Education and ecological precarity: Pedagogical, curricular, and conceptual provocations

Too big to imagine and too urgent to ignore, climate crisis is the text or the subtext of many of the news headlines as we write the editorial introduction to this special issue. We write while still in the COVID-19 pandemic, just after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, just after a summer of deadly heatwaves, just after a highway collapsed due to flooding in British Columbia, and just after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police again invaded Wet’suwet’en, where land defenders are engaged in the ongoing protection of their lands and waters from construction of a gas pipeline. No matter when you read this or where you are reading from, you will also be reading during and “just after” the devastation caused by climate crisis. We can count on the permanence of crises popping up, eroding away, and worsening. We are in times of guaranteed precarity. Youth climate activists continue to inspire; they hold corporations and governments to account for the lack of substantive action and bring attention to the need for action. Amidst the disappointments of the COP26 summit (including those identified by youth from all corners of the world¹) somehow scaling up and escalating a response to climate crisis remains ever more urgent. We are reminded of this urgency every day. A recent headline announced: “Extreme weather events are ‘the new norm’” (McGrath, 2021). The article proceeded to name some of the extreme events of the year from around the world including drought, extreme rainfall, and an accelerated rise in sea levels. We are drowning in stories of ecological devastation, its disproportionately distributed effects, and colonial governments’ insistence on capitalist extractivism. The ruinous times illustrated by these stories demand urgent responses at multiple levels.

We have convened this special issue as a call to consider possibilities for curricular and pedagogical responses. In particular, we see a disconnect between how quickly human and more-than-human lives are changing as a result of climate change and the lack of accompanying responsive and responsible changes in curriculum and pedagogy in preK–12 schooling and in higher education. In this introduction, we elaborate on key themes that inspired the special issue and how article authors have taken up these themes in various curricular projects and pedagogical interventions. These themes include centering nature-culture relations and witnessing relational stories, disrupting colonialism, attending to Black ecologies, and engaging with interdisciplinary pedagogies. We bring the articles into conversation with critical interviews we conducted with Black and Indigenous climate change scholars, including Megan Bang, Ananda Marin, Max Liboiron, Katherine Crocker, Deondre Smiles, J.T. Roane, and Sharon Nelson-Barber, scholars who offer insights into the conundrums that are at the heart of this special issue. These include questions about where conversations in education about the climate crisis get stuck and about the contradictions or hypocrisies between what faculties of education teach about the climate crisis and their practices as institutions or entities. We wanted to know about where these scholars and thinkers saw faculties of education being open or reluctant to pushing for structural change and the kinds of different imaginaries required of educators, educational researchers, and curriculum scholars to more meaningfully engage learners to take action to address climate crisis. Together, these articles and interviews offer important provocations on the kinds of shifts and orientations that are needed in education in responding to disproportionate inheritances of ecological precarity. Next, we elaborate on the central theme of centering nature-culture relations.

Centering Nature-Culture Relations

Euro-Western education remains largely invested in reproducing hierarchized neoliberal capitalist formations of the human—homo economicus (Bang et al., this issue; Clarke, this issue; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Relatedly, dominant ways of responding to ecological precarity remain tethered to human exceptionalism and to individualized discourses of “saving the planet” that do little to shift underlying settler colonial and racial capitalist relations that drive climate crisis (Yanchapaxi et al., this issue; Roane et al., this issue). Centering relationality requires undoing extractive relationships to more-than-human beings including land, animals, plants, and more. Bang (2020), a contributor to the special issue, powerfully underlined the immense, yet necessary task of disrupting this hyperseparation, stating that:

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face is in our practices and capacities for dreaming what could be from places that aren’t defined by the ontological denials and negations of the past worlds—those defined by human supremacy, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and logics of capitalistic labor, extraction, domination, and erasure. We must learn to remember, dream and story anew nature-culture relations. (p. 7)

We are inspired by Bang’s invitation to imagine what it might mean, look like, and sound like to foreground entangled and reciprocal nature-culture relations in educational contexts. This includes inquiring in particular places and spaces what it might mean to enact pedagogies grounded in radical relationality that take seriously the knowledge-making capabilities of the more-than-human world (Nxumalo & Montes, 2021).

