Freire and Environmentalism: Ecopedagogy

Description

Building on Paulo Freire's educational theory and critical pedagogy movements, this book provides a short and accessible introduction to ecopedagogy - Freirean environmental teaching and environmentalism overall. Ecopedagogy offers a political and educational vision that strives for a critical, culturally relevant forms of knowledge centred on sustainability for securing the future of our planet, ending all forms of oppression, and ensuring peace globally. Using examples from around the globe, Misiaszek shows how different populations (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity) are affected in unbalanced ways by ongoing environmental destruction and argues that these systematic socio-environmental inequalities are ignored in much of environmental teaching. He argues through reinventing Freire's work that environmental justice is inseparable to social justice and should be seen as part of wider debates around, for example, globalization, development, citizenship, racism, feminism, neo/colonialization, and linguistics. The book calls for global and local approaches to understanding socio-environmental issues beyond anthropocentric models (beyond humans) and epistemologies of the North (e.g., Western knowledges). Written for anyone with an interest in environmentalism this book offers news ways of thinking and teaching about environmental crises we are living through.

Greg William Misiaszek is Associate Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University, China, and Associate Director of the Paulo Freire Institute at The University of California Los Angeles, USA. He is Executive Editor of Teaching in Higher Education and Co-Editor of Global Comparative Education and is co-series editor, with Carlos Alberto Torres, of the Bloomsbury Freire in Focus series.

Given the environmental dangers we face, a critical educational response is especially important now. This makes Freire and Environmentalism is a truly timely book. * Michael W. Apple, author of Can Education Change and John Bascom Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA *