Why a dispositional view of ecological literacy is needed

ABSTRACT

In this Points of Departure, we present four vignettes from our teaching to argue that a dispositional view of ecological literacy is needed for Justice-Based Environmental Sustainability (JBES). Having such a perspective can enable educators to encourage students to learn to develop the habit to critically problematize sustainability (e.g. ‘the sustainability of what values and actions’) and development (e.g. ‘development for and by whom’). From this perspective, people need to develop an inclination to act for the larger planetary good (i.e. praxis) and towards JBES. We also argue that this view of ecological literacy will require teachers to critically engage with their lessons to ensure that lessons are crafted to counter socio-environmental injustices that can lead to JBES action throughout one’s life. Taking a dispositional view, then, means the ecological literacies reside in the learner and its teaching emerges as something akin the education of moral character.

Japanese abstract

このポイントオブデパーチャー論文は、教育現場の4 つのエピソードを取り上げ、正義に基づく環境の持続可能性 (JBES) を達成するためには性質的観点で捉えた環境リテラシーが重要であることを考察する。学生が持続可能性（例えば、「どのような価値観・行動の持続可能性」 ）や開発 （例えば、「誰のための・誰による開発」) について批判的思考で分析し、問題視する習慣が定着することを促す役割を教員が担うことを、この観点の探究により検討する。加えて、この観点は地球全体の公益やJBESを達成するための取り組み（つまり、実践）を実行する傾向を養うことを強調している。更に、学生が生涯を通じて社会や環境に関する不正に立ち向かい、JBESの行動に繋がることを習慣とすることを目標とした教案をデザインすることを提言する。環境リテラシーを性質的観点で捉えることにより、道徳教育と類似するものとなり得るが、本論文は環境リテラシーを学習者自身が身に付ける動機の重要性を考える。

KEYWORDS:

• Ecology
• environmental education
• critical thinking
• global classrooms
• learner dispositions

Introduction

Against the backdrop of educating for an understanding of Nature¹ and planetary sustainability beyond the anthroposphere [e.g. justice-based environmental sustainability (JBES; Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023); critical literacies of development, sustainability, and sustainable development (Misiaszek 2020a); global citizenship (Davies 2006; Misiaszek 2020b); ecopedagogies (Misiaszek 2017, 2020a, 2020b)], how might we rethink ecological literacy? One way to begin this rethinking is to reflect on education in ancient Greece. Kazamias (2009, 2012), note how the Greeks highly regarded the concept of Paideia, which was the process by which a person learned to become a model citizen. Paideia was a special concept to pedagogues as education was not understood to be about the command of fixed knowledge or the control of a skill; rather, Paideia was about the formation of a person’s character (Kazamias 2012). In this Points of Departure, we deem that inherent in a dispositional view of ecological literacy is learning that fosters critical, reflective thinking with a wider and deeper literacy (Freire 1993, 2000, 2004; Misiaszek 2020a, 2020b) of socio-environmental injustices that can lead to JBES action throughout one’s life. We came to this position after reading Misiaszek and Rodrigues (2023) and discussing how to apply JBES lessons to our classrooms. In doing so, we found ourselves engaging with stories from our teachings that illustrated opportunities for JBES teaching and learning in and out of the formal classroom setting. In what follows, we share four of our stories as vignettes to illustrate our dispositional view of ecological literacies.

Our contexts

Our university is a private, largely an undergraduate institution in Japan with a range of STEM, liberal arts, and humanities majors. Embedded within this context, our program, the Faculty of Liberal Arts is an undergraduate program taught and administered entirely in English. As such, many of our students hail from Asia Pacific, Europe, or the Americas, with ‘over fifty nationalities’ represented, ‘including students educated at Japanese and international high schools in Japan, as well as both degree students and exchange students from abroad.’² We believe that our heterogenous classroom situation is a part of a trend occurring not only in Japan (Ota 2018) but also globally in higher education through increased study options for international students and virtual collaborations (de Wit and Altbach 2023).

Why a dispositional view?

Many educational theorists consider the application of learning to the various real-world situations students will encounter later in life to be an important aspect of being able to think (Bloom 1956; Ennis 1987; Halpern 1998; Bailin and Siegel 2003; Lai 2011; Paul 2018). We hold a similar perspective and apply a dispositional view of thinking to our teaching of ecological literacy. As posited by Perkins, Jay, and Tishman (1993), three essential components of a disposition are: inclination, sensitivity, and ability.

