Activism, Action, and Becoming: How Might One Live and Work as an Environmental Educator?

• In Event: Teachers' Stories in Environmental Education: Tales of Embedded Constraints and Activist Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper/presentation challenges environmental educators to become engaged in activism, critically, from the perspective of academic activism. In setting context for this work, we draw upon mapping heuristics to address theoretical complexities that can be used to ground practical pedagogical action, but with attention to the subjectification processes of ‘becoming’ activist environmental education researchers. Well aware of superficial critiques of activist activities in many educational fields, we argue that rich theoretical activities across critical, poststructural and new feminist materialist work can be applied to legitimize our on-the-ground fieldwork. We argue that in addition to examples of activist inquiry, we also require backgrounding from credible sources capable of addressing dominant policy discourses both without and within environmental education.

Authors

• Paul Hart, University of Regina

• Catherine Hart, University of Regina