Ecopedagogy as a Postsecular Educational Movement

• In Event: Education in a Postsecular Age

Abstract

While many who practice forms of environmental education (conceived broadly) may profess to having a kind of post-anthropocentric spiritual relationship with nature, the history of such education is also tied closely to forms of civics-based, outdoors/experiential, and inquiry-based learning that accord with the history of modern secular progressive pedagogy. By contrast, more spiritual/religious forms of nature-based education have been taken up by fields such as holistic education. Yet, holistic education has often been less concerned with the need for the development of a critical theory of society and for the organization of social justice activism as an oppositional force to large-scale structural inequalities. Hailing from Latin America and Freirian-inspired movements for popular education, what is known as the ecopedagogy movement today can be theorized as a post-secular from of critical sustainability education that dialectically synthesizes the various above strands in novel ways for a planetary movement of movements.
The mode of inquiry of this presentation is critical theory, and it will present a metatheory of the fields of environmental education and critical pedagogy in light of the post secular character of the emerging ecopedagogy movement. The conclusions of this work are, again, that ecopedagogy can be aptly described as a post secular educational and political movement which transcends the opposition and contradiction maintained in social and educational circles between, on the one hand, teaching secular ideas and practices in light of an onto-theological relationship to nature or, on the other, teaching theologically in light of the progressive demands made by a global democratic social order based on rights. The presentation will evaluate the history of environmentalism as a historical movement containing wings that are alternatively modern secular or religious and spiritual, and will point to how liberation theology has itself synthesized and attempted to overcome this split. The result of this will be to highlight how ecopedagogy can be seen as itself an ecoliberation theology for the formation of a planetary community of peace and justice for all earthlings.
The scholarly significance of this presentation is that it will further clarify and allow for the collective interrogation of the nature of ecopedagogy as a post secular movement, a finding which has not yet been declared, despite the increasing recognition in research literature of econpedagogy as an important next phase in the development of both critical pedagogy and environmental education.

References

Kahn, R. Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang, 2010).
--- (with Tyson Lewis) Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
--- (with Steven Best, Peter McLaren, and Anthony J. Nocella, eds.) The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination (Lexington Books, 2012).
--- (with Anthony J. Nocella and Samuel Fassbinder, eds.) Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy through the Liberal Arts (Sense Publishers, 2012).
--- Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (Routledge, 2012).

Author

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles