Stories will shed light on environment

By Patricia Robertson, Yukon News, March 23, 2001

What happens when you bring together environmental educators, philosophers, poets, and storytellers, plus a sleight-of-hand magician, and put them all together at a conference in the Yukon? Yukon College instructor and environmental educator Bob Jickling doesn't know, but he's about to find out.

He's helping to organize Telling Our Stories - jointly hosted by the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education and the Environmental Education Association of the Yukon - which will be held in Whitehorse from July 18 to 20.

"Storytelling has always been important to northern peoples, and now the narrative voice is being rediscovered," says Jickling. He points to the emerging trend of narrative inquiry in the field of academic research, where increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers think of their work as telling stories.

"The role that narrative and storytelling can play, both in education and research, seemed like a timely topic," he says. "We live in a world of stories but they're not all good - witness television. "So we became interested in questions of validity, and the difference between a good and instructive story and one that's not so instructive."

Jickling is expecting 100 to 150 people to participate in the three days of workshops, presentations, roundtables, and performances, which will focus on three thematic strands: environmental education with a northern flavor, narrative and research.

"It's a conference of environmental educators, but I think it's really important that we try to reach across the boundaries of fields of inquiry," says Jickling. "What we're really trying to do is bring a diversity of perspectives together."

To that end, he and conference co-chair Remy Rodden of the Department of Renewable Resources have invited participants from a wide variety of disciplines. These include poet, educator and novelist Rishma Dunlop of York University, Australian philosopher and bushwoman Val Plumwood, and Joyce Gilbert of Scotland's SpeyGrian Project, a group of ecologists, poets, storytellers, and historians who are exploring their Celtic heritage using a cross-disciplinary approach in an outdoors setting.

The featured speaker is philosopher and ecologist David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, a book that examines why westerners seem so out of touch with sensuous nature and advocates a return to the unity of language and the natural world.

Abram is also the aforementioned magician, and used his skills to gain access to various forms of Asian shamanism that might have been closed to more conventional anthropologists. Jickling isn't yet sure what Abram will be speaking on, but says, "He's very interested in exploring and expanding the validity we give to the full range of sensory experiences we have and how that helps to shape who we are and what we become. "He talks a lot about the relationship between language and landscape and how one informs the other."

Jickling is excited by the interest shown so far in the conference, noting that the organizers have been receiving presentation ideas from around the world. "We've received abstracts from Wales, Nigeria, South Africa, Cuba, Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia," he says. "We have people who are both practitioners and who want to present workshops, through to people who are relatively new researchers finishing degrees, and also people who are very experienced faculty members."

Those presentations will include performances, he adds, which he'd "like to see integrated as much as possible with the plenary sessions. I'm not quite sure how we're going to weave that through yet, but some of these storytellers and poets are going to want to do what they do best, and that's share their creative endeavors."

Jickling and Rodden have also been working with First Nations colleagues to develop a program that is meaningful both to them and to conference participants. "Meeting in a regular building is not the same as having some contact with the land and with people whose heritage is tied to that land," says Jickling. That's why a visit to Kwaday Dan Kenji, Long Ago People's Place, has been built into the conference schedule, giving the first 100 people who register the opportunity to attend a half-day workshop organized by Meta Williams and Harold Johnson.

Pre- and post-conference activities such as wilderness tours are being organized as options for participants, and the end of the conference dovetails with the beginning of the Dawson City Music Festival. "These people want to get a chance to feel the Yukon and smell it and breathe it and have it become part of their soul - that's the kind of person who's going to come to a conference like this," says Jickling.

Participants will be able to stay either in the college residence or at local hotels, with a shuttle bus providing transportation between the Yukon College site and town. The conference is also open to Yukon residents at a cost of $35 per day, including lunch.

The conference is the yearly meeting of the Canadian Network for Environmental Education, whose members receive a subscription to the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, explains Jickling. The fact that the journal is published in the Yukon "created new opportunities to extend the possibilities of our national conference," by holding it here, he says.

The peer-reviewed journal, launched in 1996, "set out to broaden the scope of what counts as legitimate research in the field of environmental education," he adds. "We felt that it had been very narrowly conceived by the major journal of the time - it was very behaviorist-oriented and left many fields of enquiry out. We set out to push the boundaries a little bit."

Jickling himself has crossed boundaries on his own life journey, having begun his academic work in the sciences. As a public school teacher in Carcross, he was exposed to the traditional stories of Tlingit elder Lucy Wren, and later found himself "bumping into literature" as a PhD student, reading academic papers by day and novels at night. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables showed him that "ethics was full of nuance, it didn't have the hard edges that formal papers seemed to be creating for it," he says.

"That was a pretty important moment," he adds, noting that "narrative has changed the way I write, so that I make much more use of first person than I would have done before. "Part of my narrative is this experience with literature, and I've been increasingly telling that story as a way of expanding possibilities for people, I hope."

Of an earlier colloquium on environment, ethics and education held here in 1995, Jickling reported that "some of the participants had very powerful and insightful experiences here as they interacted with the people who live here and the land and their colleagues. "It was an awfully exciting time and I'm anticipating that this conference is going to be very exciting, too."

For program updates and more information on Telling Our Stories, the website address is www.taiga.net/eecom2001.

Copyright Yukon News 2001.

(Special thanks to Steve Robertson for allowing us to reproduce this article here).