Patrick Alexander & Jacques-Olivier Perche
What does it feel like to do something worthwhile, or valuable, in one’s professional life? What kind of context, or ecology, allows this to happen? At work and at leisure, how can we think differently about ecology in order to more readily distinguish between the things that matter and the things that hold less meaning, and less value?
In this article, in order to address these questions we put forward an ecological framing for professional learning, applied in this case to the professional lives of teachers but relevant to all professional domains (we will explain what this means in a moment). We argue that thinking about professional learning ecologically helps to frame the value of professional development differently, which in turn may open up brighter and more sustainable ways of framing education in the future. In these increasingly uncertain and tragic times, and in a year of multiple elections and tiltering political change, we finish on a positive note. We leave you with some practical, short-term goals an upbeat long-term reflection on the future possibilities for professional learning, and indeed for human flourishing, if an ecological approach to intellectual wellbeing is applied.
Just one year ago, we published an article defining the concept of intellectual wellbeing. In the crowded landscape of research and information about different domains of wellbeing, it remains surprising that little of value has been said about the intellectual domain. The majority of work in this field is more concerned with wellness, balance and contentment. We light-heartedly refer to as the ‘suduko’ version of intellectual wellbeing, because it’s framed around the supposed psychological and emotional benefits of engaging intellectually in problems for which there are clear and uncomplicated solutions. Doing the kind of intellectual work that is driven by a desire for happiness and resolution may be individually rewarding, but we argue that it is ultimately superficial in terms of its implications for a more lasting and complex sense of wellbeing. One major problem with focusing on intellectual wellness as a process of seeking individual contentment or inner calm is that such an approach is profoundly self-interested. Wellbeing focused only inwards on one’s own feelings and status runs the risk of putting short-term, individualised psychological gains ahead of the big picture — namely, the role of individuals in a more enduring project of seeking planetary or ecological wellbeing.
Instead of focusing inwards, we propose that it is only through a deep sense of outward-looking intellectual wellbeing that we are able to connect with the professional essence that drives practice. With this in mind, we define intellectual wellbeing as the development of a critical, thoughtful disposition towards professional life. It is a process that’s fundamentally relational and interactive rather than individual, and which encourages feelings not of contentment and happiness but rather of authentic engagement with the dissonance and complexity of the world around us. Intellectual wellbeing is not a fast route to happiness, but rather represents a way of reconnecting with the essential ethical and vocational drivers of one’s existence. For this reason, intellectual wellbeing should rest at the heart of professional learning for teachers, in order that they are able to facilitate and model a similar approach for the children and young people in their classrooms. This requires that schools become the kinds of places where intellectual wellbeing can thrive. While recognising the need for professional learning that attends to the technical demands of “effective” teaching within the confines of current systems of mass education, our provocation is that new and more socially and ecologically just horizons of education can only be realised if we take a radical step beyond current practice. Fostering intellectual wellbeing is one way to start this process.
Of course, we have to recognise that this is much easier said than done. How is it possible to sustain this kind of practice? We will offer some short-term practical starting points in a moment, but to better understand what intellectual wellbeing is and how it can be facilitated, here we propose that intellectual wellbeing must be thought about, and acted upon, within an ecological framework.
In the increasingly complex and interconnected world we inhabit, the need for a more holistic and integrated understanding of social, psychological, and environmental issues is becoming ever more evident. The French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and political activist Félix Guattari proposes his famous “three ecologies” framework to address these challenges. Guattari’s three ecologies consist of the mental, social, and environmental dimensions, which are interconnected and require equal consideration. The mental ecology refers to the subjective realm of thoughts, emotions, and desires; the social ecology encompasses collective relationships, institutions, and values; and the environmental ecology concerns the earth’s natural systems, resources, and biodiversity. By emphasising the interdependence of these three spheres, Guattari’s theory provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and addressing the multifaceted challenges that contemporary societies face. In the context of schools, this is a powerful point of departure for rethinking professional learning not as an individual exercise in development or upskilling, but rather as an ethical practice that generates intellectual wellbeing through a heightened awareness of one’s connections with others and with the wider ecology that one inhabits.
