About the Book
As Dominant Western Worldviews (DWWs) proliferate through ongoing structures of globalization, neoliberalism, extractive capitalism, and colonialism, they inevitably marginalize those deemed as ‘Other’ (Indigenous, Black, Minority Ethnic, non-Western communities and non-human ‘Others’, including animals, plants, technologies, and energies). Environmental Education (EE) is well-positioned to trouble and minimize the harmful human impacts on social and ecological systems, yet the field is susceptible to how DWWs constrain and discipline what counts as viable knowledge, with a consequence of this being the loss of situated knowledges. To understand the relationships between DWW and situated knowledges and to thread an assemblage of ontological views that exist in unique contexts and nations, authors in this book take up decolonizing methodologies that expand across theories of Indigenous Knowledges (IK), Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK), two-eyed seeing, hybridity, and posthumanism. As EE opens to emplaced and situated socio-cultural and material stories, it opens to opportunities to attend more meaningfully to planetary social and ecological crisis narratives through contingent, contextualised, and relevant actions.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures – Note from the Series Editors – Acknowledgments – Abbreviations – Janet McVittie: Decolonizing Environmental Education for Different Contexts and Nations – Zuzana Morog: A Global Assemblage – Vince Anderson: Integrating Social and Ecological Justice Inquiry – Sky McKenzie: Water Deep – Kathryn Riley: Mutually Entangled Futures in/for Environmental Education – Araceli Leon Torrijos: Ahora Adentro – Marcelo Gules Borges: Decolonial Pedagogy, Agroecology, and Environmental Education: Repositioning Science Education in Rural Teacher Education in Brazil – Alice Johnston: Taking Learning Outside – Kylie Clarke: Walking Gently … Through a Cultural Lens … – Roseann Kerr: Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Development – John B. Acharibasam: Decolonizing Environmental Education in Ghana – Elsa McKenzie: Earth Sorrow – Janet McVittie/Marcelo Gules Borges: Naturalized Places, Indigenous Epistemology, and Learning to Value – Ranjan Datta: Environmental Education through Indigenous Land-Based Learning – Julio Karpen: Escolas Marginalizadas e Educação Ambiental/Marginalized Schools and Environmental Education – Kai Orca: "From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea" – Epilogue – About the Authors – Index.
About the Author :
Kathryn Riley obtained a Ph.D. from Deakin University, Australia, in 2019. Kathryn is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Janet McVittie obtained a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada in 1999. She is currently retired from a 23 year career teaching and researching in the departments of Curriculum Studies and Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Marcelo Gules Borges obtained a Ph.D. from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil in 2014. He is currently a Tenured Assistant Professor at the Department of Teaching Methodology, School of Education, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Review :
“About a decade ago, educators began to realize that Indigenous peoples traditionally live the gold standard of sustainability. It soon eclipsed the Eurocentric, three-pillar (economy, society, environment), hegemonic, sustainability agenda favoured by UNESCO. As Marie Battiste rationalized, ‘You can’t be the global doctor if you’re the colonial disease.’
A decade later, we are gifted by a book that presents a diverse sustainability agenda aimed at ecological and social justice in environmental education (EE). Its diversity is secured by conveying experiences from eight countries (Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Brazil, Ghana, Jamaica, Mexico, and USA). Each animates important conceptual and methodological contributions to EE scholarship.
Just as diversity breeds ecological strength in natural settings (aka Mother Earth), this book’s diversity offers a refreshingly strong array of knowledge and wisdom. It maps out an evolved agenda for sustainability in EE, which promises to eliminate the current Euro-American global transculturation—the ideology of colonialism. Megan Bang calls such an innovation a ‘move toward just, sustainable, and culturally thriving futures.’”
—Glen Aikenhead, Emeritus Professor, Curriculum Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
“The need for this book is essential. This book provides needed respect for world cultures, ethnicities, regions, religions, politics, genders, sexualities, and views regarding Environmental Education. The authors break down barriers of ethnocentrism, specifically the White and Western view of Environmental Education, and open an inclusive dialogue to advance the conversation forward in an interconnected way. Provided in the chapters are thought-provoking insights that elicit movement in a positive, collaborative direction by changing the current narrative. The diversity of experience, ideas, and contexts presented help to build a global community of change-makers to stop a dire environmental future. The wisdom in this book creates an opportunity to learn, grow, and make a significant change on a global scale and passionate commonality for the environment through education.”
—Shannon McLean-Minch, Elementary School Principal, Community Montessori, Boulder Valley School District, Boulder, Colorado, USA
“We live in challenging times! We look to leaders to share seeds/stories that enable our reworlding so that we co-design better ways, generate new-normals, and actively provoke diversity in our ways of knowing and being. The authors of this book have listened and offer us insight into possibilities and opportunities for co-creation of socio-ecological justice, should we be brave enough to act. Who better to encourage change towards decolonized, hopeful, inclusive futures than environmental educators: leading us beyond Western entitlement (re)storying our education practices with our ecosystems in mind.”
—Peta White, Senior Lecturer, Education (Science Education), Deakin University, Australia
“This book offers an exciting contribution and present creative experiences and reflections that led the readers to get in contact with different perspectives addressed to decolonize Environmental Education field. This is a very successful attempt to present one opposite view of what has been considered as settler-colonial projects from the Western worldview, which reinforces the ‘human exceptionalism and supremacism’. Ultimately, the purpose of this book is to (re)story the field as ‘a site of hope’ through educational practices meant to construct particular experiences based on/for socio-ecological justice for humans and others-than-humans. Based on different points of origin, from different land educational contexts, and reflecting from different conceptual backgrounds, the intention is not to present ‘static definitions or final and absolute answers to questions’ to environmental education practices, but to offer some possibilities to guarantee that humans and ‘others-than-human entities also have the right to exist, to live well, in healthy ecosystems’.”
—Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho, Professor, Education Department, Institute of Bioscience, University of State of São Paulo, Rio Claro Campus, Brazil