Witnessing Relational Stories

Story-telling pedagogies are an important part of anti-colonial climate change education. For example, drawing from Black feminist thought (Collins, 2016), testifying-witnessing has been put to work as a relational mode of telling and witnessing stories of Black people’s land kinships that are situated within particular inheritances of anthropogenic ecological precarity while also affirming their relations with the more-than-human world (Nxumalo, 2019). The word relational is important here in underlining not only the human/more-than-human relations that such stories create and affirm but also that the stories themselves are creative practices of Black life. These creative storied practices are more than descriptive accounts of emplaced Black life. As McKittrick (2021) has stated “description is not liberation” (p. 44). Accordingly, such modes of storytelling also invite speculative imaginaries of what Black ecological relationships might entail in worlds of Black thriving (Nxumalo & ross, 2019). These emergent “narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible … the facts alone will not save us” (Benjamin, 2016, pp. 1–2).

Aaron Clarke’s article in this issue, titled “Songs of School Abolition” expands our visions of what is possible. Clarke begins with the premise that racial capitalist schooling produces subjects who enact ecological destruction and, thus, even the most progressive schooling reforms will not save us from this crisis. Thinking with Black feminist thought, Clarke theorizes the potential of school abolition as a liberatory response to current conditions of ecological precarity. Clarke draws pedagogical inspiration from Gumbs’s (2019) experimental M Archive: After the End of the World, Butler’s (2019) Parable of the Sower, and Jordan’s (2005) “The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones.” Across these works, Clarke builds a careful account of what school abolition can offer, in “how practitioners think and know and experience being human on anti-colonial terms” (p. 111). This account is crafted through three threads. First, Clarke begins by defining the relationship between schooling, the racial capitalist world order, and extraction. Clarke argues that the ruling curricular order of western humanism transforms students into understanding their own humanity in terms of the psycho-physical experiences of production and extraction. Such logics of extraction are embedded in how we are taught to live and plan for the future; environmental destruction is thus inevitable. Second, Clarke articulates how the school is limited in preparing young people, and especially young Black people, to survive and heal from ecological precarity, as this process is contingent on overturning the global order. Sitting with the “uselessness” of the school and its inability to cultivate life sustaining strategies, Clarke turns to abolition’s potential in fostering knowledges of survival during times of ecological precarity. Last, Clarke speculates on the kinds of pedagogical possibilities generated by musical gatherings and how they may help us think more about collective and everyday forms of school abolition. This article reminds us that theorizing the potential of radical alternatives, such as school abolition, is instrumental in unsettling assumptions that schools are a panacea to the environmental crises of our time.

Thinking alongside the speculative work Clarke raises, we turn to our interview with J.T. Roane to clarify and solidify some ideas that help us reimagine a horizon of education outside the current paradigm. Like Clarke, Roane looks to Black feminist intellectual traditions to speculate what other relationships to the environment and each other may be possible. He illustrates two approaches to do this critical work. First, Roane works with formal Black ecological knowledge. The second is through working with slave narratives and everyday Black expressive culture to understand how ecologically, and socially, insurgent knowledges can show us alternative modes of living. Roane reminds us that epistemologies emerging from Black collective expression expose the binds between ecocide, enclosure, and violence. We conclude our conversation with him by ruminating on the contradictory entanglements we are all caught up in as individuals; at the same time, his critical pedagogies found in his film and zine work illustrate the potential of creation and why we need to pursue interventions that emphasize relational modes of telling and witnessing stories of Black people’s land kinships.

In Indigenous communities, stories including material, narrative, and visual modes of storying are an intrinsic part of living well with more-than-human relatives (Cajete, 2017). In our interview with Sharon Nelson-Barber, it is evident how important storytelling is for connecting effects of and responses to climate crisis across (is)lands and waters. Nelson-Barber reminds us how Indigenous community knowledges shared through stories contain teachings about how we can continue to fight. But, again, the storytelling must be relational—the stories can’t be sliced away from the relations in which the stakes come to be mutually felt. In the context of subsistence communities, Nelson-Barber illustrates how the role of knowledge keepers and Elders is paramount in climate change adaptation, as they have cognitive tools tailored for local purposes that must be passed down. However, the connections between this traditional knowledge and what is identified as what children need to know in the classroom are sometimes worlds apart. Nelson-Barber underscores how children are going to pay the price for this double displacement—displaced by climate-induced destruction and displaced by their own knowledge base. She goes back to thinking with Indigenous collective principles to better understand how to move forward amid ecological precarity. We end our conversation with stressing the importance of reciprocity and that when working with community, we need to move away from helicopter research and work together collectively following principles of Indigenous life.

Our interview with Megan Bang and Ananda Marin centers the necessity of undoing settler colonial relations to lands and waters—relations that reinforce human and white supremacy. They discuss the ways in which dominant ways of engaging climate change, including justice-oriented actions, often enact Indigenous erasure when instead climate actions should uphold Indigenous knowledges, sovereignty, and governance. This interview also underlines that faculties of education have generally not yet enacted the radical paradigm shifts that are needed in relation to disrupting the primary role of education as the production of individual capitalist subjects. Bang and Marin ask: What might be opened up by education and education research that centers ethical or axiological questions about learning to live reciprocally with lands and waters, learning to enact collective values, and bringing radical imaginaries into being? This conversation also underlines the mattering of the relational stories of changing lands and waters that disrupt settler territorial stories. Importantly, the conversation underlines the need for young people to be immersed in relational, embodied, and imaginary storying with lands and waters that moves away from the current overemphasis on cognitive learning.

Disrupting Colonialism

While underlining the world-making capacity of stories and storytelling, there are also important cautions about what it means to ethically witness and respond to Indigenous community stories. An intrinsic part of centering nature-culture relationality and reciprocity is resistance against colonialism, which violently ruptures and erases Indigenous land relationships, remaking land into property (Tuck & Yang, 2012). For millennia, Indigenous knowledges from multiple contexts have enacted relations with the more-than-human world centered on relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility (Cajete, 2000; Mbiti, 1969). These relations are articulated in multiple place-specific ways including, but not limited to: creation stories, land and water use protocols, land-based teachings, and Indigenous science (Tuck et al., 2014). All these possibilities are counter to colonial hierarchical nature-culture relations. Responding to climate change requires Indigenous presencing that centers the sustainable knowledges and practices of Indigenous peoples (Wildcat, 2013). Responding also requires the rematriation of Indigenous lands—land back:

Land theft is currently driven by an unsustainable, undemocratic, and fatal rush toward mass extinction through extraction, development, and capitalist imperatives. It is further enabled by a racist erasure of Indigenous law and jurisdiction. As Yellowhead Research Fellow Sákéj Henderson has noted, this fatal rush functions as a kind of malware released into our ecological system. Indigenous legal orders embody critical knowledge that can relink society to a healthy balance within the natural world. (Yellowhead Institute, 2019, p. 8)

Conversations and actions on decolonizing responses to climate change, including land rematriation, are growing. However climate change education remains dominated by Western science, technocratic logics that leave unexamined colonial nature-culture relations that are predicated on ongoing access to Indigenous lands-as-resource (Liboiron, 2021). Both within and beyond education “[e]nvironmentalism does not usually address colonialism and often reproduces it” (Liboiron, 2021, p. 11). We are interested in possibilities for climate change education in multiple contexts, to inhabit the question of what decolonizing nature-culture relations might look like. As the interviews with Bang and Marin and with Nelson-Barber in this issue suggest, there is much to be learned, for instance, from Indigenous-led, community-based land education programs and the emplaced knowledges, practices, and survivance strategies that they embody.

