Critical Conceptions and Contestations for Eco-Critical Curriculum Studies: Interrupting and Abolishing White Racial Knowledge

• In Event: Eco-Critical Curriculum Philosophies: Radical Social and Environmental Justice Responses to Climate Change

Abstract

Critical environmental education and ecocritical curriculum studies is a contested space with an increasing critical analysis of the canon and pedagogical approaches within curriculum studies to prepare critical and diverse educators (Martusewicz, Edmundson & Lupinacci, 2015; Kahn, 2009; Grass & Agyeman, 2002). This paper is a response to the need for a critical curriculum studies influence on environmental education and teacher education that address challenges that emerge from the complex intersections of social justice and sustainability in overwhelmingly white identified disciplines; both in student and faculty demographics as well as curriculum dominated by White racial knowledge. The goal of an ecocritical framework is to address “value-hierarchized dualisms that contribute to inequities such as racism, classism, sexism, ableism, anthropocentrism, etc.” (Martusewicz, Edmundson & Lupinacci, 2015), therefore, ecocritical scholar activists must be concerned with the racial and ethnic makeup of teacher educators and its connection to what curriculum is then validated and taught. This paper presents radical pedagogical case study examples from the authors experiences as a scholar-activist educator at the complex intersections of teacher education, ethnic studies, and environmental studies. Drawing from Roediger (1994), the author asserts that White racial knowledge is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive. Using a Black feminist lens and an anti-colonial and ecocritical framework, this paper highlights the connections between the heterogeneous racial and ethnic makeup of environmental education and teacher education and its relationship to maintaining white racial knowledge as how we have done and defined ecocritical work in teacher education. The paper concludes with an unapologetic utopian imagining of Black futures for education that push beyond current status quo curriculum into the complexities and joys of a curriculum that gets explicit about social justice and sustainability.

Author

• Nini Hayes, Western Washington University