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Contested Terrain of Globalization on Citizenship and Environmental Pedagogies for Ethical Praxis: An Epistemological Analysis

Sat, April 9, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 154 A

Abstract

The goal of this research was to examine education professors’ pedagogies in regards to how they teach the intersections of citizenship and globalization, as related to environmental issues and pedagogies.
To this end, the paper presents an analysis of the global influences on and between citizenship education and environmental pedagogies (e.g., environmental education, education for sustainable development, ecopedagogy) in constructing individuals’ ethics. Given as vignettes, the paper will present how diverse ways of knowing, that grounds an individual’s ideology of ethics, coincides and conflicts with the politically contested terrain of education and globalizations. The plural form of “globalizations” identifies the contested terrain of the processes of globalization from above and from below (Torres, 2009). With inherent, complex connections between environmental pedagogies and Global Citizenship Education (GCE) (Misiaszek, 2015), the research analysis destructed the similarly contested terrains of global citizenship and GCE influencing individuals’ epistemologies constructed by other sphere(s) of citizenship. The epistemological analysis presented will focus on the following three spheres of citizenship both separately and in connection with one another: local, nation-state, and global. The researcher utilized the various ways participants frame the “local” sphere(s) of citizenship and the constructs or influences within the global sphere. The analysis of these three spheres will include other spheres that the participants determined as influential in the education of socio-environmental ethics. These spheres include: planetary (or biocentric), spiritual, and generational (past and future). In short, this paper will present how globalizations have influenced individuals’ social and environmental ethics through changing citizenship and environmental pedagogies.

The research analyzed the ethical positions of eighteen scholars in the field of education who are expert scholars in areas of globalization and citizenship and/or environmental pedagogies were interviewed. These research participants were diversely located in the following global regions: North America, South America, Western Europe, Middle Ease, East Asia, and Oceania. What will be presented is how the research participants describe the ways in which education can help develop one’s sense of ethics and how different spheres of influence are conceptualized as positive and/or negative. These descriptions include the central theme that students construct their ethical positions from multiple epistemologies stemming from their various spheres of citizenship that coincide and conflict with one another, having both commonalities and differences with one another. The rich descriptions given on how ethics are partially constructed by students in formal learning spaces by teaching citizenship will be given to offer descriptions of the dynamic, formative and personal face of ethics within pedagogies of socio-environmental justice models.

Misiaszek, G. W. (2015). Ecopedagogy and citizenship in the age of globalization: Essential connections between environmental and global citizenship education to Save the Planet. European Journal of Education: Research, Development, and Policies, 50(3).
Torres, C. A. (2009). Globalizations and education. New York: Teachers College Press.

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