I miss Andy Stables' wit, wisdom and insightfulness, and I thought of him last month as grandoffspring and I went pond dipping in the Cotswold Water Park. \u00a0In particular, I thought of this paper:<\/p>\n
Stables, A 2001, 'Who drew the sky? Conflicting assumptions in environmental education', Educational Philosophy and Theory<\/em>, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 245-256<\/p>\n It begins:<\/p>\n 'Who drew the sky?' is clearly a naive question. \u00a0The sky, as part of the biosphere, cannot be understood as a work of art or of human design. \u00a0It is no text or picture. \u00a0To understand the sky requires a solid grounding in mathematically based 'natural' science. \u00a0Nobody 'authored' the sky.<\/p>\n Yet the sky in question \u2013 the sky that prompted the title of this paper \u2013 was an intriguing pattern of blue and white, a typical English sky following rain when the wind is a fresh westerly. \u00a0Against a background of the deepest blue, a vast arrowhead of mostly high cirrus aimed vaguely towards the western horizon, whilst beneath it a few puffballs of cumulus moved more visibly in a still breeze. \u00a0Across all this were etched three of four aeroplane vapour trails, in varying degrees of increasing fragmentation, the tails of the least recently produced a mass of tiny clouds virtually indistinguishable from those produced by other means. \u00a0This sky was the result of natural processes in which human beings were implicated, possibly on a number of levels. \u00a0This sky was, indeed, constructed; it was, in a sense, a text, particularly in the ancient sense of a 'text' as 'weaving' (from the Latin textere<\/em> 'to weave'). As Barthes reminded us in The Death of the Author<\/em>, (Barthes, 1977), it is always a moot question as to who was responsible for it. \u00a0On the other hand, of course, it was not a text at all.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n See what I mean? \u00a0Andy brought new dimensions to environmental education grounded in literature and philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I miss Andy Stables' wit, wisdom and insightfulness, and I thought of him last month as grandoffspring and I went pond dipping in the Cotswold Water Park. \u00a0In particular, I thought of this paper: Stables, A 2001, 'Who drew the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}