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Environmental Education and the Critical Social Sciences

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Relational and Critical Perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development

Part of the book series: Sustainable Development Goals Series ((SDGS))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the progress in the (Global North) social sciences of the Tbilisi Recommendation (1978) for an “alternate” environmental education to be radical in commitment, interdisciplinary in scope, experientially driven, and action-oriented while simultaneously contesting the complicity of mainstream education in reproducing the ecological crisis. The (critical) social sciences of environmental education (EE), and its research (EER), have partially succeeded in that global aspiration, national innovation, local theory-building, and lived, everyday praxis. When examining terms like “belonging” and “sensing” used in the title of this anthology, some of us are mindful of the absence of the phenomenological tradition in mainstream education. Even in the critical social sciences of EE, there remains a non-presence of ecophenomenology in the inter-/cross-/transdisciplinarity potential of EER. Any “turn” to an ontology~axiology~epistemology~methodology of a “sustainable” (critical) EE and EER is compromised by that absence. I present ecophenomenology for EER and conclude that any critical “practices theorization” of EE will emphasize the embodied “layer” of the intercorporeally “lived” of a “grounded” eco-/somaesthetics~environmental ethics~ecopolitics of eco“becoming.” An “old” case study is used to introduce and conclude that ecopedagogy is as/in/for scapes.

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  1. Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Phillip G. Payne

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  1. Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Margaretha Häggström

  2. School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden

    Catarina Schmidt

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Payne, P.G. (2022). Environmental Education and the Critical Social Sciences. In: Häggström, M., Schmidt, C. (eds) Relational and Critical Perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84510-0_7

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