When I find a book that connects with my thinking at that moment, I feel a strong sense of connection and satisfaction from this. Exploring writing that expands my own thoughts, perspectives and nurtures my ideas gives me a lot of pleasure. This act of reading and reflecting becomes practice beyond pedagogical practicalities.
Let’s become fungal! Mycelium teaching and the arts, by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez, explores ideas connected to nature, decoloniality, language, and community collaboration among other subjects. The book is written as a series of questions and is based on conversations with indigenous wisdom, keepers, artists, curators, feminists and mycologists. To me, the voices that come through feel genuine, and the dialogue is open, without an agenda.
This reading connects to some of my own thinking related to the weight and province of the language we use as teachers. The language that we are tasked to use as academics within the institution, how this allows for communities grow, and interact.
In a chapter titled ‘How can language help guide us into the fungal paradigm, communication is constant and infinite’ Yasmine talk about ‘The reclaiming of words with connotations, asking language to be used in the correct way, was at the base of reaching for justice. It promoted me to ask the people that I spoke with for the research to share words they wanted to introduce or reclaim’
This leads me to ask what words might our student communities might want to ‘introduce or reclaim’? What weight to the subject and language we stand by hold outside of our own culture.
The book touches on our loss of connection to nature, and how this is tangled with ideas of decoloniality.
To me this lose of connection to nature is also our loss of connection to people as well.
In the article ‘Decolonising the library: a theoretical exploration’, by Jess Crilly, she says ‘ Thus coloniality survives colonialism . It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples…’, she refers to ‘ encoded knowledge’.
I feel that projects that focuses on decolonising or supporting decoloniality within an institution should include a diversity of voices, and work with the communities we teach and work alongside. Within my own teaching practice I would like to build projects that away step away from the front of the class/ the podiums, and start to integrate a greater diversity of voices into our education models.