Six Critical Questions for Teaching Justice-Based Environmental Sustainability in Higher Education

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  In Roundtable Session: Socially Just Emotions, Environmental Justice, and Cultural Capital (Table 13)

Abstract

This paper poses six key questions that we argue as essential to critically problem-pose in achieving teaching for Justice-Based Environmental Sustainability (JBES) in higher education (HE). The questions problematize the following in HE teaching: (1) the (de)legitimized, (de)prioritized framings of “sustainability;” (2) the same question for the terms of “development” and “sustainable development”; (3) the politics of (un)sustainability affecting HE pedagogies and curricula; (4) HE’s roles and responsibilities in leading to students’ praxis of sustainability; (5) the incorporation, or not, of Southern, Indigenous, and/or Northern epistemologies grounding (un)sustainability taught; and (6) the (non-)anthropocentric groundings in HE learning. It is argued that critically answering these questions guides essential transformation of HE teaching for JBES.

Authors

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University

• Cae Rodrigues, Universidade Federal de Sergipe