Eco-Pedagogy and Comparative Education as Inseparable Pedagogies

• In Event: Teaching Comparative and International Education (CIE): Pedagogical Aspects of CIE and CIE Guiding Pedagogies

Abstract

There are many models of comparative education (CE) forming a contested terrain that has commonalities and differences in such areas as their goals, approaches, theoretical framings, epistemological groundings, and units of comparisons and measurement. In this paper, I will utilize CE grounded in critical theories and teaching within critical pedagogies, that grounds teaching to better understand oppressions for praxis towards ending them. Designated as critical CE, it can be argued that other models have similar goals, but inarguably these are the goals for the field’s models when emergent for Freirean, popular education critical pedagogies (as opposed to Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Raywyn Connell arguments, among other scholars, against oppressive Eurocentric critical theories). The comparing and contrasting of educational systems in the critical CE field has the goal of better understanding and determining what can be contextually borrowed and lent between educational systems towards holistic social justice. I will argue that teaching critical CE for social justice praxis to emerge needs critical environmental pedagogical analysis, due to the inherent, inseparable connections between social and environmental violence, as well as environmental justice beyond the anthropocentric sphere (i.e., beyond humans). Specifically, I will discuss the environmental pedagogy ecopedagogy and ecopedagogical research.
Teaching critical CE with ecopedagogy centers analysis of the politics of education of environmental violence as the causes of social violence, and vice-versa. I have argued elsewhere that problematizing the socio-environmental outcomes of the following statement is essential: When humans carry out environmentally harmful acts these acts are done to benefit some individual(s) and/or population(s) (AUTHOR, 2018). The essence of ecopedagogy is critically problem-posing this question in learning spaces and research to understand the politics of environmental violence, as well as unlearn untrue or superficial justifications for their occurrence learn through shallow environmental pedagogies. Rooted in critical theories and originating from Freirean, popular education models of Latin America, ecopedagogy is centered on understanding struggles of and the connections between acts of environmental ills and social conflict (socio-environmental issues).
The following two questions will be problematized in the presentation: Why should comparativists care about ecopedagogy? How can ecopedagogy be connected to CE research and teaching? The inherent connections between environmental and social violence, which are often politically hidden, are why ecopedagogy needs the CE field and why CE needs ecopedagogy. I will argue that this reciprocal is essential for reinventing educational systems, both inside and outside designated environmental pedagogical learning spaces, towards ending socio-environmental oppressions.
This paper will discuss three of the many reasons for interconnected work within ecopedagogy and CE fields. The overall goal for connecting these two fields is to transform education to transform the world with social and environmental justice for all. Although other disciplinary fields beyond these two, including other fields of education, are often needed in this transformational goal, these three reasons stress how the essence of each field needing the other. This calls for rigorous analysis of how the two fields can strengthen one another.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University