A Pedagogy of Hearth and Home
A few months ago, I had an encounter with Hestia, Greek Goddess of the Hearth. I was reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos, and I was struck by the etymology and connotations of the word ‘hearth’. “It is a strange and wonderful thing”, writes Fry, “that out of the words for fireplace we have spun ‘cardiologist’, ‘deep focus’ and ‘eco-warrior’”.
A few weeks later I volunteered to be a participant in a research project, which invited me to explore my experiences of the curriculum through the visual research methodology, photovoice. First, I was to use photographs to critically engage with my past, present, and future curricular encounters. Second, I’d synthesise these with my professional role as a leader on an education practice programme. Something within me flickered, and the first photo I took was of the fireplace in my bedroom.
I began collecting a range of images for my photo assemblage. But it was that first photo – with its connection to hearth and home – that kept catching my eye. I recalled how ‘at home’ I had felt as a student at University. The academic climate had suited me. Despite ups and downs, I’d progressed relatively smoothly into employment. I’d found time to travel, and then to have a family in a home with its own, literal hearth. I experienced periods of instability and uncertainty along the way. There were times when I was angry, or felt lonely, or disenchanted with life. But I had not felt compelled –or brave enough – to reflect on how those deeply personal experiences had shaped, were shaping, or might shape my values and practice as an educator.
Then came the Spring of 2021. I lost all sense of belonging and focus and centrality. I had returned from a year’s parental leave to what I think of now as a state of professional homelessness. On that first day back, I remember feeling like I had been left on the hard shoulder of a motorway, in a clapped-out vehicle. (My work lap-top was, in fact, out of warranty!) I felt I had no hope of getting back in lane, and the traffic zoomed passed me, indifferent to my plight.
Or perhaps these other drivers were too anxious to deviate from the fast lane, for fear of being left behind themselves. The digital noise was nauseating, the screen grip was eye-watering. And the programme curriculum –which I had so carefully designed and developed – had been poured into a virtual melting pot of online activities, video lectures, and digital resources.
I could see that the curriculum had been considerately and effectively translated into an online format, but it was not the space I had grown with, tended and nurtured. It no longer felt like home. My first weeks back rendered me exhausted, tearful, and completely mistrustful of my knowledge and experience. I felt lonely and isolated. My heart was dulled, and I couldn’t see how I might ever belong in this new landscape.
Over a year has passed and I’m still here. Hestia found me. Or I found Hestia. Or we found each other. She was a restorative walk and a cup of tea with a new colleague and friend. By degrees, and through kindness, I have recovered a sense of belonging and focus in my work again. I have reconnected with the curriculum’s ‘beat’, and my own heart is bright. But the experience of last Spring profoundly affected my perspective on what it means to belong or to feel at home in education settings. Whilst my own sense of vulnerability and abandonment can only approximate what some fellow students or colleagues might experience on a day-to-day basis, I was provoked to take a hard look at how I might embody a curricular experience that is welcoming and centering for students. How might I become a custodian of space in which learners feel secure and supported, both pastorally and intellectually? This is not to conflate the home with notions of ‘cosiness’ and ‘comfort’.
After all, homes and their households can be testing at times. Rather, having a strong sense of home enables one to make departures into the challenging, the difficult, and the unchartered, whilst feeling reassured in the knowledge that there is a constant – a focal point – to return to.
Over this last year, I’ve come to think of the curriculum less as an objective-orientated journey and more as a subjective lived experience. As I walk through Penryn Campus, revisiting familiar composty smells in the walled garden and enjoying the dappled shade cast by the medlar trees at Tremough Barton, another ‘strange and wonderful thing’ occurs to me. Just as ecology was born out of the Greek oikos – the wider concept of hearth and home – I reflect on the multifaceted role of the educator and ask myself whether now is the time to consider teachers as particular kinds of ecologist, who are concerned with the guardianship of the curriculum and, naturally, its inhabitants. By attending to the educational hearth and home within course curricula, might we better sustain our student, collegial and community response to protecting our most precious physical and spiritual home – planet earth?
