Ginie Servant-Miklos: Pedagogies of Collapse (2024)

A Systems Library, Vol. 35

Photo: Booshen Navaratnam

“This book is an apogee of education’s power to overcome grief and trauma, a love letter to the young and their guiding lights in a chaotic future, and a think-with philosophical, psychological and pedagogical guide for overwhelmed educators.”

A month into Trump II, and for many level-headed, sober-minded people, the sense of doom is overwhelming. Beyond the grotesque short-sightedness of his policies, it’s the sheer brutality — the relentless lies, vengefulness, vitriol, and spite — that feels so corrosive, so effective in dismantling any vestige of hope. Of course, this psychological onslaught isn’t just incidental; it’s strategic. The challenge is finding a way to extricate ourselves from this miasma.

Ginie Servant’s Pedagogies of Collapse is a timely contribution. It may nudge us along a path — not toward resignation, but toward a dry-eyed acceptance of reality and the cultivation of a mature ‘endism’ sensibility — one that moves beyond the instinctive fight, flight, or freeze response.

Ginie Servant’s focus is on the responsibility of the teacher in today’s university lecture halls and seminar rooms against the background of the inevitable and imminent partial or total collapse of a global thermo-industrial infrastructure and economy. Educators have a delicate task in preparing young people who lack the mindset and skills to sustain themselves in this predicament. Servant: “… we’re here to give students just enough courage to face the difficult questions raised by collapse, the persistence to seek answers and the stamina to see them through”. Fundamentally, the challenge for educators is to rediscover meaning and purpose in life under and beyond the rubble of neoliberal ruins, and to make young people part of that perspective.

The book is written in a very personal voice. Ginie Servant describes herself as “a young(ish), female, partially abled, queer pedagogue”. She is also a wife and mother, a martial arts practitioner, a social entrepreneur and a scholar. In her three and a half decades she has developed a breadth of experience across different professional and social cultures. All these biographical elements are woven into the fabric of the narrative to alert the reader to the author’s positionality and the sensibility from which the book was written. The presentation, while passionate, avoids bombast and retains a sober, matter-of-fact and rigorous quality, which was much appreciated by this reader.

I restructure Servant’s narrative using a framework I often use to conceptualise the scope of systems thinking. This framework links ‘systems thinking’, ‘systems tinkering’ and ‘systems being’ into a coherent nexus.

Thinking relies on intellectual schemata and tools.
Tinkering embeds thinking in a method-driven craft of collaboratively working through messy, wicked problems.
Being embodies a systemic ethos and sensibility that informs every move and decision we make.

The rationale underpinning this nexus can be viewed in time, as a developmental journey from one level of depth and proficiency to the next (see this Medium story of mine). Alternatively, the relationship between these three elements can be understood as recursive: ‘being’ provides meaning and context for ‘making’, which in turn shapes and informs ‘thinking’. This recursive logic highlights how these elements enrich and reinforce each other.

Similarly, the content of this book can be structured in terms of thinking-tinkering-being.

Thinking comprises chapters 1 and 2, in which the author presents a well-documented argument as to why societal collapse is inevitable, and why our western society and current educational establishment lack the resilience to respond to this challenge.

In chapters 3 and 4, the author presents a pedagogical framework to support tinkering with collapse-oriented themes in the classroom. It’s more of a meta-framework, articulating the rationale behind experimental pedagogy, than a rigid script. It brings together a range of existing theories and practices into a coherent whole. One layer of the framework is based on three conceptual perspectives for understanding and making sense of human behaviour: cognitivism, psychoanalysis and philosophical existentialism. A second layer consists of design parameters for classroom experiences, largely informed by an updated conception of critical pedagogy. A third dimension of the framework is a nested set of learning foci, encompassing the cognitive, individual, group, societal and global dimensions. It seems to me that much of this material is of practical use in the classroom beyond a collapse focus.

The last two chapters delve deeper into the ethos of ‘learning, loving and living’ that underpins classroom tinkering. Educators need to grow into this disposition before they can pass it on to others. This requires them to transcend an individualism inculcated by the ideology of meritocracy. Servant also hypothesises that the pull of individualism is so strong because it invites a flight response from pervasive small and big traumas. Unaddressed, this creates the latent loneliness and despair so prevalent in our society.

