Re-rooting Environment Pedagogy in Secondary Education

• In Event: Poster session III
  In Poster Session: Poster session 3

Proposal

Global environment education agenda has developed greatly over the past couple of decades. International agencies and governments are campaigning for globally standardized practice of Environment Education (EE), but it still remains a contested field because the pedagogy of EE is not the same in different contexts and settings as it is influenced by teachers, policy, context and practice. Thus, it is important to critically reflect on the contextual understandings of environment pedagogy in formal education to re-orient it in a way that better fulfills the aim of EE towards the sustainability of the planet and social justice.
This qualitative case study of teachers in secondary schools in China and India employs a social constructionism epistemological paradigm to elicit current environmental pedagogy/ies. Teachers’ accounts show that they actively negotiate policy to take up multifarious pedagogical positions which are positioned by personal experiences, policy, educational structures and meandering practices among other factors such as globalisation, media, etc. These findings not only serve as contextual versions of comparative educational realities, but also as a vista into the pedagogical practise whereby teachers’ accounts are critically anatomized in connection with contextual and global narratives.
Additionally, grounded in the voices of participants of this research, a ‘formal environmental pedagogy pyramid’ emerged as a framework for successful environmental pedagogy. The progressive framework is an alternative route to current environmental pedagogy models, as it questions the current educational discourses which seeks to standardize the experience of students from diverse geographical and cultural place. The emerging theory finds itself rooted in the concepts of Freirean pedagogy, in pedagogy of place and in contextualized theories of ecology. This re-rooting, or allow for new foundations to emerge based on the diversity in context.
Key Words: Environment Education, Grounded theory, Critical Pedagogy, Teachers’ pedagogy, Social Constructionism

Author

• Syed Nitas Iftekhar, Beijing Normal University