Presidential Invited Session: Sustainability Education: Comparative practices for justice-based, planetary pedagogies

Group Submission Type: Presidential Invited Sessions

Description of Session

This session will critically compare and contrast a broad landscape of
environmental teachings’ possibilities, trends, and challenges of achieving students’ praxis for
globally all-inclusive environmental justice and planetary sustainability. The presenters will
deconstruct (environmental) teaching that helps justify unsustainable acts of environmental
violence to, in turn, radically reconstruct them when deemed necessary from bottom-up
approaches. This includes teaching to disrupt othering (e.g., racism, coloniality, patriarchy,
xenophobia, heteronormativity); globalizations from above, such as neoliberal globalization;
fatalism that environmental devastation has no alternatives; and anthropocentrism, among other
aspects of (environmental) teaching which justify unsustainable environmental violence. These
crucial aspects will be unpacked through diverse educational levels, types of (in/non)formal
education, and contexts. The first two presentations focus on key critical questions of
environmental teaching to help ground the session, including globally dominant Northern
epistemologies, neoliberalism, and language and linguistics that systematically deprioritize
environmentalism and distances us humans from the rest of Nature. The following two
presentations delves into these important issues with higher education learning spaces. The last
two presenters focus each on secondary and primary education, incorporating specific
pedagogical research and interventions in Singapore and England. Environmental teaching for
praxis to disrupt climate change will be weaved throughout the presentations.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Aaron Benavot, University at Albany-State University of New York

Individual Presentations

• Comparing Sustainability Pedagogies: Six Critical Questions - Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University

• Justice-based Pedagogies Focusing on Rights of Nature and Taking Nature as Our Beloved Family - Jing Lin, University of Maryland, College Park

• Future pedagogies for sustainable praxis: experiments with social justice in higher education - Spyros Themelis, University of East Anglia

• Climate action and the renewal of higher education - Tristan Mccowan, University College London

• Don't say it's going to be okay': Learning and Teaching in the Age of Climate Collapse - Jeremy Jimenez, SUNY Cortland

• Critical, Eco-Socialist Essentialness: Comparing Interventions of Primary Eco-Education in England - Alpesh MAISURIA, University of the West of England, Bristol

Discussant

• Steven Klees, University of Maryland