Between Complicity and Integrity

Our lives are tangled up in all kinds of suffering. The daily tasks of eating, working, clothing, and sheltering are tied to extreme ecological degradation, climate change, systems of oppression, colonial legacies of stolen land, and so much more. In the face of these complex, systemic challenges, and with the knowledge of our participation within them, what do we do? Particularly for educators – folks who are responsible both for reproducing and resisting the dominant culture – what does it look like to live with integrity in the midst of complicity?

This book shares intimate narratives from 12 experienced, respected educators as they describe their understandings and experiences of integrity and complicity in today’s world. Specifically, the educators highlighted here are academics working at the intersection of education, environment, and social change. Based on five years of research, their stories show the diverse ways people make sense of their lives and give readers opportunities to reflect on their own. Nora Timmerman argues that these stories collectively teach us how scale matters, to stop being one person, and to act anyway. Integrity comes not from ridding oneself of complicity but from critical learning, community accountability, cultivating interdependence, and strategic experimentation to create new worlds.

This book is written for current and future educators studying teacher experience and postsecondary education. However, the stories have resonance for anyone working to understand the experiences of complicity and how to understand integrity in its midst.