Inclination refers to the person’s felt tendency toward behavior X. For example, a person with an inclination to open-minded thinking will feel a leaning toward open-minded thinking when he or she discerns the need. Sensitivity, in contrast, refers to the person’s alertness to X occasions. For example, a person sensitive to the need for open-minded thinking will notice the occasions where narrow thinking and prejudice and bias are likely and open-mindedness [is] [sic] called for. Finally, ability, of course, refers to the actual ability to follow through with behavior X. A person with the ability to be open-minded knows how to go about it: resisting the impulse to decide quickly, listening to evidence for rival points, and so on. (1993, 4, emphasis original)

From this perspective, we argue that a dispositional view of ecological literacy is needed to promote learning that encourages students to have the inclination, sensitivity, and ability to apply their learning in the capacities they can. We argue all three components of this definition of dispositions are essential to fostering an active and critical engagement with learning that forms the praxis of ecological literacy, equipping students with a JBES understanding that moves beyond the anthropocentric curricula plaguing education worldwide (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023). Critical educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (2000) emphasizes the nexus of a human’s understanding of the world and their ability to take action to change it.

[H]uman beings emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand it and transform it with their labor. … [H]uman activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. (Freire 2000, 125)

Such a view not only forefronts a dispositional view of education, but it also makes said view an imperative. A dispositional view aligns well with Freire’s constructive lessons (1992, 1993, 2000, 2004) that counter neoliberal teachings that preordain students to accept the market values of corporations as unavoidable realities (1992) and that offer, instead, hope in a just society in which all oppression will end (2000). This, too, rings in harmony with the praxis of ecopedagogies that fosters critical thinking and transformability with the aim to eradicate social and environmental violence (Misiaszek 2017, 2020a, 2020b). Ecological literacy as a disposition, then, is most effective when coupled with a critical understanding of global inequities because such a perspective can add a personal dimension to issues such as water pollution and poverty.

A disposition to think global, act local

The slogan, ‘Think Global, Act Local’ became a call for local action with the hopes that such actions will have wider, positive implications for global citizenship and Earth (Davies 2006). Acting local in the university classroom setting means promoting key ecopedagogical principles, such as integrating critical reflection and planning for action (i.e. fostering a dispositional view of ecological literacy), and creating activities for raising environmental consciousness through group and field work (i.e. praxis). Although facilitating students’ understanding of climate change is an integral step for students to ‘Think Global,’ in this paper we underscore some critical challenges of a global classroom that can hinder students’ engagement (i.e. disposition) to ‘Act Local.’ To illustrate that a dispositional view of ecological literacy is a reasonable abstraction, we present vignettes from our teaching: two from a course on critical thinking and two from an anthropology course about urban Nature.

Critical thinking vignette 1: Twenty first-year university students are participating in small-group discussions about Aldo Leopold’s (1949) Land Ethic. The professor asks: Can modern society abandon its anthropocentric ways and change to the development of an ‘ecological conscience,’ that might later become a ‘Land Ethic?’ What would need to change for this to happen? After some time, the professor solicits responses and begins a dialogue of Socratic questioning. Slowly, students begin to examine their thinking processes and the moral principles and ethics underpinning their choices (i.e. sensitivity). Materializing from the discussion is a nuanced understanding of a land ethic that rests on the principle that an organism (humans included) is a member of an interdependent community with no rights to opt out (i.e. inclination). Students then return to their groups to discuss anthropocentric actions in our daily lives to which a land ethic might be applied (i.e. ability).

In a lesson following the land ethic discussion, students are pushed to consider the interconnectedness of important world issues and the climate crisis through a problem-posing exercise.

Critical thinking vignette 2: Students move into small groups, and the professor poses ‘the billion-dollar question:’ You have one billion dollars. Do you use it to help people living in poverty or apply it to the climate crisis? You can choose only one issue to help. Groups quickly find themselves in a dilemma (i.e. ability). Some students note helping those living in poverty would significantly improve the lives of millions (i.e. sensitivity), and others recall how marginalized peoples, including the impoverished, are more adversely affected by climate change than most people (i.e. sensitivity). Other students note how many people suffer environmental injustices (e.g. deforestation) threatening basic human rights, such as subsistence agriculture (i.e. sensitivity). After several minutes, the professor begins another dialogue with students, pushing them for justifications to highlight the moral and ethical implications of their choice (i.e. sensitivity). The class ends with small group discussions debating that the question is flawed. It should not be an either/or issue (i.e. inclination) because the issues are related to humanity and Earth as one (i.e. Nature).

