Eco-Critical Pedagogies: Language, Culture, and Learning Human Reciprocity With the Earth

• In Event: Love and Loss of Land and Language: Reciprocity With the Earth in Language Education

Abstract

This opening paper shares important connections between ecojustice education and language learning to critically thinking through how it is such examinations aid in how we prepare and support teachers in challenging assumptions about dominant beliefs in ways that recognize and value the importance of interdependence over individualism, diversity over monoculturalization, and reciprocity—and mutual aid—over global capitalism. The author shares these connections through three examples of how working with the importance of language learning that interrupts and challenges the dominant discourses of a neoliberal economic and political globalization to teach intentionally, and with attention to: 1) efforts in education to challenge and disrupt either/or dualistic thinking; 2) interrupt perceptions of hegemonic normalcy—referring to a socio-cultural process by which actions, behaviors, and diverse ways of interpreting the world are perceived by dominant society as ‘fitting in’ and being socially acceptable; and, 3) contest false notions of independence—the degree to which an individual is perceived as able to meet their social and economic responsibilities on their own—as measures of success in schools and society.

In conclusion, this paper draws on putting ecojustice theory to work in case studies from teacher education course work and mentoring of PreK-12 teachers in which an ecocritical scholar-activist educator works together with classroom teachers on the importance of embodied learning that resonates with what can be considered learning human reciprocity with the Earth. Weaving between narrative vignettes of examples from both secondary and post-secondary teaching, this paper presentation seeks to share the possibilities of learning from—and with—a focus on language learning as a way of valuing the power of community and the importance of language to teaching toward inclusive communities that value ecological diversity and interdependency— or toward what a kind of global citizenship that recognizes and resists the current logics of domination undermining, and undervaluing, human capacities for living through a reciprocity with the Earth.

Author

• John Joseph Lupinacci, Washington State University - Pullman