Ecopedagogy: Critical Environmental Teaching for Planetary Justice and Global Sustainable Development

Description

To stop the downward spiral of intensifying environmental violence that inevitably leads to social violence we, as humans, need to better understand what is at stake and to determine how to make changes at the root levels. Ecopedagogy is centered on understanding the struggles of and connections between human acts of environmental and social violence. Greg W. Misiaszek argues that ecopedagogies grounded in critical, Freirean pedagogies construct learning that leads to human actions geared towards increased social and environmental justice and planetary sustainability. Throughout the book he discusses the need for teaching, reading, and researching through problematizing the causes of socio-environmental violence, including oppressive processes of globalization and constructs of "development", "economics", and "citizenship", to name a few, that emerge from socio-historical oppressions (e.g., colonialization, racism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, xenophobia, epistemicide) and dominance over the rest of nature. Misiaszek concludes with ecopedagogies' challenges within the current post-truth era and possibilities of reimagining UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Greg William Misiaszek is Associate Professor at the Institute of Education Theories, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, China, and Associate Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA.

This thoughtful book poses inconvenient and uncomfortable questions to neoliberal development models and provides critical thinking to read the "World" as part of the "Earth". Ecopedagogy reinvents environmental education and sustainable development to be more effective in achieving global social justice and planetary environmental justice. Greg Misiaszek takes readers - scholars, students and educators - on a journey based on Freire's later writing and critical pedagogy exploring the need of a paradigm shift in the environmental pedagogies, challenging us to rethink sustainable development and to critically deconstruct SDGs. * Massimiliano Tarozzi, Co-director of the Development Education Research Centre, UCL Institute of Education, UK and Professor of Education, University of Bologna, Italy * Ecopedagogy is an important contribution to critical studies in education. * International Review of Education *