De-Distancing "Development" to Determine Educational Change: Eco-Pedagogical Readings of Citizenships, Epistemologies, and Socio-Environmental Sustainability

• In Event: Systemic Socio-Environmental Change From the Local to the Planetary: Comparatively Analyzing Needs and Leveraging Possibilities

Abstract

This paper will present the challenges and possibilities of restructuring education for de-distancing between societies/populations of “the world” and between “the world” and the rest of Earth for socio-environmental justice and planetary sustainability by re/deconstructing ways of knowing and constructs of citizenship. Ecopedagogies are reinventions of environmental pedagogies of Paulo Freire’s work (Gadotti, 2000, 2008; Gutiérrez & Prado, 2008; Kahn, 2010; AUTHOR, 2011; 2018). As Freire taught to critically read the World, ecopedagogues teach to read Earth with the World, as a part of Earth (1stAUTHOR, 2019). The term ecopedagogical literacies will be utilized as the critical, Freirean reading of the connections of environmental and social violence, between the world and the rest of Earth.

There are various aspects of this that will be discussed through Freirean de/reconstruction of local-to-planetary citizenship spheres, and epistemologies of the South and North, but problematized here is how we are often taught World-Earth separation that leads to socio-environmental distancing and devaluing all outside the World (i.e., rest of Nature outside humans; non-anthropocentric sphere). The term distancing describes how societies/populations increase the distance of their self-defined local communities to environmental violence such as geographically (e.g., exporting environmental hazards to others’ societies), time-wise (e.g., negative social effects will not occur for many years, if ever); and through othering (e.g., negative social consequences will happen but at least not to “good” communities, with the “good”/”bad” population mostly aligning with historically oppressed populations) (AUTHOR, 2011; 2018).

I will focus on critical comparative education methodologies with the aim to reconstruct/reinvent education, utilizing scholarship of Freire and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as well as results from two international research projects focused upon ecopedagogies, citizenships (plural indicating multiple spheres of citizenship) education, and/or globalizations (plural processes of globalization from above and from below). The paper will problematize how we define development, then teach and speak of “sustainable development,” and who (human/non-human) we include when framing “development.” What epistemological lenses do we answer these questions through, and which ones do we ignore? Problematizing the de/reconstruction of education internationally will also be through the scholarship of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ scholarship, among other experts on epistemologies of the South. Through the intensification of globalizations from above, de Sousa Santos (2012, 2018) systematically deconstructs how epistemologies emergent from colonial, gendered, and capitalist oppressions (i.e., epistemologies of the North) has continued oppressions and will continue until counter epistemologies are utilized.

The comparative and international education (CIE) field that influences the construction of schooling internationally must be problematized. President of the global CIE umbrella organization WCCES, N'Dri Assié-Lumumba, called for the need to ground the Southern African paradigm of Ubuntu within comparisons, with “the fundamental question of epistemology, in terms of not only or mainly how we know what we know but first of all what we think is worth knowing about” (p. 9). Towards this end, I utilize Freire’s and Santos’ work to systematically problematize CIE by challenging the epistemologies that ground “our” comparisons for educational systems.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University