At face value, the lessons were a success. Students engaged their critical thinking skills, defended their positions using valid arguments, considered the moral and ethical basis on which their decisions were made, worked in pairs to generate other situations to which the principle of a land ethic could be applied, and, finally, collectively identified the interconnection of important world issues such as poverty and climate change. The lessons are also representative of first steps towards how one might combat anthropocentric teaching practices (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023, Question 6) through an exploration of a land ethic in students’ daily lives and by problem-posing that focus on the relationship of world issues. However, two important points emerge. The first point is the assumption that students will now apply the lessons to their lives. In other words, will students have the inclination and sensitivity to notice instances that they can ‘act local’ with a land ethic, or take local action to amend an environmental injustice or violation of human rights? The second point is whether they will develop a disposition to think about and reflect on the consequences of their actions in connection to the environmental injustices that persist. Although the first point is important, it is the second point, we argue, that poses the biggest threat to the potential contribution of ecological literacy to improving the world we live in.

Teaching for conceptual change is most effective when students learn with the aim to understand the concepts deeply and thoroughly (Perkins et al. 2000). Thus, in the critical thinking vignette, when the professor employs small group work the pedagogical effect sought is a deeper comprehension and conceptual understanding of Nature through critically thinking about anthropocentricism and land ethics. However, no matter how well a land ethic is understood by students they may choose to not act when, for example, social pressures forestall moral reasoning and critical thinking. Therefore, we assert, that a dispositional view of ecological literacy is needed to delineate it akin character development, which is what Paideia (i.e. education, Kazamias 2012) is supposed to be about. It might be easy to dismiss this view with a retort that one cannot teach a disposition, as students regularly show signs of understanding a moral concept in the classroom but fail to produce the same moral in their daily lives. We offer the rebuttal that this problem exists for nearly all areas of education. Thus, although control of ideas in the classroom does not necessarily mean they will carry over to life in general, educators continue to teach for the application of knowledge to life during and after formal education, and so it should be with ecological literacy.

One way to teach an enduring disposition for ecological praxis would be to operationalize the slogan ‘Think Global, Act Local’ in the classroom. A classroom such as ours might seem fitting, since students are already globally oriented at a personal level: climate impacts such as wildfires in Australia, flooding in South Asia, or sea-level rise in Oceania are reported by those who consider those countries home or have lived there. Students also gain sensitivity by having taken courses that teach about the connection between ecological crises and issues of development, sustainability, and environmental justice. Thus, the diverse backgrounds of our students and the program’s curriculum seem conducive to nurturing the students’ sensitivity to global environmental justice issues (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023, Question 1 and 2). Thinking globally is, relatively speaking, easy in a global classroom.

Yet to ‘Act Local’ is more challenging. Our students have difficulty planning and taking effective environmental actions because they are often unfamiliar with the local context. Language is a key barrier, hindering access to government documents, academic reports, and popular media resources in the local language and obstructing direct communication with community members. A greater hurdle, however, is the students’ lack of local, or traditional, ecological knowledge (Berkes 1999; Kimmerer 2013), such as weather patterns, seasons, local fauna and flora, and landforms such as hills, brooks, and footpaths, the names, and locations of which only local children know (McFarlane 2016). Even linguistically fluent students often have difficulty navigating the culturally thick, intergenerationally transmitted, and often contested meanings ascribed to local places (Basso 1996).

This lack of local attachments can lessen the inclination to acknowledge their own impact on the environment, even in their immediate surroundings. The following vignette from an anthropology course on urban Nature shows the difficulty students often have with connecting personally with the local ecosystem.

Urban Nature course vignette 1: In an anthropology seminar held before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, 15 students are participating in a problem-based learning component. They are investigating the cause of the pollution in Tokyo Bay (i.e. sensitivity), which was condemned to be too dirty for rowing and marathon swimming competitions. A week before, students investigated an urban pond – observations, interviews, and water quality testing (i.e. ability) – to document the eutrophication (a type of water pollution) caused by dirty street runoffs. The professor then lectured on the major causes of Tokyo’s water pollution as aquifer depletion and the inflow of sewage and runoffs (i.e. sensitivity). The students are asked to decide on what to investigate next, to better understand the causes of pollution (i.e. inclination). But the professor is perplexed when the students decide to investigate toxic effluents from industrial factories (i.e. ability).

