Rethinking Accountability: Teaching Toward an Eco-Critical Creative Democracy

• In Event: Deweyan Perspectives on Standardization, Accountability, and Assessment in Contemporary Education

Abstract

Recognizing the role of “accountability” and its discursive relationship to restrictive conceptions of democracy, we argue that Dewey’s call for a creative democracy requires education supportive of rethinking accountability in favor of an ecocritical take on democratic decision-making. We discuss ecocritical work in teacher education with preservice teachers to rethink deeply-rooted cultural understandings of value hierarchies, diversity, and democracy. We assert that such work includes addressing current ways that accountability is constituted and materialized through what Plumwood (2002) refers to as a logic structure of centric thinking. We describe how such an analytic offers opportunity for teachers to recognize, resist, and reconstitute accountability in decision-making; and we propose that bringing an EcoJustice analytical lens to Dewey’s call for creative democracy offers the opportunity for asking questions that work toward supporting social justice and sustainability while learning together to practice creative and equity focused decentralized decision-making.
The first 20 years of the 21st century have been an era in which many thousands of people have found themselves having to face survival on the planet (Islam & Winkel, 2017; UNICEF, 2020). Heightened racism, sexism, and a fearful intolerance of queer and differently abled identities inextricable from a white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist and industrialized consumer culture, is also what 2020 has put into clear focus—via a rise in tyrannical governments and a global pandemic—is that the way of life for a political majority on the planet is socially unjust and not sustainable for humanity (Hartcher, 2020; Masci; 2019; Parveen, 2020; Repucci, 2020; United Nations, 2020a; 2020b). The reign of this lifestyle has come to an end—or at least a planetary pause. Amidst the grim reality of COVID-19, it is clear that democracy is in grave danger in the wake of a brutal loss of human and more-than-human life exacerbated by a gross denial of civil liberties and human rights worldwide (Center for Disease Control, 2020; United Nations, 2020a; 2020b). It seems fairly simple that where democracy has been usurped, centralized, and organized to ensure profits over life and freedom for diverse species; democracy has been endangered, denied, and possibly lost. Accountability within these oppressive frameworks seems at times futile or at least to be framed and defined in such a way that measurements of such a construct have become highly disciplined by discourses of individualism, competition, dominance and consumerism (Martusewitcz et al 2020). However, history has taught us that we ought never underestimate our human capacities for taking ideas and bringing them creatively to action and in this paper, trouble the dominant discourses shaping accountability as it relates to Dewey’s (1976) notion of a creative democracy, education, and democratic decision making.

Authors

• John J. Lupinacci, Washington State University

• Brandon Edwards-Schuth, Washington State University