Our conversation with scholars from the CLEAR Lab also underlines the necessity of relational orientations that undo individualist and capitalist-driven theories of change in responding to climate change. Like our conversation with Bang and Marin, these scholars remind us that responses to climate change need to be underpinned by a recognition that colonialism enacts relations with lands and waters that are responsible for climate change alongside other violences on people and more-than-human relations. Max Liboiron, Katherine Crocker, and Deondre Smiles offer important provocations for education in orienting towards collective ethics; they ask how we might work with the complex entanglements of individual responsibility and the necessity of being in good relations with Indigenous peoples and lands. They underline the importance of enacting research and pedagogical practices that are grounded in anti-colonial relations and that such practices require radical imaginaries of what is possible within academic spaces. As we learned from them in in our interview, stories of the harms of colonialism and the climate crisis colonialism causes are not enough when extractive dynamics have not been disrupted. Serving up pain stories of climate crisis experienced by Indigenous communities is not the theory of change of the CLEAR Lab, whereas with mutual partnerships between Indigenous communities and collaborators, those stories might be able to do entirely different work.

One curricular intervention that aligns with disrupting extractive dynamics is the practice of “relational reading” found in the article “Power of Country: Indigenous Relationality and Reading Indigenous Climate Fiction in Australia,” by Sandra Phillips, Larissa McLean-Davies, and Sarah E. Truman. The authors consider the possibilities for practices of relational reading in secondary classrooms through an analysis of the recent addition of Waanyi author Wright’s (2006) Carpentaria to the state of Victoria’s high-stakes exam list. Carpentaria, Wright’s award winning “cli-fi” or climate fiction novel, is set in the fictional town of Desperance, on the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Told from many vantage points, the novel unfurls the story of entwined pasts-presents-and-futures of Indigenous obligations to lands and waters, mining, climate catastrophe, settler colonialism, and the constant shifts and slippages of time and relation between communities and more-that-human kin. Phillips, McLean-Davies, and Truman attend to the neoliberal context of high-stakes testing that inform and are simultaneously exceeded by the politics of introducing such a novel to the state exam list in Australia and a Zoom visit between the novel’s author and secondary students in an English class in Victoria, Australia. The authors theorize the significance of the adoption of a text that plunges readers deeply into an understanding of Country, of land as sentient, as active. Providing both a close reading of Carpentaria, and of what this text can do in a secondary English classroom, this article makes note of how the nature, structure, and social purpose of state examinations may inevitably constrain the relational reading practices the novel provokes. This article makes a cautionary argument for Indigenous ontological relational reading and how it cannot easily fit into colonial curricula, assessment, and pedagogy.

Attending to Black Ecologies

Alongside an undoing of colonial human-centric nature-culture relations that keep settler colonialism in place, educational responses to climate change require a reckoning with the disproportionate impacts of climate change. While such liberatory-oriented responses to the climate crisis and environmental precarity have a long history outside of education, the flattening and universalizing discourses of the Anthropocene continue to have a firm hold in education.² J.T. Roane (this issue) describes current climate change discourse as de-agential, rather than clarifying histories of genocide or slavery. We are interested in how educational responses to climate-induced precarity might unsettle the Anthropocene’s erasures through engagement with work in Black geographies and Black ecologies that make visible the ways in which “Black resistance is always already tending to other ecologies of being(s)” (Brown, 2021, p. 14).

The article titled “‘Like You Can Tell a River Where to Go’: Floods, Ecological Formations, and Storied Pedagogies of Place” by Benjamin D. Scherrer stories Mississippi river floods and their impacts on the area known as Flood City by juxtaposing writings by Louisiana author Ernest Gaines, histories of flooding, and colonial efforts to control the river. Thinking with fugitivity, Scherrer engages with the question of how Black geographies and ecologies, anti-colonial orientations, and more-than-human storying can interrupt dominant humanist and colonizing understandings of climate-related displacement such as what Scherrer terms plantation hydrologics. Such interruptions include stories of Black communities’ resistance to technological fixes to the problem of flooding, Ernest Gaines’s storying of Black and Indigenous ways of relating to the river, and attention to the river’s agency. This work attends to spatialized anti-Blackness and the ways in which Black ecological relationships and knowledges subvert geographies of domination (Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick, 2006).