Ecologies
Taking this perspective requires a little further engagement with Guattari’s thinking. According to Guattari, the mental ecology is profoundly affected by the socio-political and economic systems in which individuals are embedded. In the contemporary neoliberal era, the pursuit of endless growth, productivity, and profit maximization has led to an intensification of work demands, increased stress, and a disregard for workers’ mental health. To counteract these negative effects, organizations must create environments that prioritize intellectual wellbeing. An important part of this process is to rethink the very parameters of what counts as the individual mind. Western notions of mind are highly individualistic and regularly assume that personal growth is limited to the fleshy containers that we inhabit. On the contrary, many other cultural perspectives would position the mind as something with boundaries that are much more diffuse. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson championed a more complex understanding of mind along these lines, emphasising that it is almost an essential quality of the human experience to project our minds out into the world, as much in our use of tools and technology as in our social networks and our ability to produce art, myths, symbols, and ideas (one of which happens to be the idea of the inviolate human individual).
Thinking about our existence as profoundly diffused, rather than hermetically sealed within the limits of the human body or life course, is an exciting way to expand how we can conceptualise the ways that we interact with others through education and learning. It means that we are inherently connected to the communities that we live in and the landscapes — professional, urban, virtual, natural — that we dwell in. What is best for us as individuals is what is best for the community, because essentially there is no clear distinction between one and the other. Imagining one’s mind as one overlapping contrail in the rich swirling mosaic of life changes the focus by making it possible to think about oneself and one’s community, and about the environment, all at the same time, not because they are interconnected, but because they are the same thing. Thinking in this way draws on the work of the French thinker Bruno Latour, who famously argued that the distinction between nature and culture is not an essential reality of our world, but is rather simply an idea that humans came up with quite recently to make sense of the world (not surprisingly, in a way that privileges Homo sapiens in the natural pecking order). An integrated ecological understanding of intellectual wellbeing attends to this false distinction, with an important caveat being that recognising our place in the world does not absolve us of taking ethical action in it.
It might feel like we’re getting some distance away from teacher professional learning here, but the essential point is that a radical change in the epistemology of professional life — a change in the ways we frame what we think we know about what it means to be, in this case, a ‘good’ teacher — opens up radical opportunities for thinking differently about how professional learning is done. It suggests that authentic professional learning really is the antithesis of professional learning as a process of developing discrete skills or technical aptitudes that offer opportunities for individual professional advancement. Certainly, in the field of teacher professional learning it remains important to expose practitioners to technical innovations in how teaching is done; but if we only attend to this kind of technical innovation we run the frightening risk of avoiding any deeper engagement with the ethical premise and challenge of education to offer up a better version of the world than the one we currently have.
Encouraging sustainable ecologies of mind also requires a focus on social ecology. Social ecology refers to the collective relationships, institutions, and values that shape individuals’ experiences and actions. In a crude sense, in the workplace this dimension can be understood as the organizational culture, policies, and practices that influence the nature of human interactions and means of collaboration. Guattari argues that social ecology is essential for fostering a sense of belonging and collective agency (a kind of ecological empowerment, if you will). This raises an interesting practical question: in education systems that tend towards the atomisation of learning, whether for young people or teachers, how do we foster modes of collaboration, or social ecologies, that are self-sustaining because they remain clearly focused on a collective ambition? To create a supportive social ecology in the workplace, organizations must adopt policies and practices that promote diversity, inclusivity, and above all, collaboration. Our contention is that this is most powerfully evidenced where intellectual wellbeing remains at the heart of the matter — meaning that the process is not always comfortable or focused on consensus. Perhaps it is the most self-sustaining of social ecologies that recognise and embrace the inevitability of diverse and conflicting opinions and views. As much as we may entertain conflict and dissonance as part of our own meaning-making processes, so too can we expect and embrace this in our social ecologies. All healthy, sustainable landscapes will experience the full gambit of weather conditions, and should be robust enough to take the rain as much as the sun. Shortly we will turn our attention to some practical starting points for cultivating intellectual wellbeing in ways that survive all weather in order to entertain difference as well as a collective coming into presence.
