Eco-Pedagogy: Critical Environmental Pedagogies to Disrupt Falsely Touted Sustainable Development

• In Event: Criticalness Within, Through, and Between Southern Epistemologies, Literacies, and Philosophies for Socio-Environmental Justice and Planetary Sustainability

Abstract

Environmental teaching should deepen and widen students’ understandings on how the rest of Nature, outside of “us” as humans, is affected by our actions and, consequently, upon ourselves as part of Nature. However, many environmental pedagogies don’t critically teach towards better understanding these inseparable connections. Our unsustainable environmentally violent actions are inseparable to social violence and injustice, and devastative to Nature beyond anthropocentric interests. “Unsustainable” is emphasized because acts of environmental violence form continuums (e.g., turning on a computer to managing fracking for electricity) which have countering positive and negative outcomes depending on who/what are considered and the always-accompanying politics. Effective teaching of sustainability must be critical literacy education to read the complex, often politically hidden, dynamics of socio-environmental actions that (in)directly affect human populations inequitably and Nature beyond humans. Teaching students to critically read “sustainability” is needed more than ever before as intensifying post-truthism portrays environmental unsustainability as unimportant to counter, falsely labeled as “sustainable”, and/or devaluing populations negatively affected, and Nature destroyed. This includes unending reading how racism, coloniality and neocoloniality from globalizations from above, patriarchy, heteronormativity, xenophobia, epistemicide, neoliberalism (e.g., framing “development” and “modernity”), and their intersectionalities have falsely justified unsustainable actions. This paper will argue how critical theories are essential within environmental pedagogies, as well as research upon them, for true environmental sustainability to occur through students’ praxis to determine actions needed to end their/our planet’s destruction. Ecopedagogy and accompanying ecopedagogical literacies, which are rooted in critical, Freirean pedagogies, will ground this paper. Analysis on UNESCO’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), post-truthism, and what is/was (un)learned during COVID-19 will also be discussed in this paper, as well as comparative analysis on other environmental pedagogies such as environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD).

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author