Next, Tamara Butler’s article titled “Disruptions at the Edges: Ecotone Crossing with Black and Indigenous Creative Pedagogues,” brings Black and Indigenous women poetics to engage matters of ecological concern that include centering Black and Indigenous land relations and knowledges. Within the context of her Black Studies and English education classes, Butler enacts teaching in conversation with ecological precarity and highlights how education can be a site to creatively disrupt the erasure of Black land relations. Butler provides important insights on how interdisciplinarity might be put to work to connect ecological precarity, environmental injustice, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. This is beautifully demonstrated through pedagogical examples of a close reading of Black feminist poetry and scholarly writing on bees alongside a documentary on Wet’suwet’en land defenders. The article also shows the necessity of centering Land in climate change pedagogies. Drawing from the work of King (2019), an important contribution of the article is in the conceptualization of pedagogical engagements with poetry as a potential for ecotonal practices that bring Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous knowledges into conversation and that work within a generative space between the disciplines of environmental education, Black studies, and English education.

Engaging Interdisciplinary Pedagogies

As illustrated by Butler, interdisciplinary educational responses to climate change are imperative when underpinned by liberatory theories of change, including “rematriation, reparations, regeneration, sovereignty, self-determination, de-colonization, resurgence, the good life, futurisms” (Tuck & Yang, 2016, p. 9). This means that climate change education needs to be more than a cognitive “learning about”; it requires embodied and affective immersion in and ethical commitments towards building alternative worlds and relations (Bang, 2020; Nxumalo & Berg, 2020). Taken together, working with anti-colonial liberatory theories of change in climate change education entangles affective pedagogies, ethical commitments, and engagements with what situated modes of relational living are needed to build “just systems of thriving and sustainability” (Bang, 2020, p. 8). These orientations underline the importance of interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that enact expansive understandings of what counts as climate change education—bringing together, for example, knowledges from the natural sciences, the environmental humanities, Indigenous science, Black ecologies, the arts … and more.

Interdisciplinarity, underpinned by relational thinking and doing, also holds potential to enact pedagogical disruptions of the neoliberal individualist formations of the human that we referred to at the beginning of this editorial (McKittrick, 2021). Sylvia Wynter’s work underlines these disruptions of neoliberal humanity as requiring recognition that “narrative is scientific (to enunciate stories is a physiological practice) and science is narrated (evolution is a socially produced origin story)” (McKittrick et al., 2018, p. 868). Brought to contexts of climate change education, this suggests that the science of climate change, how its effects and responses thereof are narrated, who is doing the narration, and where the narration is situated are all important aspects of climate change education. Put another way, pedagogical stories and story-telling have the capacity to create ethico-onto-epistemologies that are otherwise to extractive individualist logics.

Similar to Butler, another interdisciplinary pedagogical disruption is seen in the article titled “Composting (in) the Gender Studies Classroom: Growing Feminisms for Climate Changing Pedagogies.” In this article, Astrida Neimanis and Laura McLauchlan walk us through the teaching of an undergraduate course called “Gender and the Environment” at the University of Sydney, Australia. The authors highlight the importance of interdisciplinary pedagogies and put forward “composting” as a guide for pedagogical commitments for climate change education that bring together intersectional feminist, anti-colonial, crip, and queer orientations through transmodal engagements that include literature, poetics, and affective attunements. Neimanis and McLauchlan show how climate change education can be enacted in ways that trouble human exceptionalism, pay attention to inequitably distributed human vulnerabilities, and notice the mattering of affective classroom atmospheres in climate change education. This article powerfully highlights the necessity of educational responses that refuse the separation of current conditions of environmental precarity from settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. An important unique contribution of this article to the special issue is illustrating how carefully attending to and pedagogically responding to the embodied affects of climate change education can complexify dominant narratives of hope and despair.