The assignment was designed to offer students an opportunity to study the local impact of climate change and urbanization. In Tokyo, one key climate impact is the intensification of rain events (Kato 2021), which can cause more sewage to flow out to the sea via rivers and ponds in some cities (Balaraman 2016). In other words, Tokyo Bay’s pollution, is caused by wastewater, including street runoffs but also household effluents such as dishwater, bathwater, and bodily waste (which in Tokyo is usually flushed into the sewerage).

Yet the students blamed corporations, and not the sewage infrastructure. Why? They may have been informed by our curriculum’s focus on globalization and capitalism, for which corporations often become a proxy. Conceivably the media coverage, at that time, of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant releasing radioactive water into the ocean may have given students the impression that corporate and government interests are behind all water pollution. Furthermore, students had learned about cases of industrial effluents polluting rivers, contaminating water, and damaging crops – injustices that deserve more attention worldwide (e.g. Kirsch 2014) but are rare in contemporary Japan. Thus, students may have been more inclined to blame corporations for the pollution instead of acknowledging that their own body waste ends up in Tokyo Bay and admitting their complicity in the pollution via the sewers.

Yet a more crucial factor in their choice may be a disposition shaped by a global orientation that prevents students from forming meaningful attachments to local communities and the ecological spaces that they inhabit. For their plans after graduation, many see Tokyo as a launching pad for a globe-trotting career. When they do think and act locally, they tend to be drawn to and have better access to pockets of the city that are crossroads for the global and the local: immigrant enclaves and spaces of global commerce. Students often perceive ‘Nature’ as beyond the city borders and across the sea, or at best sequestered, curated and manicured in urban parks and zoos (Marris 2013).

Students in global classrooms, therefore, may not be sensitive to or be inclined to engage with the local environment at a personal level. Sometimes, though, a little immersion in such environments can reset their dispositions.

Urban Nature course vignette 2: Students are on a walking tour near a pond on a spring day. The tour begins at a plaza by a subway entrance, where students are asked to make field observations (i.e. ability). The area is quintessential Tokyo: a five-way intersection with a highway above and three subway lines underneath. Students take photos of the drab, spruced plaza gardens but soon lose interest (i.e. inclination). Later the students are led to a grassy area under the highway, overlooking the pond. The professor explains the history of the pond, noting that homeless encampment under the highway was removed recently (i.e. sensitivity). But students are not listening. Instead, they are dazzled by flying butterflies, such as bluebottles, clouded yellows, pale grass blues, and small whites. The professor explains that the butterflies are feeding and lay eggs on the dandelions, wood sorrels, and clovers in this abandoned area, and that they are eaten by city-dwelling frogs, lizards, and birds (i.e. sensitivity). Distracted students continue to exclaim in wonder, however, not listening to the professor’s exposition (i.e. inclination).

Distractions are usually unwanted in classrooms, but here the butterflies captivated the students and nurtured an inclination to notice the ecological difference between two areas. More than just enchanting, the butterflies showed them the ecological and land-use difference between anthropocentric urban design (the plaza) and an undeveloped, ‘weed-infested’ space (grassy area). Their enthusiasm also derived from the fact that this experience required bodily movement and the use of senses often left dormant inside a classroom such as olfaction (the fragrance of flowers versus the highway fumes). Back in the classroom, the students discussed how non-human urbanites also deserve such habitats because they not only evoke a ‘sense of wonder’ (Carson 1965) but also provide important ecological services such as pollination, hence ensuring the health of the urban ecosystem.

Thus, students became inclined to appreciate these insects and enhanced their sensibility to the diversity of urban spaces. By caring about the butterflies, they also began to see how homelessness is connected to these derelict and forgotten urban spaces. The serendipitous encounter with the butterflies nurtured a sense of belonging to a specific locale by creating a new memory that became infused with a set of social and environmental values. This shared experience, of both mind and body, enabled the students to find global processes in their local observations, thus giving them a good foundation for JBES praxis.

Brief discussion and conclusion

In closing, we want to emphasize that the reconceptualization of ecological literacy through the lens of dispositions is far from being a panacea to address the problems of teaching for JBES in HE, and, we maintain, researchers should continue to call for the re-envisioning of constructs and for innovations of interventions to various aspects of HE towards a praxis worthy of Nature. That said, we contend that having a dispositional view of ecological literacy may be a critical step towards teaching students how to act local to address global issues as a vital part of achieving JBES praxis.

