EcoPedagogy

Sustainability, Planetarity, and Biophilia

The realization of culturally relevant forms of knowledge grounded in normative concepts such as sustainability, planetarity (i.e. identifying as an earthling) and biophilia (i.e. love of all life).

 

 

Pedagogy

Pedagogy is a method or practice of teaching. It usually refers to an academic subject or theoretical concept.

 

Eco

"Eco" refers to ecology or environmental terms.

 

Ecopedagogy

Ecopedagogy traces its roots back to the second Earth Summit in 1992 held Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. According to wikipedia:

 

"As a form of critical theory of education, ecopedagogy works at a meta-level to offer dialectical critiques of environmental education and education for sustainable development as hegemonic forms of educational discourse that have been created by state agencies that seek to appear to be developing pedagogy relevant to alleviating our mounting global ecological crisis. While environmental education strategies undoubtedly accomplish much that is welcome and good from an ecopedagogical perspective, ecopedagogy questions (especially within the context of the United States) the ways in which environmental education is often reduced to forms of experiential pedagogy and outdoor education that may deal uncritically with the experience of “nature” proffered therein – an ideological zone of wilderness representations that are potentially informed by a mélange of racist, sexist, classist and speciesist values. Further, ecopedagogy has begun to pose problems into the way environmental education has become tethered to state and corporate-sponsored science and social studies standards, or otherwise fails to articulate the political need for widespread knowledge of the ways in which modern society and industrial culture promote unsustainable lifestyles, even as it remains marginalized in the research, teacher-training and educational leadership programs of graduate schools of education. Likewise, while ecopedagogy seeks to utilize the ongoing United Nations Decade of Educational for Sustainable Development (2005–2015) to make strategic interventions on behalf of the oppressed, ecopedagogy also attempts to generate conscientization upon the concept of sustainable development and thereby uncloak it of the sort of the widespread ambiguity that it presently maintains."