Scientific training disciplines students to hide their felt love for plants

Evidence

When I visited with the students with shovels in their hands, their pride in the planting was evident. I asked what motivated them in their work, and I heard about “getting adequate data” and “devising a solution” and a “feasible dissertation.” No one mentioned love. Maybe they were afraid. I’ve sat on too many dissertation committees where students were ridiculed for describing the plants they’ve worked with for five years with so unscientific a term as beautiful. The word love is unlikely to make an appearance, but I know that it is there. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1231

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes ch10 (Western botany frames plants as objects while Indigenous science treats them as subjects) and ch30’s point that students lose embodied knowledge — plausible to weave into the Eco-Justice essay on how science method disciplines emotion. — connects to: The plant species one notices reveals that person’s ecological education — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 165; Students internalize ecological kinship most fully through creative response — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 868; Formal education can erode rather than sharpen perception of the natural world — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 83
• SEED: Angle: ‘what science disciplines out of students’ — institutional norms that punish beauty and love as unscientific, and what that costs restoration and the reader’s integrative essay on listening-as-method.

Broader Connections

• Formal education can erode rather than sharpen perception of the natural world #expands (0.85) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 83
• Students internalize ecological kinship most fully through creative response #complicates (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 868