Before we do this, let’s finally turn our attention to the big picture: we need to see intellectual wellbeing as at once an individual mental activity, a means of collective professional action, and, ultimately, as a means to existing ethically and sustainably in a wider natural ecology. Environmental ecology is concerned with the natural systems, resources, and biodiversity that underpin human existence. In the context of the workplace, this dimension is closely related to the organization’s environmental impact and its commitment to sustainability. Guattari contends that environmental ecology is essential for ensuring the long-term survival of both human societies and the planet. Organizations must take responsibility for their environmental impact by adopting sustainable practices and promoting environmental awareness. Superficially, this can be achieved by reducing energy consumption, minimizing waste, and sourcing materials responsibly. On a deeper level, this means that we need to seek intellectual wellbeing through a critical appraisal of how education systems impact on the natural world — which leads to questions of our own complicity in these impacts, and a call to action for positive change.
There is an argument, for instance, that our current systems of mass education through schooling are profoundly unsustainable because they socialise future generations into the logic of late capitalism, which is by definition fuelled by practices of natural extraction and never-ending economic growth. Can we reasonably argue that, as practitioners, we are protecting the best interests of the children we teach, if we are complicit in the reproduction of what is a demonstrably destructive, even extinctive mode of human existence? Can we sleep at night knowing that we are actors in a period of human history that is defined, above all else, by the threat of ecological crisis by our own hands?
Engaging with these kinds of disquieting questions is the practice of intellectual wellbeing. It is hard. But it is essential if we are to radically and positively rethink how our own ethics and actions (our mental ecology) links to those around us (our social ecology) in order to positively impact on us all as beings in the wider ecosystem of the earth (environmental ecology).
Rethinking Value
If we are to adopt the ecological approach above, an essential part of the challenge of profound professional learning is the question of value. When professional learning is framed as a process of maximisation of teaching capacity, then its value is articulated in a transactional sense as being the means of teaching in the most effective way — which in turn is a way of saying that the value of professional learning for teachers is about the best outcome for students. In the current mode of mass education defined, above all else, by high stakes summative assessments, ‘best’ outcomes are about the transactional value of qualifications either for entry to work or Higher Education. Even in this framing of education, what exactly it means to cultivate ‘effectiveness’ remains mysterious (as we know, it’s extremely difficult to measure the impact of professional learning on student outcomes), but it remains either an explicit or implicit driver of why schools invest in professional learning. Added value and increased effectiveness are what so many professional learning consultants will promise from their content, as the transactional value of what is being bought and sold. What else would be the point of professional learning unless it improves our value as professionals, measured in student or consumer outcomes? Why would one invest increasingly tight school budgets in professional learning unless it offered the promise of this kind of currency?
The fact that the above question appears on the surface to be so sensible reveals an enduring problem with current thinking about professional life: we are thinking about value in the wrong way. This takes us back to our ecological framing because it demands that we think differently about how we are positioned not in, but as part of a wider ecology. If we are part of the ecology, rather than individual actors in it, then we are required to think differently about our relationship to our professional environment (to our work), and this, in turn, raises questions about value. If we are no longer individual actors seeking to extract the maximum yield from our resources (whether effective staff, or outcome-oriented children, or efficient school budgets), then we can start to think about our actions in very different terms.
One implication of this process is that it requires thinking differently about the self. Schooling has much to answer for as a process of encouraging children to imagine themselves as coherent, enduring individuals for whom, like so many squirrels, the game is to accrue as much capital as possible in order to shore up against the coming winter of adulthood. The language of this process is extractive: children are encouraged to get as much out of school as they can. It is a system designed for profound self-improvement, the assumption behind which is that the value of schooling is capital value. Schooling, seen in this way, is the means by which one is able to gain the skills and dispositions, the social networks and means of being in the world, that will make one more valuable in the field of work and in the social and economic fields to which one aspires. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler sums this up by saying, ‘capitalism turns knowledge and its economic valuation into its primary element’.
