most interactions with the non-living world.

5 Implications

I offer one recommendation and two implications for educational practice. The recommendation first: educators can do what they do best even better by explicitly engaging in cybernetic thinking. Very few educators label themselves “cyberneticians.” While they dwell professionally in eductive recursion (i.e. when teaching, they are learning from a learner learning from them), the capacity to produce cybernetic models is not for them of high practical value. Recursions are usually happening too fast and on too many simultaneous and interacting levels, rendering most models misleading. Instead, the educator often accesses and acts on emotional responses to the situation, which function as embodied statistical computations of complex lived interactions. This does not mean that explicit cybernetic thinking is useless to an educator. Educators do think and do model. When they do, like all of us they tend to fall into lineal traps of one kind or another, some of which they learnt in teacher's college, but most of which they internalized far earlier. For this reason, in educational contexts cybernetic thinking may be of greatest utility in a negative sense: rather than providing models that we can apply to lived situations, cybernetic thinking should be recruited to detonate captivating patterns of thought that reduce interactive complexity to something linear (or, what is almost as dangerous, something simplistically recursive). Familiarizing oneself with cybernetic thought assists in understanding the circular nature of experience but does not and cannot comprehensively represent the entire experience. Practitioners can enter into the unfinished loop with less baggage when they employ cybernetic theory to scrape away what severs or distorts the educing relationship, bringing them into the living charge and potentiality of the direct encounter.

As educators de-anthropocentrize their thinking, classroom experiences will prove critical in developing ways of understanding and engaging in interspecies relationships. The average educator does not realize that the biological world is semiotic, is communicative, and is learning from them (even right now), having been heavily funneled by the anthropocentric constraints of the discipline. It is therefore essential that, as the biologist spreads out to embrace what is offered from the experience of educators, the educator likewise treads into the intersubjective world offered by subject-oriented and semiotic approaches to biology. After breaking down the barrier between pedagogy in the classroom and interactions with other species outside it, educators can venture into interspecies interactions with care and experience, drawing from their rich work with children.

This should have important consequences for the environmental movement. Environmental scientists currently monitor the physical and chemical effects of human activity manifested in pollution, land-use changes, and the like, and record population-scale biotic effects, such as trends in biodiversity distributions and migrations. The options available to us in developing ecological societies are directly mediated by what we understand our ecological effects to be. If we limit our understanding to what environmental scientists are currently monitoring, we will continue to miss underlying causes and effects of destructive human behaviour. Environmental impact assessments loyally follow the Cartesian assumptions about mindedness in nature, missing orders of interactivity.

Educators will be able to help us develop an understanding of our pedagogical effects on the organisms in our bioregion. Whether or not it makes sense to label these effects as a new sort of pollution (such as “semiotic pollution”, for example) I will leave unresolved. The term “pollution” may not adequately account for the co-regulation present in eduction, reifying the very dichotomy that needs to be overcome. However, such a discrimination between ecologically pathological patterns of eduction and those that promote vitality and re-generation may be useful for more pedagogical relationships. In any case, it is necessary to cultivate and hone our perceptual capacity to observe and experience existing relational trajectories as they unfold and to be better equipped to engage in whatever lies in the unforeseeable future. Because (good) educators are ever-participating in eductive relationships, they bring a unique sensitivity needed to compel human attention into the subtle realms of semiotic unfolding in their bioregions. We could become conversationist conservationists.

A second practical implication is that breaking down the classroom walls (and perhaps this is literally in part what is needed) will recast classroom curricula at the root-level. A teacher sensitizing to interspecies relationships will conduct school subjects in ways scarcely imaginable today. Biology would probably face the first significant shifts, as the Cartesian assumptions underlying its rigid fixation on anatomy and physiology[2] would surely lose out as the ontological premises of the discipline. However, both the humanities and social sciences would eventually re-orient to make room for the history of eductions between humans and those other beings around them, and for the co-constructed futures that potentially lie ahead. An integrated demolition of the human-nature dichotomy should be a part of any approach to environmental education dedicated to dethroning the pernicious assumptions that continuously invite us to commit error and folly.

One blind reviewer asked me to include a section on the implications of the ideas developed in this paper for policy. I confess that I am unable to satisfy my reviewer's demand. Teachers should certainly be given enough freedom to re-vision their subjects as needed, so any further push towards standardizing existing curricula would be hazardous. However, I am much more hesitant to make a positive claim as to what curricular or policy level changes are needed. It is not clear to me whether new ways of thinking should “trickle-up”, or whether it is more profitable to make the changes at the school board and curriculum level. At such an embryonic stage, I am tempted to advocate that we need to sow and nurture our capacity in eduction before we begin implementing policy changes. Not doing so risks propagating one-sided and non-relational solutions that this paper seeks precisely to avoid. Although I have put forward a framework to re-conceive human relationships with other species, I must admit I am still hopelessly insensitive in my interspecies eductions. With the incredible weight and momentum of history, we have decades, perhaps centuries, of unlearning ahead of us.