Ecopedagogy: teaching critical literacies of ‘development’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘sustainable development’

ABSTRACT

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) largely emerged from Environmental Education (EE) models to teach how actions for ‘development’ positively and negatively affects our societies and the rest of nature, to then determine how such actions can be ‘sustainable’ without causing current or future socio-environmental oppressions. However, the ‘development’ has been increasingly taught as adhering to normalized neoliberal ideologies. This article provides a critical analysis of reinventing environmental pedagogies to center the ‘reading’ of development framings through the following questions: ‘What is development?’, ‘Who is it for?’, and ‘What are the politics behind it?’ Emergent from two research projects, centering the teaching of critical literacies (i.e. ecopedagogical literacies) to read ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ was found essential in higher education. Rooted in critical theories and Freirean popular education movements in Latin American, ecopedagogy is transformative teaching in which educators dialectically problem-pose the politics of socio-environmental connections through local, global, and planetary lenses.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecopedagogy
• development
• education for sustainable development
• critical literacy
• Paulo Freire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Objectifying term ‘the Earth’ will not be used.

2 Plural to indicate the processes of globalization from below and above (Torres 2009).

3 Pedagogies on the environment denotes teaching that includes anti-environmental education, and environmental pedagogies focused on environmental wellbeing (e.g. ESD, EE, ecopedagogy).

4 The ‘who’ includes all human in the global sphere and all on Earth in the planetary sphere.