Educational Metaphor
I find the metaphor of a gardener to be a fertile one in helping me feel and think my way into my work as a formational educator. Rather than tending to fruits, vegetables, and flowers, I picture my formational role as active participation in God’s work of forming leaders who live out of the love of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Truth is, I can’t form a leader anymore that a gardener can make a flower grow… yet I can do something, and I train and prepare to do what I can with wisdom, purpose, and hope.
As base as this may sound, a gardener is one who gardens. While most gardeners likely have philosophies of gardening, strategies by which they approach their work, even favorite seasons or plants, at the end of the day they are not gardeners because of their credentials, philosophies or tools, they are gardeners because they garden. Gardeners live their way into their name; and is how I aspire to be an educator. Long before I earned a doctoral degree or began a member of a teaching faculty I was forming leaders for Christ’s church. If a gardener gardens, I’m a formational educator because that’s what I do.
Part of the way I make sense of my life is through a vocational sense that I invited to actively participate in the formation of leaders for Christ’s church.
I am using the gardener metaphor in at least a few distinct ways.
First, submission to reality. The genesis of sustainable gardening is humble submission to reality. Gardeners exist within a garden. They find themselves within a particular context… with a given rhythmic world marked by seasons not of their own making and operating far beyond their control. One can’t plant when it suits them, rather they seek to do their work within the circadian rhythms of life. One can’t plant just any seed in any soil, any climate, or any ecosystem. Location matters. Wise gardeners attune themselves to the particularity of their time and place, aligning work within the context they are given.
Winter is season to enrich the soil by letting the earth lay fallow, while readying themselves for the next growing season. It’s a season to repair broken tools, map out the plantings, and schedule their sowing; it’s a season to gather the needed resources, seeds, and fertilizer for the coming growing season. Come spring the gardener gets into the muck of preparing the soil; they clear the land of the winter debris, till the soil while turning in the appropriate peat or fertilizer, before planting the seed. Breaking up ground which may already show some signs of growth can be quite disruptive, backbreaking work (for both the student and the educator). And into that turned up soil carefully selected fertilizer is added; particular to the to the desired harvest.
Summer invites patient watching, tending to weeds, and watering. Sometimes protection as the maturing plants are fragile, easily endangered by insects, flooding, hail, careless footsteps, and we can’t forget about the slugs and bunnies. Risking such elements is necessary for plants to mature. The wise gardener doesn’t over water; rather they steward conditions which encourage roots to go deep. And at the end of the day the gardener knows the real outcome of their work is out of their control. Weather happens; infestations, and blight happen. So it is only natural that when a harvest comes in thanksgiving erupts. Most often harvest season is a time of abundance. Deep gratitude. But there are times of drought or pestilence when gardeners gather in autumn gather to lament the loss, to share resources, seeds, support, and to dream of next year… another kind of thanksgiving.
At its core gardening invites one to discover the way of harmony with the real and created world in a manner which renders flourishing life more plausible. My calling as an educator is to invite others to discover the real and join God who is already and always present wooing all of creation toward abundant life.
A gardener is rooted in the particular. No gardener creates their crop, instead they tend to the seeds given by the Divine. Long before I have the privilege of joining an emerging leader in their formational educational process God has been at work in that person’s life; they come with a lifetime of experience. Each student I encounter is already well into their development before our eyes meet. My work is to wisely cultivate the growth God has already begun. I am a gardener not a producer. A producer maximizes yield, producing as many apples as the land possibly can. Such monoculture farming rapes the land, violates creation, yielding diminishing returns while depleting the soil. Producers get rid of orange or pecan trees to ensure they can bring as many apples to market as possible. But gardeners love all their trees.
If “gardener” is my metaphor for imagining my vocation as a formational educator, then by extension, any exploration of my philosophy of technology in the “classroom” will be grounded by thinking about gardening tools.
Michael Polanyi helps me think about tools as an extension of my body. Polanyi highlights that when a person is learning how to use a new tool the person is focally aware of the tool, but as one’s comfort with and knowledge of the tool becomes subsidiary the tool functions an extension of the gardener.
What this suggests to me about the use of any technology within the classroom room, whether we’re talking about technology of language, readings, desks, chairs, white-boards, websites, assignments, classroom design, artifacts, pedagogical tools, Prezi/PowerPoint, and the list goes on… is that these technologies are extensions of both me and the leaders within the learning environment that I am stewarding. In thinking about technology within the classroom I find it helpful to shift the gardening metaphor slightly. Away from the leaders as soil or crop, and more as apprentice gardeners.
It would be absurd to think even for a minute that I am – metaphorically – growing apples, I am not. Rather, I am apprenticing gardeners. Whatever gifts, discoveries, and risks I may have taken are offered as fodder for those coming after me. As they develop the mind of a gardener they will inevitably move beyond whatever I have offered.
Again, as a gardener my starting place is to attend to what is. The land, its history, and topography already exist. Further, it is part of already existing ecosystem with patterns of sun, rain, heat, etc. This invites careful attention and submission to reality. It invites opening up to indigenous flora and fauna and their relationship to the animals, birds, and insects native to the region. Part of this work is to listen for the impact of invasive species threatening sustainability of the ecosystem. To garden is grow in attentive listening to the needs of the whole system through radical love of one’s particular garden.
A gardener begins acknowledging the gift of land, water, sun, nutrients, oxygen, and seeds. That which is most needed for flourishing of life is already provided by Creator. My role as gardener is to discover and surrender to the Divine telos of creation so as to participate in the God-designed eschatological pull unto life which is loving given to all. To acknowledge that I have been instructed by others into understanding the seasons what to plant when and near what, when to fertilize and when to water, when to pull out weeds and when to leave them, all of the knowledge that is in me about has come from others. And I never know enough about gardening, my neighbor Reid, my father-in-Law, my mentor Christine, and my friend Brandon continue to expand my understanding of the life of gardener and how to tend well to the process.
A gardener listens to the particularity of the land, selects seeds, prepares soil, sows seeds, tends by watering/draining/providing support structures, weeding, harvests, and helps the soil rest and stay healthy.
The reality is that God causes growth. My calling is to tend to the growth that God has already begun in the leaders with whom I am working. I tend to the context seeking to steward an environment where healthy growth is more likely to happen than not. Though I, as a gardener delight in a bumper crop I cannot take credit, this might be part of the reason so many cultures harvest is followed by thanksgiving celebrations. I understand myself to be more like an artisanal gardener; I know and love all what is in my realm of care. Some because of location are more exposed to North winds, others get more shade or sun, more or less water, some are bothered by pests, and so. Sometimes I don’t discover that a plant has blight until much damage has occurred and then to save the plant invasive action is sometimes required. All the while, the harvest is still out of my hands. The invitation to me is to be faithfully present. This will come as no surprise but I draw on this metaphor because living in concert with the reality and particularly of land is one of the primary metaphors Jesus uses to describe the shalomic way of God. This is meaningful work! Full of beauty and wonder… I am so grateful to participate in this work.
