Contextualizing Socio-Environmental Knowledges in Teaching: Eco-Pedagogy and Comparative and International Education as Inseparable

• In Event: Doing “Epistemologies of the South”: Criticality, Reflexivity, and Praxis Across Cultures

Abstract

This paper will present analysis on the need for teaching contextual knowledges, from local (including indigenous) to global for global, all-inclusive praxis to emerge grounded in social and environmental justice. The author argues that within an increasingly globalized world to understand local knowledges and affect from globalization upon these knowledges, is the field of Comparative & International Education (CIE) and ecopedagogy. Rooted in critical theories and originating from popular education models of Latin America, ecopedagogy is an environmental pedagogy (EP) that is centered on understanding struggles of and the inherent connections between acts of environmental ills and social conflict (socio-environmental issues) (self-citations). Ecopedagogies have multiple definitions that are grounded in critical thinking and transformability to construct praxis within social-environmental justice models (Gadotti, 2000, 2008; Gadotti & Torres, 2009; Gutiérrez & Prado, 2008; Kahn, 2010).

This analysis emerged from two CIE research projects on ecopedagogy. The first was a qualitative study on ecopedagogical models involving 31 expert ecopedagogues in the Americas. They were asked to frame successful ecopedagogy within the own contexts in which they have taught and conducted research. The second qualitative study analysed how 18 international expert scholars of citizenship and/or environmental pedagogy from six world continents regarded the ways in which citizenship intersects with environmental issues and the pedagogies of both in an increasingly globalised world, with specific focus on Global Citizenship Education (GCE).

The inherent, but often politically hidden connections between environmental devastation and human conflict are why ecopedagogy needs the field of CIE and vice versa. This reciprocal need emerges from the goal to better our educational systems, inside and outside designated EPs learning spaces, towards ending socio-environmental oppressions. In the paper, I provide key reasons why many current EPs fail at achieving crucial socio-environmental transformation; and then frame ecopedagogies to achieve these needs. The following three reasons are focused upon: the borderless nature of environmental effects which necessitate local and global perspectives; the multi-disciplinary, multi-level teaching and analysis increasingly needed which are inherent in CIE and ecopedagogical social-environmental analysis; and how both fields are needed to construct global citizenship education and reinventing education for sustainable development.

Expressed overwhelmingly by the research participants, the essential reason why many EPs fail at needed transformation is that critical and democratic dialogue that arises from problem-posing pedagogy is lacking in many traditional EE models (self-citations) - teaching and research in which questions are dialectically posed and re-posed, with awareness of questions which are important but avoided and asking why they are avoided. Because of the way they present environmentally harmful acts as apolitical, neutral, ahistorical and/or non-transformative, many traditional EPs in fact sustain, rather than combat, socio-environmental oppressions. Knowledges and resulting solutions constructed from such EPs are problematic and ineffective because the root socio-environmental causes and effects are politically avoided. Therefore, without knowing these socio-environmental issues, solutions cannot arise because the problem is not known. With the same reasoning, solutions are superficial and ultimately ineffective if the root causes of socio-environmental are not dealt with.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University