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Abstract
Politics of public pedagogies that systemically obscured, ignored, and/or flat-out lied about COVID-19 realities that led to, and worsened, the global pandemic coincides with education that falsely justifies environmental violence, unsustainability, and dominance of Nature. I discuss how ecopedagogy, grounded in the popular education models of Paulo Freire, are essential to critically compare and contrast COVID-19 aspects with environmental issues to construct effective environmental pedagogies for critical literacy (i.e., ecopedagogical literacy) to disrupt and "unlearn" ideologies that sustain and intensify unsustainable acts of environmental violence. The following three disruptions are argued as essential for socio-environmental justice and planetary sustainability: disrupting Northern, dominate epistemologies that instills world-Earth distancing (i.e., “us” humans (anthroposphere) from the rest of Nature); disrupting “development” defined within neoliberal and neocolonial framings, including being solely grounded upon epistemologies of the North, and disrupting academic scholarship and structures that lead to the first two aspects needing disruptions as mentioned.
Notes
1 “Environmental pedagogical work” signifies environmental teaching and research upon environmental pedagogies (e.g., environmental education, education for sustainable development (ESD), ecopedagogies). The use of “ecopedagogical work” will be the same except that the work is ecopedagogically grounded.
2 “Earth” and “Nature” will be upper-cased to not ecolinguistically objectify either. In addition, the article “the” will not be written with “Earth” for the same reason.
3 Education in this article will include informal, non-formal, and formal education, unless otherwise noted.
4 This upper/lowercasing will be utilized beyond “development” terminology in this article. D/development without the “D”/”d” italicized and underlined signifies either form of development.
5 Pluralizing ecopedagogies indicates its various framings; however, the usage of “ecopedagogy” in this article will indicate Freirean-based ecopedagogy.
6 The term “socio-environmental” denotes the inseparability between social and environmental violence. Ecopedagogues focus on the politics of their connections, as opposed to shallow (environmental) pedagogues that most-frequently teach false separations between the two (Gadotti, Citation2008; Misiaszek, Citation2012).
7 “Temporary” indicates Nature’s sustainability in long geographic timeframes, with humans as part of Nature or not.
8 COVID-19 statistics from https://covid19.who.int.
9 “Irreversible” is used with caution here as Nature’s return to balance will happen but the process often within geological timelines with/out human extinction.
11 Petar Jandrić and Sarah Hayes (Citation2021) further argue that we have always relied on technologies as “…homo sapiens has survived because of technologies such as fire, clothing, and agriculture. But in our world, technologies permeate all aspects of our being.” Postdigital is not easily defined but is “messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational. The postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation” (Jandrić et al., Citation2018, p. 895). Specifically, within ecopedagogy,
12 Jandrić and Ford (Citation2020) describe these ecosystems as expansive, including “…humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, objects, and more; ecosystems that are overdetermined by new forms of ontological hierarchies and capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism.”
13 This coincides with some of the critical literature of the currently popular terminology of “futures [of] education.” There are various scholars’ work on this important topic, including UNESCO’s Futures of Education Ideas LAB (see https://en.unesco.org/futuresofeducation/ideas-lab).
14 Freirean transformation and praxis is not, as critiqued by some, non-contextual change (Au & Apple, Citation2007; Misiaszek & Torres, Citation2019).
15 “Unnatural” stresses Freire’s (Citation2005) argument that apolitical education is impossible.
16 see, for one example, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html
18 The uppercased “T” indicated the oppressive use of technologies rather than the technologies themselves, such as social media to (un)consciously spread false-truths.
19 The term “nature” is lowercased to coincide with Moore’s (Citation2014) arguments of “cheap nature” within the capitalocene.
20 “Radical” denotes challenging dominant ideologies (un)consciously instilled through education.
21 This highlights a key ecolinguistic limitation of the English, especially as a/the lingua franca.
22 Ineffectiveness is due to distribution that follows global power dynamics rather than global distribution that best vaccinates populations that are most susceptible to COVID-19’s infection, spread, and symptoms, including hospitalization and deaths.
23 For example, how theoretical scholarship (hopefully) read by a small academic audience translates into people’s ((anti)-environmental) actions is impossible to fully determine.
24 Freirean work is too-often misinterpreted and misused as a technical method. For example, he stopped using his most famous term—conscientization/conscientização—due to people’s technocratic misuse (Schugurensky, Citation2011).
25 Reinvention of Hegel here.