*2.2. Three Curricula*

Educators have long observed, as did Elliott Eisner in 1985, that learning is embodied in three curricula: the explicit, the implicit, and the null (Eisner 1985; Kim-Cragg 2019). The explicit curriculum being that which we intentionally seek to teach, the implicit being those elements, that information, which we pick up unintentionally or around the edges of any explicit curriculum. The null curriculum, perhaps the most powerful of all, is that which we learn through silences, through taboos.

I grew up with an explicit curriculum about the outdoors being a place in which to play, a resource for my enjoyment, a source of beauty and peace. The implicit curriculum of those spaces carried as well the sense that I as a human being had both the right and the ability to plumb those spaces to their depths for my enjoyment. The null curriculum, the silence at its heart, taught me to ignore the histories behind the names of these places I loved, to not listen for the anguish emerging there. It also taught me, a white person growing up in a middle-class space, not to ask where everyone else was. Why were there not people of many other races enjoying these spaces? The native peoples who had tended that land for centuries were simply an ancient stereotype. The enslaved peoples, and the people who had been brought to build the railroad from Asian lands, these people were nowhere to be found in the spaces I inhabited, and that was typical, that was what I learned was the norm, how it was supposed to be. Never mind that Wisconsin as a state in the 1970s and 1980s as I grew up had many communities of people in it from many vastly differing lands and contexts. I learned not to ask certain questions, and I learned not to see, not to feel, certain kinds of pain (Brookfield and Hess 2021).

It is this combination of the three curricula that we need to break open. As renowned scholar of leadership Brené Brown has written: "... numbing vulnerability is especially debilitating because it doesn't just deaden the pain of our difficult experiences; numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity, and empathy. We can't selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light". (Brown 2012, p. 137). Refusing to acknowledge the pain and the anguish of these places also means I, like so many others who grew up in these "curricula", have been cut off from the deep joy and love to which our God invites us. Far from feeding only one of the wolves, we are essentially starving ourselves all together (Ayres 2021).

#### *2.3. A Global Pandemic in the 2020s*

It is 2022 as I write this piece, and there are diametrically opposed stories vying for our attention and embodiment. We are currently in the third year of a global pandemic due to the SARS-CoV2 virus. The stories swirling around compete constantly for our attention. Is this a mild bug, a mild flu? Is this a devastating virus which has killed more than 1,000,000 people in the US alone? Is this a viral vector deliberately created by sinister entities seeking to implant nanochips in people? Are basic measures like physical distancing and masking social goods to be embraced by all? Or are vaccines and face coverings deceptive and hidden attempts to erase personal freedoms?

Notice, though, how few of these stories lift up the possible origins of this virus in the devastation of our global home, and the climatic changes that are ruining biomes. There is actually a lot of scientific evidence that this virus, and others sure to follow it, are being born and finding pools in which to grow and mutate, because of the profoundly altering impact humans are having on our earth, on our shared home.<sup>3</sup> Here again there is a null curriculum that is preventing us from perceiving deeply that to which our God (at least in Christian settings, the ones from which I speak) is calling us.<sup>4</sup>

What might we observe about this discontinuity, this disconnect between the ubiquitous stories that heighten our fears and anxieties in terms of individual responsibility, and any others that might articulate shared and communal forms of knowing?

The story of the two wolves has been embedded in so much popular culture that it has lost much of its original context.<sup>5</sup> If we could retrieve and reclaim some of that context, we could learn that the native communities telling this story (and so many others) begin within a shared space of collective knowing. Their epistemological standpoint, if you will, is thoroughly communal, deeply relational, and explicitly story-driven. It is not simply that each individual person "feeds" their wolves, but also that the very notion of having within oneself a "wolf" is connected with a way of viewing oneself and creation as deeply entwined. I would caution here against the cultural mis-appropriation of notions of a "spirit animal" that have become so dangerously popular,<sup>6</sup> and emphasize instead that this story arises within an epistemological stance which honors all of creation, and views human persons as but one participant in that creation (Garod et al. 2017; Reyhner 2015; Cajete 2015; Kirkness 2013).

## *2.4. Genesis Stories and beyond*

Christians who inhabit the kind of social location in which I find myself need to be asking profound questions about the Genesis stories, and whether there might be a different standpoint, a different form of knowing, from which to hear and embrace that story (Dahill and Martin-Schramm 2016; Johnson 2014; Rasmussen 2013). For instance, Parker Palmer describes in his book *To Know As We Are Known*, an interpretation of that story which suggests that Adam and Eve

... were driven from the Garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for—a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God. Their drive to know arose not from love but from curiosity and control, from the desire to possess powers belonging to God alone. They failed to honor the fact that God knew them first, knew them in their limits as well as their potentials. In their refusal to know as they were known, they reached for a kind of knowledge that always leads to death. (Palmer 1983, p. 151)

This is an interpretation of the story which highlights our need to stand in humility and awe, rather than reaching for power. There is a story in Genesis that is far more often told when thinking about creation and the environment, and that is the story of God giving Adam "dominion" over creation. Rather than interpreting that word in its sense of "domain" and "tending to the domain"—an epistemological stance that would be congruen<sup>t</sup> with seeing humanity as part of creation—that text has far too often been understood as granting humans power over creation, and as a license for domination (Chamberlain 2000, p. 137).
