An ecopedagogical, ecolinguistical reading of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What we have learned from Paulo Freire

Abstract

This article will discuss Paulo Freire’s global influences on environmental pedagogies and argue that ecopedagogical reinventions are essential for ‘quality’ education, as touted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #4, for global, all-inclusive ‘development’ that is planetarily sustainable. The politics of how ‘development’ is taught or not taught to be critically read linguistically and dialogically will be problematized through Freire’s work, and reinventions of his work, on ecopedagogy. As Freire was a pedagogue of critical literacy, ecopedagogical literacy widens ‘reading the word to read the world’ (all humans, human populations) to read Earth to read the world as part of Earth. Such reading is not anthropocentric. The article will first describe Freire’s influence on reinventing environmental pedagogies, including education for (un)sustainable development (ESD), with specific discussions on how language of ‘development’ and corresponding (un)sustainability is framed. These influences from Freire will then be discussed through his de/re/constructions of citizenship, utopia and education, and globalization. Throughout the article, I will argue the need for teaching ecopedagogical literacy with ecolinguistics is essential to better understand the politics of language and (non)hierarchical dialogue which influence how ‘development’ goals are constructed, including the SDGs.

Keywords:

• Paulo Freire
• ecopedagogy
• ecolinguistics
• environmental pedagogies
• environmental justice
• epistemological justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Earth’ is purposely de-objectified without the article ‘the’ and having an uppercase ‘E’. As well, Nature is capitalized. The term ‘initial notion’ signifies the self-unfinishedness of Freire’s earlier work (2000) and his later work (1992, 1998a, 2004) in which ecopedagogies more directly emerged from (see Misiaszek & Torres, 2019).

2 The term “initial notion” signifies the self-unfinishedness of Freire’s earlier work (2000) and his later work (1992, 1998a, 2004) in which ecopedagogies more directly emerged from (see (Misiaszek & Torres, 2019)).

3 In this article, using ecopedagogical terminology or naming ‘Freire’ directly will not determine his influence, but rather the use of Freire’s essence.

4 The term ‘world-Earth’ indicates both the world as part of Earth and our subjective, political world affecting the rest of Nature. The latter aspect is discussed later in this article.

5 The term ‘socio-environmental’ represents the inseparable connections between environmental and social violence/injustice within the world and planetary unsustainability. It is important to note that the rest of Nature inability of self-reflectivity cannot inflict violence and injustice upon the world, as both are only emergent from humans’ will (Warren, 2000).

6 Gadotti is an expert ecopedagogue, a previous student of Freire, and the Founder and past-Director of the Instituto Paulo Freire, São Paulo.

7 The phrase ‘rest of Nature’ is used to indicate Earth outside of the world. This phase is important to emphasize that the world is part of Earth and, thus, humans are part of Nature.

8 Falsely taught ideologies of distancing of environmental violence includes geographic distancing (e.g. happening ‘far away’), timewise distancing (i.e. consequences will not happen for a ‘long time’), world-Earth distancing (i.e. anthropocentric valuing only), and socio-historic othering (e.g. not affecting ‘us’ but rather the dehumanized ‘them’).

9 Globalization forms a contested terrain (i.e. globalizations (Torres, 2009)) with countering processes from below and from above. SDGs’ ‘success’ can only emerge from the former which inherently countering the latter.

10 Limit situations: ‘"reading of the world” that enables its subject or agent to decipher, more and more critically, the "limit situation" or situations beyond which they find only “untested feasibility”’ (Freire, 1992, p. 90).

11 ‘The criteria that worldviews are judged by are derived from an explicit or implicit ecological philosophy (or ecosophy). An ecosophy is informed by both a scientific understanding of how organisms (including humans) depend on interactions with other organisms and a physical environment to survive and flourish, and also an ethical framework to decide why survival and flourishing matters and whose survival and flourishing matters’ (Stibbe, 2014, p. 119).

12 The use ‘wickedness’ is specific, coinciding how Hal Lawson (2008) explained that ‘concentration effects comprise a new genus of problems called wicked problems, which stand in marked contrast to tame ones’.

13 After reading Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1963) Freire’ re-edited his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed to reflect decoloniality using Fanon’s work (Schugurensky, 2011). He also wrote an additional fourth chapter to the publishers’ urging (Schugurensky, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greg William Misiaszek

Greg William Misiaszek is an Assistant Professor at Beijing Normal University in the Faculty of Education and an Associate Director at the Paulo Freire Institute, UCLA. His work focuses on critical, Freirean environmental pedagogies (ecopedagogy) through theories of globalizations, coloniality, citizenships, race, gender, development and sustainability, Southern/Northern/Indigenous epistemologies, and linguistics, among others.