An intense calling: How ethics is essential to education, by Jesse Bazzul

Abstract

Jesse Bazzul (2023) delivers An Intense Calling: How Ethics is Essential to Education during a global pandemic against an escalating climate crisis. The book is timely, given its arrival when such circumstances undeniably demand attention to ethics. Bazzul situates the writing of the book during a time of movement while relocating from Ireland back home to the Canadian prairies in the traditional territories of the nêhiyawak, Anih sin ap ek, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the homeland of the M etis. Like the transient conditions of its creation, the book has an ephemeral quality, pulling readers back and forth from at-times nightmarish realizations of reality to daydreamy ponderings of more ethical and pleasurable futures. The book is organized into two sections. The first, “Ethics and Subjectivity”, explores subjectivity, ethics, and education, inviting the reader to consider how ethics is entangled with politics and central to education. The second, “Ethics as Ontological Exploration”, pulls ethics beyond human subjectivity and proposes solidarity with nonhumans. The book encourages difference and possibility, asking that readers contemplate ways education is responsible for nurturing such difference and possibility. The thesis of the book is that the essence of education is ethics. In An Intense Calling, Bazzul illustrates a utopia where “education is an intensive ethical journey that moves someone from one way of being to another. Knowledge acquisition is always secondary” in the future he calls readers toward (p. 5). In the book’s preface, Bazzul does some important positioning: a positioning in both place and movement, and in intersecting positions of privilege. He offers the reader a consciously simplistic image of two figures: one which disregards social conventions and traditional mores, and one that holds them in too high of a regard. In a sophisticated move, he demonstrates his allegiance to the former by rejecting rigid scholastic semantics, beginning sentences with “and,” and filling the pages with fragmented phrases that mimic speech rather than normative academic texts. Bazzul’s warm, conversational approach is fitting for a book asking readers to question traditional mores and recognize the danger of taken-for-granted traditions. His metaphor of a figure wearing pajamas to dinner parties, sitting straight-faced, and asking guests why they insist on making things uncomfortable is an important setting scene. Bazzul takes the reader through a dizzying amount of educational theories, leaving nothing unquestioned, but with the relaxed, slightly cynical tone of someone who has been sitting with these theories for a long time—perhaps on a couch, in pajamas, at a dinner party. Everyone is welcome to this discussion, and he immediately dismisses selfimportant posturing, leaving no room for pretentiousness. He asks that more space be made for imagination, creativity, trans-discipline, and the arts in education. The book is whimsical and thoughtful. Although Bazzul provides a map of the chapters at the beginning of the text (p. 12), it may be difficult to appreciate the order of the chapters’ contents until the book’s end. The introduction, as already described, is key. Here, Bazzul states his thesis, sheds