Interdisciplinarity also remains key in any project of climate justice. In the article titled “Climate Justice Pedagogies in Green Building Curriculum,” authors Miriam Solis, Will Davis, and Abby Randall take up the question of how climate justice might be centered through green building curriculum. Green building, as an area that cuts across fields such as architecture, design, and urban planning, is concerned with the ways in which the built environment can engage issues of sustainability. The authors engage environmental justice and critical place inquiry lenses to critically inquire into a career and technical education program for youth in a high school serving marginalized communities in Austin, Texas. This article brings needed attention to the ways in which career and technical education, an area which has not received much attention in climate education research, can be reconceptualized to centre climate justice. Solis, Davis, and Randall provide an insightful analysis of the ways in which normative green building curriculum can enact erasures including erasures of settler colonialism and the effects of gentrification and displacement. Critically, this article resists tackling climate change as an issue that “silos the climate out from other ‘social issues’,” as Roane suggests in the interview in this issue (p. 131). The article underlines the importance of pedagogical approaches that involve youth as co-planners and co-architects of their communities rather than passive recipients of curriculum. The youth participants offered sharp analyses of the effects of environmental harms in their communities and radical imaginaries of what justice-oriented design might entail. This research illustrates that more work is needed that situates green building and green building curriculum within current conditions of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

Conclusion

In this special issue, we are listening to climate scholars and educators who are enacting creative and compelling curricular interventions on varied scales and across diverse geographies. We have put together a collection of articles and interviews that emphasize why we need to slow down in thinking and acting on “common-sense” climate change education interventions. When the scholars we interview remind us that climate crisis both is colonialism and is an outcome of colonialism, or that climate crisis is ecocide and herbicide, suddenly addressing climate change is not the addition of a new special secret something. Instead, it is doing what we have to do to make life more livable anyway. There is a clarity of connection, a clarity of purpose that was made possible in crafting these interviews and then bridging these ideas with the research projects featured in this issue—one that is foreclosed when we think of addressing climate change as separate from rematriation of lands and waters, separate from the things that Black and Indigenous communities are already doing to make life amid destruction.

What was also made clear by the interviewees is that schools of education have a particular or outstanding responsibility in addressing climate change; they are part of larger systems of university labour which, under capitalism, are always going to be implicated in ongoing colonial relations and harm. Yet, as illustrated by the curricular interventions highlighted in this issue, the scale of climate crisis cannot freeze us away from action—how we make relation, how we theorize, how we imagine all matters for the worlds we are trying to bring into being.

We hope that, together, this set of interviews and articles can be clarifying in both connection and purpose for readers. There is hope here, but not too much. There is horror here, but not too much. There is possibility here, but only if we tell the truth. There is truth here, but only if it is told towards possibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fikile Nxumalo

Fikile Nxumalo is Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, where she directs the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. She is also affiliated faculty in the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on anti-colonial place-based and environmental education.

Preeti Nayak

Preeti Nayak is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research examines how racialized high school teachers and community educators across Southern Ontario engage youth on issues of climate justice. Broadly, she is interested in how educators enact local climate justice pedagogies that make sense of epistemic diversity and racial justice, in the context of the climate crisis.

Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. Tuck is the founding director of the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. Tuck is Unangax and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.

Notes

1 Youth climate activists have called out several important issues with COP26. For instance, they have pointed to their tokenized presence and the lack of meaningful access to negotiations, particularly for racially marginalized and Indigenous youth (Guye, 2021). They have also criticized the large presence and disproportionate access of the fossil fuel industry at the conference and the strategy of “climate delay” in relation to future promises by world and business leaders to cut emissions (Guye, 2021; Nugent, 2021).

2 See Davis and Todd (2017) and Davis et al. (2019) for important insights on the erasures and universalisms of dominant Anthropocene discourses.