Ecopedagogical responses to Global Environmentalism’s Discursive Perplexity: A critical view from Mexico

• In Event: Eco-pedagogy, place, & permaculture in the age of post-truth: how do we midwife a biophilic society?

Proposal

Ecopedagogies are users as much as they are providers of environmental information: what they “teach” about the current state of the environment, it’s problems and possible solutions, ultimately depends on the information available to them. This information develops as part of a social process in which different actors produce, negotiate, validate, and circulate environmental knowledge claims, data and narratives, through particular discourses (Goldman et al. 2011).

As environmental concerns have garnered growing global attention, a coalition of transnational environmental activists, planetary scientists, and multilateral organizations has been gradually institutionalized into an entangled epistemic/cultural/political global environmental regime. This “globalized environmentalism” mostly privileges expert knowledge and disseminates “top down” and vague discursive frameworks (e.g. Sustainable Development), which can be framed to represent just about anything, producing discursive ambiguity (Buttel & Taylor, 1992). Powerful global interests take advantage of this ambiguity to create a sense of perplexity about particular issues, circulate false narratives, conceal their negative impacts, all the while presenting themselves as beneficial actors in the search for sustainability.

Recent debates about the current global environmental crisis have been marked with extraordinary complexity, uncertainty, and deliberate obfuscation; which in turn have generated an eruption of differing understandings and accounts; making local educators’ task of knowledge “brokering” more challenging than ever and leading many of them to experience a sense of information overload, hesitation, and confusion when constructing their own pedagogical responses (Wals & Corcoran, 2012). One could expect educators to have somewhat less difficulty identifying some of the intricacies, biases, silences, and/or outward fabrications present in some discourse. However, there seems to be generalized lack of deep critical interpretations of complex environmental problems within the field, especially in relation to the socioeconomic structures and dynamics which produce them (Gonzalez, 2017).

Important questions need to be raised around the ways in which educators are dealing with the daunting task of navigating the great number of environmental discourses that exist out there today. Do they feel perplexed, indifferent, resilient, or other ways regarding this situation? How do they teach about/within/for complexity in their programs? (e.g. do they simplify complex problems in order to make them more accessible for their audiences?) Are so-called “critical” educators any better at dealing with the complexities, obfuscations and uncertainties?

This presentation tries to answer some of these questions by utilizing an ecopedagogical perspective (Misiaszek, 2018) to analyze and showcase various strategies used by educators in Mexico to make sense of the current discursive polyphony that revolves around environmental issues. Ecopedagogy is presented as a promising inquiry-based educational model based on action-research, transformational ethics, discursive analysis and the territorialization of ecoliteracies. It is argued that educators can overcome current discursive perplexity by applying an in-depth ecopedagogical analysis of the material/bio-physical conditions of local environments as they are co-produced with, and by, the social constructions of them, in order to generate complex, nuanced, political, critical, and anti-essentialist interpretations of the “environment”, “society”, and “human/non-human” relationships; which in turn allow for the identification of unjust, oppressive and undemocratic socioecological contexts and conditions.

Author

• Daniel Dominguez Valles, UCLA