Ecocrtical Scholarship toward Social Justice and Sustainability in Teacher Education (original) (raw)
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Northwest journal of teacher education, 2020
This article amplifies the importance of social movements like Black Lives Matter and diverse critical educator responses to social suffering, COVID-19, and related critiques of current dominant assumptions of teacher education and Western industrial schooling. The author offers an ecocritical conceptual framework that aims to emphasize the importance of how teachers, and teacher educators, can take action as leaders (re)imagining education as supportive of valuing diversity, democracy, and sustainability. This article calls for an ecocritical pedagogical (re)imagining of how teacher education might be (re)constituted through more local activist teaching and diverse collaborations with social movements in support of social justice, multispecies equity, and sustainability.
In considering the place of curriculum in today's world, and vice versa, Yates and Grumet (2011) write of the challenge "to construct curricula that acknowledge tension and ambiguity and encourage young people to see themselves and each other as persons capable of thinking and acting in this complicated place and time" (p. 247). As part of our ongoing theorizing of curriculum in teacher education, we invite our students to enter into the dialogue around a world in crisis and the urgency of sustainable practices, while thinking about the question, "How do we come to know and think as teachers?" (Robertson, 1997, p. 27). In our forays into this space, we attempt to work against notions of fixed identities and knowledge, and rigid imaginations of transformation and outcomefocused models of education. In this paper, we take up the question of sustainability as a lens in a Teacher Education Institution; we consider the possibilities and limitations of sustainability while drawing on findings of a recent study that looks at future teachers' perceptions of their role "in this complicated place and time", particularly in the promotion of environmental and social equity.
Reflecting Education, 2009
The paper describes the process of developing a global education curriculum in two teacher education courses at a state university in the United States. The initiative intended to develop critical thinking from diverse perspectives about global issues, motivate trainee teachers to include global education and instruction in their own practice, and to consider identities as global citizens. Student responses before and immediately after the innovation are described, and conclusions drawn on further steps to be taken in thinking about sustainability and globalization in teacher education. What would happen if teachers embraced the identity of global citizen (Banks 2004) and sought to help their students develop such an identity? What if they regularly infused issues of globalization and sustainability in the curriculum? As teacher education professors at a state university in the United States, we provide our students with insight into such wider political contexts during class discussions about poverty, race, ability, gender and sexuality. We aim to give them an understanding of the impact of oppression on education and schooling. In fall, 2006, we taught two courses: to undergraduates Culturally Relevant Teaching and Critical Pedagogy, and a graduate course. We used the occasion to collaborate in introducing a unit on globalization and sustainability. In these courses we examined underlying ideological values and beliefs in economic, political, educational, judicial and other institutional systems that perpetuate oppression within the United States and beyond. By globalization we meant not only the economic integration of world markets within a capitalist framework, but also all of the ways in which we are interconnected (Bigelow & Peterson 2002). In the courses we examined aspects of the social, political, technological, military, and cultural impacts of global interconnections as well as economic relations. By sustainability, we meant living in ways that conserves the Earth's resources to ensure the survival of subsequent generations, while eliminating poverty (United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organization 2007). In the courses we examined child labour, fair trade agricultural initiatives, alternative energy sources, and conservation initiatives in a global context. As Brazilian and U.S. born educators we had invested effort into better understanding omissions, distortions, and stereotypes in our education through study and travel in Latina America, Europe, and Africa. This gave opportunities to renew our commitment to developing our perspectives of global citizens. Each of us had experienced our students' reluctance to think about oppression experienced here and now, and about our roles in perpetuating the status quo. We wanted to teach about globalization and sustainability in ways that connected conditions and events taking place elsewhere in the world to those in the United States. This paper describes the context, procedures and outcomes of our work on introducing globalization and sustainability into teacher education. Section 1 offers a brief historical account of global education in the United States, and discusses our assumptions about the importance of teaching about globalization and sustainability in teacher education. Section 2 provides information about Ramalho, T and Beyerbach, B. Introducing globalisation and sustainability issues in teacher education Reflecting Education
Critical teacher education for economic, environmental and social justice: An ecosocialist manifesto
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2007
In this chapter we set out a series of progressive egalitarian policy principles and proposals that constitute a democratic Marxist and ecosocialist manifesto for schooling and teacher education for economic and social justice. This is based on a democratic Marxist theoretical framework (1) and on a structuralist neo-Marxist analysis (2). We also draw out a set of strategic connectivities between these programmatic ends and forms of resistance to neoliberal hegemony to be found in the interstices of contemporary educational systems, with a focus on the United Kingdom .
