Ecopedagogy

The term ecopedagogy is a blending together of the two terms ecology and pedagogy. Unlike environmental studies, ecopedagogy is not concerned with a particular topic area within science education. Rather, ecopedagogy was coined as a way to think about the nature of curriculum itself and as a way to organize, understand, and teach in all curricular areas. As such, it provides teachers and researchers with an alternative model of curricular theory and practice that steps away from antiquated industrial images of knowledge and learning and that is more in line with a wide range of contemporary research in the natural sciences, the human sciences, and work that explores the place of information and communications technologies in education.

Ecopedagogy was formulated as both a critique of and an alternative to the industrial assembly-line model of curriculum. In this industrial model, curriculum topics are broken down into their component parts, placed in developmental sequences according to rules of efficient, sequential assembly, and doled out one isolated piece at a time to students. Ecopedagogy thinks about curriculum differently than this. It begins with the assumption that curriculum topics are not objects that can be disassembled and whose disassembled parts can be treated as if they are authentically learnable independently of the relations between those parts. Any seemingly isolated curricular mandate or objective is to be rethought in terms of the fields of relations to which it belongs. Ecopedagogy thus draws upon ideas, assumptions, and images from ecology—interdependence, relationships, landscapes, fields, habitats, generativity, renewal, cycles—and uses these to place or locate curriculum objectives or ideas back into the conceptual and disciplinary locales that make them what they are. Curriculum topics are to be thought of as full of relationships and interdependencies; they are to be thought of as existing in rich and diverse fields of thought. All of the curriculum areas entrusted to students and teachers in schools are thus to be treated as living disciplines rather than piecemeal objects. For example, the first question ecopeda-gogy asks when addressing a curriculum topic such as quadratic equations or the use of commas in English sentences is not how do I teach this piece of knowledge to students, but rather where does this piece of knowledge belong. What is the field within which this is a meaningful and substantial piece of knowledge? What other ideas, concepts, knowledge, experiences belong in this field with this topic? In other words, the basic questions of ecology are about the topic under question, its topography, its surroundings, and its place. Only then is an ecopedagogical approach to curriculum ready to ask the next question: How do I open up this field of relations for my students and invite them into the work that is proper to this field?

There are several related consequences to the shift to ecopedagogical thinking. First, it involves not only a move from assembly-line consciousness to field consciousness, but also a move from the arms-length objectivity, distance, and disinterest that an assembled object demands to a sense of immediacy, implication, and investment in what one knows. Ecopedagogically conceived, curriculum topics are living inheritances whose life and well-being are placed in the hands of teachers and students. Ecopedagogy therefore requires teachers and students to think about how they are already living in the midst of these topics and what their real life is in the world being passed on to the young. Knowledge, thus conceived, is both inter-generational and ancestral. The Pythagorean theorem, for example, is not just a formula that one can memorize for an upcoming examination, but is a clue to a long, complex history, and an opening into a large field that included right angled triangles, surveying, architecture, art and visual composition, ancient Greek cults, the harmony of the spheres, daVinci's Vitruvian Man, and so on.

...