Reframing Westernized culture: insights from a Critical Friends Group on EcoJustice education

Abstract

In this article I report the findings of an intrinsic case study involving seven ecologically minded teachers who participated in a Critical Friends Group (CFG) for five months. The topic of our discussions was EcoJustice education, which involves analyzing and reframing Westernized culture. Findings are focused on how the participants grappled with what EcoJustice education means and their affective responses to both the content and the professional development experience. Analysis of the data revealed that reframing Westernized culture takes time, that it is not merely an intellectual exercise but also an emotional and psychological one, and that personal internalization comes before practical application. The participants also indicated that they valued being in a CFG where they could be honest and vulnerable as well as supported, connected, inspired, and challenged. I conclude by recommending CFGs as a model for transformative professional development in environmental education.

Keywords:

• EcoJustice education
• transformative learning
• Critical Friends Groups
• professional development

Notes

1. Following Hall (1996), I use the term Westernized as a historical rather than a geographical construct. Westernized cultures have adopted or been influenced by the cultural, economic, or political systems of Europe and North America and are considered industrialized, developed, urbanized, capitalist, and modern. Mehmet (1995, 2) described Westernization as ‘reconstructing or shaping the rest of the world on western norms and institutions.’ In the past two centuries colonization and globalization have led to the Westernization of cultures around the world. For examples of Westernization see Norberg-Hodge (1991) and Thong (2012).

2. Others have critiqued environmental education for similar reasons (e.g. Fien 1995; Saylan and Blumstein 2011; Sobel 2012).

3. Bowers (2001) wrote about ‘eco-justice’ over a decade ago, but Martusewicz, Lupinacci, and Edmundson (2011) chose to designate their iteration of the work as ‘EcoJustice’ education. The term is used in other fields as well. Ecological justice is a topic of philosophical inquiry (e.g. Baxter 2005). Ecojustice is a Canadian environmental justice organization that represents community groups, non-profits, First Nations, and individuals in court. Eco-justice Ministries is an ecumenical agency that works toward social justice and environmental sustainability. Charting the similarities and differences between eco-justice, ecojustice, and EcoJustice is beyond the scope of this article.

4. According to Kulnieks and Young (2014, 184), eco-justice education involves two primary tasks. The first is ‘a critical cultural and linguistic analysis of the ecological and social crises … through a critique of modernism, local-global and scientific-technological perspectives, and the mechanistic nature of root metaphors that frame language and perception.’ The second ‘involves identifying diverse cultural methods for possible activism through an analysis of the local environment, identifying non-monetized relationships, place-based learning, and an integration of intergenerational knowledge’ (185).See also Stanley and Young (2011).

5. The discourses of modernity include the following: anthropocentrism (the belief that humans are superior to everything else), ethnocentrism (the belief that some ‘races’ or cultures are superior to others), scientism (the belief that reason is the most advanced way of knowing), androcentrism (the belief that men are superior to women), consumerism (the belief that consuming material goods is a marker of success and will lead to happiness); commodification (the belief that ‘the market’ is the best means of determining value); and individualism (the belief that individual needs are greater than community needs).

6. The cultural and environmental commons can be defined as ‘the right of local people to define their own grid, their own forms of community respect for watercourses, meadows, or paths; to resolve conflicts their own way; to translate what enters their ken into the personal terms of their own dialect; to be “biased” against the “rights” of outsiders to local “resources” in ways usually unrecognized by modern laws; to treat their home not simply as a location housing transferrable goods and chunks of population but as irreplaceable and even to be defended at all costs’ (The Ecologist 1994, 111). Additionally, the cultural and environmental commons represents ‘the lived alternatives to money-dependent activities’ and ‘potential sites of resistance to the spread of the consumer-dependent lifestyle’ (Bowers and Martusewicz 2009, 273).

7. There are notable similarities between EcoJustice education and what Gruenewald (2003) called a critical pedagogy of place. The social and ecological objectives of a critical pedagogy of place are reinhabitation and decolonization. Reinhabitation is ‘learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation’ (9). It also means determining ‘what cultural patterns should be conserved or transformed to promote more ecologically sustainable communities’ (9). Gruenewald described decolonization as the underside of reinhabitation: ‘learning to recognize disruption and injury and to address their causes’ (9). Recently, however, the notion of place, and even the terms reinhabitation and decolonization, have been critiqued. For example, Paperson (2014, 124) wrote that ‘decolonization is not just symbolic; its material core is repatriation of native life and land, which is incommensurable with settler re-inhabitation of native land.’ Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy (2014, 17) argued that ‘if theories of reinhabitation are reliant upon replacement discourses … or other discourses that attempt to relieve settler anxiety and dis-location, reinhabitation may actually thwart decolonization.’ According to Calderon (2014, 33), place-based education does not consider ‘the ways in which place is foundational to settler colonialism.’ These scholars rightly point out that ‘place’ is not a benign construct; that it must be interrogated historically, socially, culturally, and politically; and that any form of place-based education – or any attempts at reinhabitation or decolonization – must not perpetuate the very modernist discourses and assumptions that EcoJustice education seeks to transform. See also Bowers (2008) and Greenwood (2008).

8. Historically, the environmental movement has struggled with issues of diversity (Bonta and Jordan 2007; Jordan and Snow 1992).

9. Are men better than women? Who might think so? Who might not? What messages circulate about gender in our culture? How should we evaluate those messages? Are technological inventions always good? How should we evaluate whether new technologies and inventions are good or not? What about the invention of machine guns, nuclear weapons, and personal computers? Who thinks these are mostly good advances in human history? Who thinks they have led to mostly negative consequences? Are humans more important than animals? Who thinks humans are better and why? Who thinks humans, animals, plants, and nature are basically equal in value and why? What contributes to people thinking the way that they do about humans and nature? Are people in “rich” countries (like the United States) better than people in the “poorest” countries? What explains why some people have a lot of money and others don’t? Are some cultures just better than others? How do we define what makes one country, culture, or person better than another? How do we usually define “rich” and “poor” and why?

10. Spivak (1988) used this term when writing about the politics of re-presentation, specifically calling for an unlearning of privilege. Moore-Gilbert (1997, 98) defined unlearning as the ‘imperative to reconsider positions that once seemed self-evident and normal.’ According to Andreotti (2007, 76), however, Spivak ceased using the term ‘unlearning privilege’ in favor of ‘learning to learn from below,’ which ‘demands learning about “human wrongs” and the legacies’ that created them in the first place.