A dispositional view of ecological literacy can help facilitate a view that learning about the climate crisis is not enough, and students must learn to develop the habit (i.e. inclination) to critically problematize (i.e. sensitivity) sustainability (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023; Question 1) and development (Question 2) and act through praxis (i.e. ability) towards JBES. By this we mean to cultivate in students a sensitivity and knowledge to problematize, ‘development for and by whom,’ and ‘the sustainability of what values and actions,’ to develop an inclination to act for the larger planetary good, which may be one of the only ways to ‘achieve justice for all species and increase the chances that people will engage with actions to protect the environment’ (Ajaps 2023, 1030). Such acquisition of a disposition would ‘prepare both students and educators with the stamina for a long-haul, multi-generational journey of learning to think, feel, relate, and exist otherwise … ’ (Stein et al. 2023, 999).

As no education is apolitical (Freire 1992), a dispositional view of ecological literacy also requires teachers to critically engage with their sensitivities and to unlearn ‘human mastery and human exceptionalism’ (Young and Malone 2023, 1076) and to avoid solutionist pedagogies (Stein et al. 2023). This view also means teachers need to be aware of their inclinations to ensure a socially just mindset that feeds the lesson planning, which may be one way, for example, to address the problem of teachers being comfortable with Settler Colonialism ideas in their curricula (Bills and Klinsky 2023). As such, a dispositional view can help inform the responsibilities of teachers (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023; Question 3) to teach beyond facts, ‘dominant narratives’, and ‘narrative monoculture’ (Kinchin 2023) and to avoid and counter the neoliberal trends that permeate higher education and wider society (Question 4). This approach can also help understand what and how materials are used alongside their own epistemologies (Question 5; Freire 2004) by zealously teaching students to critically engage with their surroundings now and in life after university, as our educations remain unfinished (Freire 2000), towards a JBES praxis with the goal to eradicate socio-environmental injustices.

Students can achieve JBES praxis through a disposition to ‘Think Global, Act Local,’ only if they are inclined to questions existing global-local frameworks and engage in actions that they can take at the local level. As we acknowledge that our local actions have repercussions elsewhere, we must also realize that we are impacted by the actions of others. We join the papers in this special issue that highlight nontraditional teaching methods (e.g. Ajaps 2023; Bills and Klinsky 2023; Kinchin 2023; Lin et al. 2023) and submit that one effective means of fostering a disposition for JBES praxis is to allow students to forge connections at the local and personal levels through critical reflection that leads to actions in local places. This may also involve interacting with, or using the Freirean term, ‘dialoguing’ (Freire 2000, Chapter 3) with, humans, other living organisms, and even non-organics impacted by these local actions. Such actions may include experience in the field, where they can interact with and in Nature with not just their minds but also their bodies (Rodrigues 2018; Cuenca-Soto et al. 2023). Our focus on local, personal action also resonates with how Indigenous knowledges and practices are grounded in local places (Jimenez and Kabachnik 2023).

From our perspective, all three factors (i.e. inclination, sensitivity, ability) are necessary for a disposition to have any meaningful impact. We do not mean to define dispositions rigidly, rather we argue that the isolation, removal, or prioritization of one component or another can be problematic. Without the inclination to use their ecological literacy, it is unlikely any action will be taken. Ecological literacy sans sensitivity is like living an uncritical, oblivious life perpetuating the status quo. Finally, ecological literacy that lacks ability is arguably the moral equivalent of surrendering to anthropocentrism as an inevitable, if not preferred, reality.

Lastly, allow us to clarify one last point by way of example. Sometimes sensitivity and ability may not surface because of, for example, a lack of knowledge (e.g. knowing the local fauna and flora) or skills (e.g. language proficiency). In such situations, the dispositional view of ecological literacy does not evaporate; instead, we offer that it is being suppressed. For instance, a wine glass has the disposition of being fragile. Wrapping the wine glass in bubble wrap does not remove the fragile disposition. Instead, the bubble wrap prevents the disposition from emerging. From this perspective, when learners are challenged by their contexts, a dispositional view of ecological literacy can still be taken with the outlook that in other contexts that facilitate sensitivity and ability, a learner with the inclination can be agentive. We hope that proposing a dispositional view of ecological literacy will lead to discourse and dialogue about how we might further reconceptualize and rethink the critical issues and constructs that form the foundation of HE teaching to foster JBES praxis.

Author note

This research was partially supported by a KAKEN Grant (20K00753) awarded to the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology: [Grant Number 20K00753].

Notes

1 Throughout this article, Nature will be spelled with a capital “N” to represent the ecolinguistic viewpoint that humans and the human-world are one, as Nature.

2 According to the program website. https://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/faculty-of-liberal-arts/ug_a_liberalarts/#educationalpolicy