Ecosocialist Pedagogies: Introduction

The three of us have been passionate about having a special edition of CNS devoted to pedagogies that were attuned to history, power and politics. We wanted to explore pedagogies with ecosocialist potential that followed a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach that are rarely analyzed or taken seriously by political or social thinkers or even natural scientists. That is despite the fact that nearly all of those who engage in research and academic work spend some of their time teaching, or have done so at some point in their career.

Our goal here is to start to sketch out an ecosocialist vision that prefigures a collective coexistence of self-liberated people outside of any hierarchical gender-class-race differences (Kovel 2002). To keep this special edition manageable, we have had to omit detailed discussion of nonhuman and natural rights perspectives, but a key theme is difference as historically specified and as part of political processes and capitalist systems. Particularly, we have in mind the kind of difference that engages the collective knowledge of marginal people, the recovery of oppositional histories of domination and subordination, and the possibilities of alliance across difference.

Disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge is not based on any one epistemological enterprise, as they arise from our praxis, engagements with the world, academic upbringings, political aims and ideologies. We suggest that disciplinary boundaries matter less than questions of power, history, and self-identity. Most, if not all, institutionalized knowledge that we routinely engage with or communicate from textbooks, policy documents and maps is codified in colonial or settler principles, which are both authoritarian and central to the capitalist system. Hence, our manifest intellectual plurality and radical inklings notwithstanding, we came together to discuss our pedagogical experiences and efforts to subvert institutionalized oppressions.

Neoliberal economic empires operate through control, domination and accumulation at the expense of species at the bottom of the hierarchies they institute. One way to resist this is to consistently engage with radical projects and simultaneously refine teaching techniques responding to increasing socio-ecological injustices. Efforts like these have been undertaken by our contributors.

First, through the contributions in this special edition, we suggest that an ecosocialist approach to education is distinct from other radical and libertarian approaches, and this position can yield interesting insights into philosophies of education.

Second, against-the-grain pedagogical frameworks can promote nonhierarchical student cooperation on projects in class and in local communities. They can introduce theories that resonate with the everyday experiences of students from oppressed groups. They can sanction participatory and action-oriented learning, encourage problem-based learning and a dialogical method of problem-solving, as well as promote experiential learning by following “other” histories and context-specific struggles.

Third, in this journal’s title the two antagonistic forces of “capitalism” and “socialism” bracket “nature,” pointing to its focus on ecologically sound socialist (gender-) egalitarian alternatives, and making Capitalism Nature Socialism the natural outlet for the articles included here.

Pedagogies should not stand as a set of loose ideas or prejudices disconnected from history, power and politics (Engel-DiMauro 2009; Koyabashi 2006), passively spilling over information (Freire 1970) while studying “other” communities as detached subjectivities (Fanon [1952] 1967). Pedagogies should instead produce internationally sensitive students (Merrett 2004) who will be tolerant towards other cultures, engage with transnational projects, with reflexive pedagogy (Crang 1998), “border pedagogy” (Giroux 1991) and experiential methods (Suissa 2001).

In the mainstream academy, conventional educational models based on apolitical, technocratic and state-legitimized ideological knowledge are usually recommended as superior forms of knowledge. By contrast, ecosocialist perspectives, rich in insights on relational ways of understanding human and nonhuman processes and collaborations and their environmental implications, are devalued. Nonhuman species, ignored for so long by even radical pedagogical writers such as Paolo Freire, ought not to go unnoticed. We are not suggesting that teaching alone can disrupt institutionalized boundaries or disturb reductionist views of people and environment. But teaching is one way among many to challenge capitalist exploitation within the academic system and beyond. Knowledge is socially-constructed and situated. All knowledge, particularly that which is produced in the academy, is pedagogical, and all pedagogy is political (Castree 2008). Everyday classroom relations are therefore crucial for the struggle for egalitarianism and for uncovering the realities of social oppression (McLaren and Houston 2005). In this edition, Sutapa Chattopadhyay justifies her use of a self-reflexive pedagogy, following her personal teaching trajectory, ethnographic experiences, and theoretical approaches to feminism, anarchism and anti-/de-colonial struggles. According to her, humans and ecosystems are linked with one another in knots by our everyday actions and by the histories of domination and repression in ways that cannot be overlooked. “Any institutionalized, essentialist, corporate-driven teaching content cannot be challenged without a mutual synthesis of teacher-student knowledge, critical formulations of social and political realities through praxis, action and place-based environmental pedagogy,” the author holds. For Chattopadhyay, this has been the most important reason for the development of an anti-authoritarian (Indigenous) people-environment-centric pedagogy. She draws together radical geography, anarcha-ecofeminist and de-colonial philosophical trends.