Critical Teacher Education for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice JCEPS16(3)
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2019
t In this paper we set out proposals that constitute a democratic Marxist manifesto for teacher education for economic, environmental and social justice. In doing so, we of course recognise structural limitations on progressive action but also that teacher agency is shaped and not erased by these. We therefore sketch the strategic shape a transformative UK teacher education might take in resistance to attacks on workers from longstanding neoliberal hegemony and, more recently, from so-called ‘austerity’. Keywords: Teacher Education; Social Class; Marxist; Eco-Socialist; Economic Justice; Environmental Justice; Social Justice
Towards a Linking Activist Pedagogy: Teacher Activism for Social-Ecological Justice
The world is currently in the midst of a social-ecological crisis. We cannot ignore that the primary cause of this change in our planet's ecological balance and the increase in social injustices is our heavy dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels and a capitalist economic system, which encourages exploitation of both human and more than human resources with no regard for the consequences. In such a reality, it is alarming that education treats knowledge as disconnected fragments and that environmental and social issues are often addressed separately in education. In order to live in environmentally healthy and socially just communities, we need ways of thinking and teaching that integrate rather than fragment issues. There is a need to recognize that the ecological crisis is a “cultural crisis”. With the need for such an approach in mind, Morgan Gardner (2005) formulated the term “linking activism” to describe one's “blended social-ecological justice practice” when “being positioned in a single construct” (p.3). I extend this into a consideration of environmental and social-justice educators as agents of change whose daily activism works to change the current cultural paradigm and bring social-ecological order and harmony. This paper will argue for the importance of engaging in linking activism in education by critically examining the mainstream environmental educational field in order to critique its paradigm that is imprinted by the current dominant culture, which in turn perpetuates social-ecological oppression.
INTEGRATING HUMANE PEDAGOGY AND WHOLE SCHOOL SUSTAINABILITY KRIVAS, N.E.
ProQuest, 2022
Challenges to empowering secondary students toward engagement in addressing injustice persist in the United States education system. Likewise, teachers feel generally underprepared to support students through the process. A critical examination of literature in justice-based pedagogy and praxis revealed a gap in practical application of justice education as it pertains to empowering teachers and engaging students in a justice-oriented process of learning and doing. A qualitative bricolage approach employed case study and heuristic methodologies to share the professional stories and observations of three secondary teachers within a highly urbanized and diverse county schools district, and facilitate a dialogue between those stories and that of the researcher, a secondary teacher along the journey of discovering practical ways of engaging and empowering students to actively address injustice. Through participation in a fellowship of a justice-based curriculum rooted in principles of humane education and the whole school sustainability organizational approach offered by their county office of education, teachers’ stories illuminated a transformative experience that reinvigorated their enthusiasm and hope in the profession. Through a paralleled transformative learning process in the classroom, students were observed to access and activate voice, agency, and motivation toward addressing injustice. Critical and systems thinking paired with social emotional support facilitated a positive learning experience for students as they learned and grappled with injustice. Community engagement activated for many students and teachers a connection with the real world, and fostered a sense of hope in creating a more just and sustainable world for all. The findings of this study offer far-reaching implications for igniting teacher and student passion toward addressing injustice and provides practical advice for education stakeholders on how to implement justice-based, universally inclusive curricular and instructional methods in the U.S. secondary education system.
Developing Teachers' Capacity for Ecojustice Education and Community-Based Learning
2010
Vignette In the summer of 2009, a group of teachers, community activists, and university professors came together in a Summer Institute on EcoJustice Education and Community-Based Learning held by the Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalitions at Eastern Michigan University (EMU). A series of workshops were organized to help participants examine the interwoven foundations and educational implications of social and ecological violence. They read and discussed a passage from Val Plumwood's book Environmental Culture (2002) in which she interrogates what she calls "the illusion of disembeddedness"--our hyperseparation from nature and its connection to a more general "logic of domination"--and they watched a film called Race: The Power of an Illusion (2003). Following the film, the group engaged in a silent "chalk talk," (1) filling the board with their responses to the question: "What does the study of race as an illusion have to do with our desire...
EcoJustice for Teacher Education Policy and Practice The Way of Love
Issues in Teacher Education, 2019
EcoJustice Education is both a framework for thinking about our ethical responsibilities as educators and community members, and a socio-ecological and political movement. In this essay, I trace my own personal history in the development of this field, focusing on the theoretical foundations, major scholars contributing to those founding ideas, and a number of concrete practical manifestations in organizations, curricula, programs and institutions. I begin the essay with a focus on "relationality" as a particularly important concept in the epistemological, ontological and ethical frames that make up this particular approach to teacher education.