Ecopedagogy and Hegemonic Discourses: Transforming Dominant Systems of Education, Agriculture, and Foodways

• In Event: Freire in Focus: Exploring Power and Pedagogy Through Language, Methodologies, Identity, and Sustainability

Abstract

With the launching of Sputnik in the height of the Cold War, a number of industrialization races forced mantras to appease the newly born masses. In education, mass education came to the forefront, especially with maths and sciences being promoted to ensure national hegemony. Mass industrialization of the agricultural, transportation, and grocer industries, especially in the production of wheat, forefronted the instability of foodways to “feed the masses”.

These dominant forms of hegemonic industrialization have perpetuated unsustainability, ill health for and between Earth and more-than-human systems and beings, and individualistic and competitive neoliberal ideologies that are damaging to these systems and beings as well. In a time when Earth enters an epoch marked by ecological disaster, increased climate crisis events, and heightened psychological and ecological devastation, we look to these dominant, hegemonic systems to reflect, problematize, and create praxis with the intersections therewithin. “Schools are losing their claim to be effective tools to provide education; cars have ceased to be effective tools for mass transportation; the assembly line has ceased to be an acceptable mode of production,” (Illich, 1973).

A missing intersection between education and foodways sits in the human-food gap - akin to the human-nature gap which distinguishes humans as apart from nature instead of a distinct part OF nature, (Bang, Medin, & Atran, 2007). Humans have been disconnected with nature, and thus, foodways as well in the aftermath of the mass industrialization of each. Recognizing the need for ever-expanding development, food has been transformed into a quick, thoughtless, and individual practice. Inserting the idea of sitting within foodways, preparing and eating with community in mind, and learning, knowing, and understanding where, how, and becoming reciprocal with foodways can breed a convivial and more sustainable method for food systems. This idea can be intersected with dominant education systems in mutual transformation.

As Freire sat beneath the mango tree and wrote about Earth as a most oppressed being, Illich wrote about conviviality, and a missing chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed was setted speaking to ecopedagogies and creating communion with Earth - problematizing neoliberal ideologies, ideas relating to development (as well as sustainable development), and reinventing Freirean ideals through a transformational praxis of action along with the austere idea of eutrapelia in conviviality. This session will speak to a transformation in the intersection of recognizing the human-food gap and translating the joy and wonder of creating communal, mutual aid in feeding and eating together. Education systems can re-envision, re-invent, and transform into tools of communal, mutual conviviality as well.

Author

• Michaela Ensweiler, University of California - Los Angeles