Environmental education 2.0: Toward a theory of ecologically minded teaching.

摘要

Since the 1970s, the environmental education movement has been positioned as one of the primary means to cultivate the knowledge, values, dispositions, and behavior needed to preserve and protect the planet. Ample research suggests, however, that environmental education has failed to meet its goals, and that the state of the environment is worsening. There are organizations and frameworks that recognize the limits of traditional environmental education and that are pushing school reform broadly, and environmental education in particular, in new directions—what I call the Environmental Education 2.0 movement. In this study, I focus on one framework in particular, EcoJustice education. EcoJustice theorists posit that the ecological crises we face are rooted in culture and, more specifically, that Westernized culture has produced ecological crises through the pervasive homogenization, monetization, and privatization of existence. The result is alienation of community, the loss of forms of intergenerational wisdom that sustain healthy communities, and the erasure of cultural diversity into a global monoculture. The premise of Ecojustice education is that teachers and students need to understand these realities and then work to challenge them. Seven educators and I, all committed to preserving and protecting the environment, met regularly over the course of five months in a Critical Friends Group to learn together about Ecojustice and consider its implications for teaching. Analysis of these meeting transcripts and interviews with participants revealed the ways our Critical Friends Group served as a space—a commons—for reflection and reframing. So, too, was it a space in which an understanding of ecologically minded teaching emerged.