Sun Dog Pedagogy

Lessons in refraction and looking beyond

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Learning how to pay attention to meaningful lessons from the Earth, a cold January day became a teacher of refraction and looking beyond. Welcome to the Purell Mountains in beautiful British Columbia, Canada.

The clouds closed in the ski hill like a shroud. As I boarded the lift, I watched the chairs ahead of me disappear into the fog. Sometimes, in the mountains, the clouds hang low in the bowl of the valley. Trek high enough and you just may find sun. Like a plane passing through to high altitude where the floor is a sea of cloud.

Emerging through the grey into a blue-bird sunny day, the sun, fog, and winter cold made the perfect conditions for a purely magical scene.

This beautiful thing is a sun dog. The term is the common name for a Parhelion (love that word!), which caused when light from the sun refracts on diamond dust (ooh stop it, you lexicon flirt, you!). When ice crystals fall and their hexagonal faces are perpendicular to the horizon, they refract the sun at a 22° angle. To the lowly human observer on the ground, this creates a pair of brightly coloured sunspots on either side of the sun, flanking a halo of light.

Researching sundogs, I fell in love with the anatomy and naming conventions of sundogs, where every element has a name. Many of the features were on display that cold January day on the ski hill. Like a rainbow, I thought, this sun dog won’t last long. I was wrong. All day, I bathed in the amplified sunlight of that sun dog - its halos, arches, and pillars - each time the chair lift moved me through that moment of cloud to sun, where the diamond dust was drifting down at the perfect angle.

If I listen closely, what will this moment teach me?

This is how I’ve started looking for learning in the quiet spaces, the earthly spaces.

As the world seems replete with stories and events that leave many feeling disheartened, discouraged, scared, or disillusioned, I have started to look for the lessons that connect me to beauty. Teach me something I have yet to learn. Show me the overlooked complexities of grace, gentleness, wholeheartedness, kindness. These are the lessons I often now seek, and I find them in the sky, ground, dirt, trees, moss, and mountain.

That cold January day, I slid to a stop on the ski run and basked once again in the glow of the sun dog. It was only when I looked up, so far up it felt like I should lie down on the snow, that I saw the upside-down rainbow of the circumzenithal arch high in the sky.

Sometimes we find beauty in stretching our vision. Looking beyond the view of the horizon directly ahead to the infinite space all around.

Sometimes, we might do well to consider ourselves like diamond dust, capable of angling the energy we receive out into the world in new directions. Capable of amplifying the warm energy that passes through us when we position ourselves accordingly. Those moments where we become one part of all the connected conditions that enable something magical to occur.

I like to think about teaching and learning this way.

Teachers:

• Imagine yourself as emanating warm, bright energy in what you teach and how you teach it - what does this look like for you?

• What conditions enable learners to receive your teaching energy and send it out into the world in unique directions?

• How can we help learners look beyond the horizon ahead to ‘stretch their vision’?

• Thinking of your disciplinary area and professional community, what does it look like to envision the ‘horizon beyond’ the immediate?

Learners:

• How can you position yourself to take what you’re learning and put it out into the world in a meaningful way?

• If you look up and all around from what you’re currently focused on, what else do you see?

• When something is refracted, it means the energy that is received passes through and is altered in some way, like white light passing through a prism to become a rainbow. Taking inspiration from this, how can you refract what you’re learning in a transformative, meaningful way?

Let’s call this Sun Dog Pedagogy.

Here at Learning Forwards, I write about how learners and educators can leverage teaching and learning for taking future-authentic action. I believe everyone has the power to create meaningful, future-oriented learning pathways for themselves, making sense of a changing world by build the skills and competencies needed for purposeful action-taking rooted in what they care about most.