Another line of argument is a critique of the Left’s shift away from a social programme aimed at pragmatically and tangibly improving the lives of the poor to an identity politics characterised by moral one-upmanship and an obsession with purity of process. This ‘fight’ response is not helpful in building broad-based resilience in the face of collapse. In contrast, Servant emphasises the cultivation of imperfect solidarities. Our ability to remain poised in the ambivalence of human relationships and the chaos of collapse is rooted in

a) a fundamental trust that ‘there is more that unites us than divides us’;
b) the ability to love ourselves and our fellow travellers as imperfect beings; c) the mastery of unconventional learning routines with a focus on nature and the mind-body nexus;
d) the ability to live lightly, both infrastructurally and psychologically.

There is a beautiful section in the final chapter that deals with our ability to ‘love romantically’. Here Eros transcends ‘love as a possessive investment’, turns relationships into mutually supported containers of transformation, and thus has revolutionary potential. It echoes some of the valuable insights in Hilary Bradbury and Bill Torbert’s book Eros/Power: Love in the Spirit of Inquiry (Vol. 33 in the Systems Library).

In the final pages, the discussion turns to hope. After all, the subtitle of the book promises a ‘hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it’. For Ginie Servant, hope is an ethical commitment to defiance, to learning, loving and living against all odds, to passing on the seeds of survival. We are not the first to undertake such an experiment. Worlds have been destroyed many times on our watch. Now, it is our turn to reckon with the ruins.

More to read in the Systems Library:

Vol. 34: Hans Van Ewijk: Complexity and Social Work (2017)

Vol. 33: Hilary Bradbury and William Torbert: Eros/Power (2015)

Vol. 32: Charles Taylor: Modern Social Imaginaries (2003)

Vol. 31: Martin Savransky: The Adventure of Relevance (2016)

Vol. 30: Martin Savransky: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (2021)

Vol. 29: Augustin Berque: Poetics of the Earth (2014)

Vol. 28: Mary Catherine Bateson: Composing a (Further) Life (1989, 2010)

Vol. 27: Hilary Bradbury: How to Do Action Research for Transformations (2022)

Vol. 26: Francis Laleman: Resourceful Exformation (2020)

Vol. 25: Keller Easterling: Medium Design(2020)

Vol. 24: Ian Cheng: An Emissaries Guide to Worlding (2018)

Vol. 23: Janis Birkeland: Positive Development (2008)

Vol. 22: Michel Serres: The Natural Contract (1990)

Vol. 21: Henk Oosterling: Resistance in Times of Ecopanic (2020)

Vol. 20: Ray Ison & Ed Straw: The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking (2020)

Vol. 19: Andreas Weber: Enlivenment (2019)

Vol. 18: Luc Hoebeke: Making Work Systems Better (1994)

Vol. 17: Donella Meadows: Thinking in Systems (2009)

Vol. 16: Lois Holzman: The Overweight Brain (2018)

Vol. 15: Hanne De Jaegher: Loving and Knowing. Reflections for an Engaged Epistemology (2018)

Vol. 14: Judi Marshall: First-person Action Research: Living Life as Inquiry (2016)

Vol. 13: Jocelyn Chapman (Ed.): For the Love of Cybernetics (2020)

Vol. 12: John Morecroft: Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics (2007)

Vol. 11: Antoine de St Exupéry: Flight to Arras (1942)

Vol. 10: Edgar Schein: Humble Inquiry (2013)

Vol. 9: Peter Block: Community. The Structure of Belonging (2008)

Vol. 8: Valerie Ahl & Timothy Allen: Hierarchy Theory (1996)

Vol. 7: Herbert Simon: The Sciences of the Artificial (1969, 1998)

Vol. 6: Donald Schon: Beyond the Stable State (1971)

Vol. 5: Barry Oshry: Seeing Systems (2007)

Vol. 4: Béla Bánáthy: Guided Evolution of Society. A Systems View (2000)

Vol. 3: Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh: The Path (2016)

Vol. 2: Stafford Beer: ‘Designing Freedom’ (1974)

Vol. 1: John Law and Annemarie Mol (Eds.): ‘Complexities’ (2014)

In the final pages, the discussion turns to hope. After all, the subtitle of the book promises a ‘hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it’. For Ginie Servant, hope is an ethical commitment to defiance, to learning, loving and living against all odds, to passing on the seeds of survival. We are not the first to undertake such an experiment. Worlds have been destroyed many times on our watch. Now it’s our turn to take the reckoning.