An Eco-Pedagogical, Eco-Linguistical Reading of the Sustainable Development Goals: What We Have Learned From Paulo Freire?

• In Event: Education, Emancipation, and Political Struggle: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Paulo Freire

Abstract

Paulo Freire’s literacy pedagogy was a paradigm shift in education – students and teachers learning together to read the world by dialectically problematizing how we are taught what the world ‘is’, what are the politics constructing the world, how the world ‘should be’, and what actions are necessary to end oppressions. Ecopedagogy widens Freire’s initial notion of reading of the world (defined as the anthroposphere, all humans and human populations) to reading Earth (defined as the planetary sphere, with the world as an inseparable part of Earth). This ecopedagogical literacy includes critically reading ‘development’. This paper will analyze Freire’s influences on language and dialectics to unveil the politics of ‘development’ and hidden curricula of environmental pedagogies, including education for sustainable development (ESD). This includes the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and pedagogies guided by them, including SDG#4 on education quality.
Ecopedagogies – plurally conceptualized in order to acknowledge diversities within the fields - emerged from Freirean popular education movements that have an aim to end inseparable social and environmental violence and injustices (Gadotti, 2008b, 2008c; Gutiérrez & Prado, 1989; Kahn, 2010; Misiaszek, 2012, 2018, 2020b). Determining what and how environmental violence leads to social injustice and planetary unsustainability is key to Freire’s contribution to in/non/formal environmental pedagogies and environmental justice. Ecopedagogical work balances ‘widening’ reading of world-Earth socio-environmental violence with ‘deepening’ reading of local contextuality, ingenuous knowledges, and diverse ways of knowing (i.e., epistemologies) (Gadotti, 2008a, 2008b; Misiaszek, 2018, 2020b). This includes reading how language, linguistics and communication dynamics too-often justify dominant forms of ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ that lead to socio-environmental oppressions and planetary unsustainability. Freirean reading includes the deconstruction of the politics of language and communication dynamics used oppression and dominance. Freirean literacy is inherently “bottom-up” reading for understanding oppressions from those suffering to gain deepened and widened reflectivity in determining necessary transformative actions (i.e., praxis). Moacir Gadotti (1996) has argued that only learning oppressions without praxis is perverse, as well as anti-Freirean.
Freire vehemently argued against fatalistic education by stressing the need for utopia in teaching to guide praxis. How does language and dialogue of ‘development’ sustainability or counter environmental violence is an essential question to continuously problematize for constructing humanizing and planetarily-sustainable development. The language that we utilize to express world-Earth (in)separability determines how we (de)value each other and the rest of Nature. In part, I will utilize ecolinguistics to analyze Freire’s influence on language and communication that decodes anti-environmentalism, unsustainability, socio-environmental injustice, and dominance over the rest of Nature. Ecolinguistical framings will be further defined selectively throughout this paper to argue Friere’s influences on language and intercultural communications within environmental pedagogies. This paper first focuses on the ecopedagogical work to counter the hegemonic politics of development’s language and dialogue for (un)sustainability, inside and outside the SDGs. These discussions are then deconstructed through the Freirean constructs of citizenship, utopia and education, and globalization.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University