Time in school in this way becomes rarefied: school time becomes an extremely rare commodity that once passed, present made past, cannot be retrieved because it represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for self-making. Systems of high-stakes assessment and certification reify this thinking by turning the concept of time capital into social reality. Somewhat counter to the current science about neuroplasticity, this framing of time also underpins thinking about cognitive development in schools: we must ensure that learning is maximised in the fleeting, golden years of childhood and youth lest these children be left behind, bereft, unable to stretch and yaw to the demands of ever-increasing social mobility through the accrual of capital. We need only think back to the anxiety of ‘lost learning’ during the pandemic to be reminded that self-making through schooling takes place though the shrewd and prudent use of time during the school years, principally in the pursuit of skills, certificates, and dispositions of capital value.
Our values about value, as it were, are so central to our existence within capitalism that they are not merely seen as components of a historically specific system of political economy. Instead, and particularly in the guise of neoliberalism, they have become essentialised as qualities of human existence. The human self is thus imagined as homo economicus, a being that is driven by its very nature to maximise capital value through rational action in linear time. When it comes to articulating the value of education, to lose or waste time in school is therefore seen not only as irrational or uneconomical, but also morally objectionable or even socially deviant: it is presented as contrary to the very nature of human life. While we’ll dig into time in more detail in our next instalment of this series of essays, it’s important here to signal that time is the medium through which the economic self is articulated through its relationship to capital.
So, what if time seemingly wasted was actually of creative value? What if time used in pursuit of value actually encourages destruction, or perpetuates the degradation of value? Thinking differently about value helps to make these questions sensible. The political theorist Thomas Nail is a valuable resource in this process, because he reminds us that Marx was asking these questions almost a century ago. Nail elucidates how Marx was not interested in a better or more accurate way of calculating value within a capitalist society, but rather in pointing to the absurdity of how exchange value work, because capital value is entirely imagined. Importantly, Thomas Nail reminds us via Marx that the very essence of capitalism is to always make the individual persons’ experience of existence less valuable in capital terms than the benefits that are reaped by an employer. In this system, we are always going to get less than we are worth. This can be a particularly depressing prospect if one is employed in what the anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’, or forms of employment that seem to have no real inherent value beyond turning the cogs of the machine for the ultimate capital benefit of another actor. If we don’t enjoy our work, and don’t consider our work to be ethically or socially valuable (or indeed think it may be socially or ecologically destructive), and if we are inevitably alienated from the capital rewards of this work, then what on earth are we clocking in for every day? In the context of teacher professional learning, the practice of intellectual wellbeing is to dwell on these hard questions in the context of schooling. While teaching appears to be an inherently valuable profession, or even a vocation, what proportion of our current working lives are dedicated to activities we might consider to be ‘bullshit’? If we pause to consider this question and find ourselves uneasy with the answer, then it is time to reconsider what it means to become the role of ‘teacher’ in contemporary society.
Concluding Thoughts
Surfacing our concerns about our own practice is difficult but necessary in order to then ask an equally important question: what are we going to do to make things better, more ethical, more just, more sustainable? This is an exciting and positive place to be. This shift in thinking is fundamental to imagining a more sustainable future where education is not about the accrual of value nested in forms of capital but rather becomes a process of developing a kinder and more critical disposition in relation to the world. Before the more cynical readers begin to roll their eyes, this is not a fuzzy call for education to become the means for making nice people for a peaceful future in a way that discounts the hard realities of living in the world that we already inhabit. On the contrary, engaging with an ecological understanding of intellectual wellbeing is the slow and thoughtful practice of making small changes that accrue into a different future social reality, enacted by individuals and communities, in their environments, in the present.
One simple practical activity that can enact intellectual wellbeing is to begin with dialectic, by which we mean to build a professional learning community that embraces diverse and divergent views. Expose teachers to cognitive science, to technically-oriented professional learning and to positions that challenge and critique the orthodoxy of evidence-based practice. Create spaces that normalise a plurality of professional views. Establish a high standard of critical intellectual engagement and disagreement for teachers and challenge teachers to model the same in their classrooms. Most importantly, if you are in a position of leadership, create clearings and pose difficult questions so colleagues can feel alive and visible in the day to day of their professional lives. To paraphrase the educational philosopher Gert Biesta, this by necessity and not coincidence involves trust and risk, but this beautiful risk is at the very heart of how we start to value education differently for the future.
Intellectual Wellbeing 