Nature - autonomous learning

conclusion 245environmental issues or their concern about environmental degradation.Nature will, I hope, have shown you that geographers’ interest in natureextends beyond the biophysical environment. More importantly, I hope itwill also have led you to grasp the fact that geographers are but one of manycommunities worldwide struggling to define what ‘nature’ is and how weshould behave towards those things designated by the word. In order tomake themselves heard in that struggle, geographers – like other academics– rely upon their perceived expertise. We saw this most graphically inChapter 4 in relation to physical geographers’ continued preference fordescribing themselves as scientists (with all that this loaded term implies).Yet the struggle does not simply go on outside universities – in the realmsof environmental-policy formation, for example. It also goes on inside highereducation too, within and between academic disciplines.Teaching is a keyelement of this.Whether or not they realise it, the knowledges of naturethat geography students internalise while taking their degrees are part ofthe wider process where societal understandings of nature are shaped andmoulded.Though it may appear that these knowledges are uncontestable– because they are presented to you by your professors – I’ve been arguingthat you should see them otherwise. Education, I would argue, is politicsby other means. A failure to recognise this locks students into a ‘master–pupil’ model of pedagogy that shackles their critical faculties.In a book called Teaching to Transgress, the cultural critic Gloria Watkins(otherwise known as bell hooks) argues that both partners in the educationprocess frequently forget what is at stake in their encounter (be it in thelecture theatre, the seminar room or, as in the present case, in the pagesof a book). Misconstruing education as the simple transmission of informationfrom one party (teachers) to another (students), these partnerscan fail to see the true importance of pedagogy. For Watkins, educationis always life-changing for students – whether they realise it or not.There’sa well-known saying that goes like this:‘as the twig is bent so the branchgrows’.Along with a few other key things – such as the family and television– the education system has a major role to play in bending the twig that isa child, and in shaping the growing branch that is a teenager and a youngadult. After all, by the age of twenty-one or twenty-two (the typical ageof graduation from a first degree) most students in Western countries havespent some 80 per cent of their lives in full-time education. During thistime, the knowledge that students assimilate is not simply ‘added on’ to fullyformed characters – like icing on a cake or an extension to a house. Rather,