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

Group Submission Type: Paper Session

Proposal

Our panel seeks to explore some of the intersections of ecopedagogies, place-based education, eco-literacies, and critical theory. Liz Jackson will share with us some of her research and ideas about how critical-pedagogy and place-based learning can be used to re-negotiate the learning that had often privileged previously settler and colonial perspectives. While the norm is still that such systems promote a vision of globalization that produce a homogenization of cultures and identities and risks subjugating people for the sake of a global economy, Liz points to other possibilities. Eco-pedagogy is the extension of this work to unpack the often hidden links between these socioeconomic elements and their dynamic impact upon the environment. Environmental degradation begets social degradation. By using place-based education we can re-center the environment in our pedagogy and thereby also reclaim place for indigenous knowledge and culture within the dynamics of determining the power struggles of curriculum over whose knowledge, development, and relationships matter. It is not to advocate that indigenous knowledge or place is pure or uncontested as Liz points out, but it is rather to reopen and explore the need to critically examine what has for far too long remained largely uncontested and silenced spaces within our school systems.

Daniel’s work builds on these ideas by exploring the manners in which sustainable education has suffered from the often vague discursive frameworks it inherits that attempt to reduce wicked and complex problems of climate change and ecology into favorable positions by powerful global interests that have often created false narratives, or concealed negative impacts while presenting themselves as benefactors of sustainability. Daniel attempts to better understand how educators are dealing with such information overload and complexity – are they feeling perplexed or indifferent? Something else? How are they presenting information to students? Are “critical” educators doing something different to manage the complexity? Daniel tries to answer these questions using Mexican ecopedagogical educators as an example of how place-based, action research, ecoliteracy approaches offer a path to maintain greater complexity and nuance in how we think about such answers and thereby maintain more just and democratic spaces as we grapple with a changing climate and it’s impacts on the biosphere.

Similarly, Greg in his work explores the emerging post-truthism movement, and how this movement further undermines the ability of people to deconstruct their reality, and thereby to critically engage with their world. Such post-truthism thereby further entrenches the banking model of education and oppression, making it harder, yet again, for the oppressed people of the world to understand the mechanisms and ways in which an increasingly wicked (complicated) and nested problem is working to link the degradation of environment and that of socio-economics. This has led to a rhetoric in which ‘Development’ is being used, but the context and questions of whose development and whose de-development are being ignored, as are the non-anthropocentric spheres in their entirety. Greg argues that ecopedagogies and critical readings of ecoliteracies are essential for peoples’ abilities to counter this post-truthism and their ability to deconstruct and counter these falsities.

And finally David will explore two core values of eco-pedagogy, that of inter-being (that all things are interconnected) and that of biophilia. This latter idea is linked to Fromm and Freire’s idea of the necrophilic civilization, that our civilization has at its core a death loving attribute, and that the other symptoms we are discussing are simply manifestation of this inner rot. Building on some of the metaphorical work and questions Andreotti asks about epistemicide and how to hospice a dying way of knowing, this presentation focuses on sharing a bit of these two core values of eco-pedagogy: interbeing, and biophilia. And from there, it will speak to Greg’s point of post-truthism and Daniel’s point of the discursive ambiguity and the wicked problems by briefly highlighting some of the actual hard-science and publications that shine a light on just how necrophilic a civilization we have become. What are scientists actually telling us is in store for society if we continue behaving as we have? And with that information in mind, not just of this presentation but all four, what kinds of questions, metaphors, and ideas might we generate during our Q&A to help consider how to begin midwifing the birth of something new via education (such as Liz, Greg, and Daniel already begin pointing to) so that society can move out of the necrophilic and into the biophilic?

Sub Unit

• SIG: Environmental and Sustainability Education

Chair

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Localism and Sustainable Education - Liz Jackson, University of Hong Kong

• Ecopedagogical responses to Global Environmentalism’s Discursive Perplexity: A critical view from Mexico - Daniel Dominguez Valles, UCLA

• Post-truth D/development S/sustainability pedagogies: An ecopedagogical analysis - Greg W Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University

• Hospicing The Necrophilic Civilization: Can Educational Policy Centered Around Eco-literacy Birth A Biophilic Society? - David Epstein, University at Albany

Discussant

• Vanessa Andreotti, University of British Columbia