Ecopedagogy: Teaching to Disrupt Socio-Environmental Injustices, Anthropocentric Dominance, and Unsustainability of the Anthropocene

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Freirean Perspectives on Global Challenges (Table 1)

Abstract

This paper delves into Freirean ecopedagogy to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). This paper argues that Freirean ecopedagogy is essential to disrupt four falsely taught ideologies that justifies the Anthroposphere. First, false commonsense that separates environmental and social violence and instills anthropocentrism that separates humans from the rest of Nature (i.e., world-Earth distancing). Second, fatalism that extinguishes hope of ending humans’ acts of unsustainable environmental violence. Third, “development” for sustaining hegemony and planetary unsustainability (i.e., Development rather than development). Lastly, epistemological dominance that legitimizes the first three ideologies given above (e.g., epistemologies of the North).

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Tohoku University