Indigenous methodologies involve generational knowledge, defy methodological restrictions, acknowledge situated perspectives and can set the central need and pathways for solidarity projects. These aspects show that radical teaching alone cannot sensitize students to the challenges of those who are most affected by climate change unless teachers engage their students outside their classroom with local community experiences. In this special issue Levi Gahman and Gabrielle Legault’s piece opens a discussion on settler colonialism by following their experiences in radical organizing with local communities. The authors show that scientific progress and the purported superior needs of the colonizers exploited and continue to repress the knowledge and lands of Indigenous “others.” In undergraduate Women’s and Gender Studies classes, they replace Eurocentric knowledge and institutionalized pedagogies with Indigenous knowledge shared by members of the communities themselves. They reveal how de-colonial and place-based teaching methods can be “leveraged against settler colonial institutions, discourses, and logics to unsettle their claims to legitimacy, land, and authority over learning.”

Laurence Cox opens up the possibility of envisioning a pedagogy based on Irish working-class community organizing experiences, rural environmental justice alliances and women’s and LGTBQ activism to reimagine education as an outlet that can maximize the potential for everyone’s self-determination. To move to a wider and nuanced activist understanding, Cox starts concretely from exploring participants’ existing praxes, honing in on mutual experiences of struggle and exploiting “frozen” movement theory.

Anne Harley reflects on counter-hegemonic thinking and theory from below, following the issues of food sovereignty to her teaching at the University of KwaZulu Natal. She employs the knowledge gathered from the Food Festival there to subvert the innately oppressive industrialization of food and the interlocking hegemonic discourses of food security. Her readings of Freire and her understanding of the global peasants’ movement La Via Campesina help her formulate counter-hegemonic interventions towards an alternative pedagogy.

Judith Watson suggests that the challenge of radical pedagogy is to involve the development of critical knowledge while critiquing scientific knowledge that is mobilized by corporate capital. Academics can also carve out a space for historically silenced people to construct knowledge. These knowledge bases that emerge from transgressing monolithic Eurocentric knowledge make possible a conceptualization of knowledge as self-transformatory and as a praxis through the modification of its structure and the power it embodies. As Watson writes, “alternative educational spaces and networks, such as free universities, can be precursors of a genuine learning society … There is sufficient data, information, knowledge and skill to support the transition from the fossil fuel economy. What is lacking is the wisdom to do so.”

Acknowledgements

Sutapa first suggested having a special issue on pedagogies in Capitalism Nature Socialism devoted to ecosocialist prefigurations. This led to Salvatore Engel-di Mauro's suggestion of Judith as a co-editor following her long involvement in students' and workers struggles', and ecological and peace movements. Apart from this, her passion towards devising non-authoritarian higher education pedagogy was the thread that connected her to this issue. The discussions further led to including as an editor Levi, who was working on de-colonial teaching frameworks. Our choice of Laurence and Anne also followed their mixing of activism and teaching, and long engagement with counter-capitalist movements. All the contributions were based on the authors' profound commitment to alternative teaching strategies geared to students, workers, farmers, prisoners, etc. Adi Forkasiewicz's help with the edits and suggestions in particular those on the exclusion of non-human species from ecofeminist and ecosocialist works has been edifying. The contributions of several peer reviewers must not go unnoticed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.