The playing field: Locating environmental education

A study of water pedagogy is nested within the field of environmental education research.

Conceptualising water pedagogies requires insight into what it is we are navigating when we attempt to educate about our social and ecological interconnected worlds, the project of environmental education. Gaining a sensibility of the moving parts from which

environmental education is constituted is important for opening its complexities and attuning to how its transformative potential might be harnessed or conservative renditions reproduced.

This section opens up the field of play so to speak in which the theoretical work of this PhD is located.

In its ideal form environmental education is shaped by the “absenting of harmful culture- nature or eco-cultural relations in modernity” (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 319). The challenge of environmental education is captured in an articulation of its central matter of concern, that is complex environmental issues:

[A]bsenting absences in environmental education is a challenging affair, as

environmental issues have ontological depth; they are shaped by interacting social- ecological generative mechanisms that need to be engaged in and through

environmental education praxis, often in combination with other structural interventions. (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 320)

Education praxis spoken of here is itself one of the social-ecological generative mechanisms shaping environmental issues. Thus the concerns of environmental education are also captured in the field of political ecology of education which considers the mediation of

‘pedagogical processes’ and ‘knowledge systems’ in terms of how power is distributed in

‘political and cultural entities’. And in turn, we need to consider how these affect “access and control to natural resources”, “cultural landscapes” and conceptualisations of “nature-society relationships” (Meek and Lloro-Bidart, 2017, p. 217). Thus, education itself has impacts upon the ways we conceive of and distribute power and resources. So, while environmental

education has as its focus, depth and complex social-ecological issues, it is itself entangled in these which calls for a concern for how it is used in the name of producing a better world.

Environmental education, with a concern for relations between the social and ecological, will always include an environmentalism which names the composite of cultural politics that informs how we imagine in our interconnection with others and the ecology in the world.

Martinez-Alier (2002) named three environmentalisms and in doing so gave a language for

‘environmentalism of the poor’, a critical contribution towards social and cognitive justice departure points for environmental movements located in solidarity with people experiencing the most significant environmental costs. While naming environmentalisms may be useful, environmentalisms are not so clearly distinguishable; they have ‘contingent beginnings’ and are made in expansion rather than unity. It is ‘conflict and struggle’ that should replace any conceptualisations of environmentalisms as essentialised “nature, science or the earth”

(Gonzalez-Gaudiano and Buenfil-Burgos, 2009, p. 102).

Educational cultures, in which environmental education emerges, struggle to reflect the plurality of environmentalisms that exist. In South Africa there is no ‘master

environmentalism’ but rather “an inchoate sum of multiple, diverse, uncoordinated struggles and organizations” (Cock, 2004, p. 1). Constituted as such, it is possible to see how in South Africa, environmentalisms reflect the broader polarisation but also the multiplicity of our society. Despite this enormous potential for reinventing environmentalisms that resonate with the cultural politics of the South African public, educational institutions are at risk of taking on particular northern oriented environmentalisms, such as the one Rosenberg (2004, p. 153) referred to as the “northern individualist turn”.

As illustrated, environmentalisms interrelate with theories of education which always include social theories which might, for instance, articulate the relationship between learning and action, and individuals and social structures (Blenkinsop and Egan, 2009)⁠. This relationship can be seen by the responsibilisation of youth in the ‘age of risk’ (Kelly, 2001). Such simplistic assumptions about the relationship between society and education can be usefully disrupted by Biesta (2007b) who explained, in the context of democratic education, that one cannot educate for democracy when the society is not democratic; similarly, in a society that is actively working to devastate our natural systems, simplistic education about a better socio- ecological relationship will not bring about environmental restoration.

The complexity that I have opened up here of course acknowledges the notion that “all education is environmental education. “By what is included or excluded we teach the young that they are part of , or apart from, the natural world” (Orr, 2004, as cited in Bigelow and

Swinehart, 2014, p. 33). However, we need ways to focus well intentioned directives in environmental education because, if we frame environmental education superficially as being everything, it can be co-opted by “northern individualising turns”, and thus eliminates this progressive contribution of focusing on relationships (Rosenberg, 2004, p. 153).

Arising in the context of these potential pitfalls, recent scholarship on environmental

education, draws on decolonial theory, recent articulations of critical theory and suggests the following as guides towards attuning to the implicit and cultivating the explicit intentions of environmental education practice.

Lotz-Sisitka (2016b) maked an important point about the pedagogical orientations required for environmental education and that “the knowledge and new creative practices” necessary for expanding environmental education “may need to be ‘worked out’ in and through emergent forms of praxis”. She concluded,

We cannot therefore predetermine the lesson or the learning process; we need to open it up for discovery, transition and for co-creation, for mediation. (2016b, p. 325) This is a comment on the spirit, modalities and sensibilities of pedagogy that is necessary for an expansive form of environmental education. It requires that environmental educators develop reflective capacities to observe mechanisms at play and cultivate emergence in their educational practice. This involves making space in education so that educator practice becomes governed by more than “political inconsistency and immediatism”(Gonzalez- Gaudiano and Buenfil-Burgos, 2009)⁠. Instead, educators might build reflexive capacity to reflect upon and find ways to move through the unique challenges every educational encounter will bring. These encounters will include the following.

- They will bring the struggle against epistemological orthodoxy – that there is only one dominant way of knowing the world.

- Encounters will bring science knowledge ‘face to face’ with local, indigenous knowledges as well as social movement and activist knowledges. This meeting also relates to the vast and wonderful plurality of environmentalisms (understood as complex above) in South Africa and the world. (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 329) - They may involve embracing the structural level of change as complementary, not

oppositional, moving to more individual acts such as saving water and picking up

litter, or to lovingly engage a non-reified notion of structure. (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p.

322)

- Encounters may locate agency somewhere between voluntarism and determinism (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 322), hereby working out what is possible in context with the resources and agency available.

Thus, environmental education takes place both implicitly and explicitly and building a reflective practice involves an attentiveness to dogma, interdisciplinarity, multiple nested scales and assumptions about individual and collective power.

Being aware of the relationships and theories invoked in practices of environmental education relies upon reflexive capacities that can facilitate emergence and working out. This process can be assisted by concern for epistemological orthodoxy, bringing other knowledges in, embracing scales and structure, and locating agency in real understandings and practices of the world. These might help us to embrace the ways in which environmental education is concerned with all that is in the world, and yet needs to bring focus to the intentional work of

“absenting of harmful culture-nature or eco-cultural relations in modernity” (Lotz-Sisitka, 2016b, p. 319).

From describing and opening up environmental education I move to an exploration of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy has long included or emerged from a critical analysis of

capitalism, and in particular racial capitalism (Lange, 2012; Carpenter and Mojab, 2017).

Within this positioning or framing, environmental destruction is seen as a collective, systematic externality of extractive racial capitalism. Our individual and collective

consciousnesses are sites from which to build emergent or reproductive power and re-make the world. Critical pedagogy has yet to merge with functional ecological literacies that are needed to make stronger arguments about ecological crises (Kellner and Kneller, 2010). It is the transformative and change oriented impulse of critical education praxis that this study engages with. Before this, however, I outline three descriptions of the depth crisis that lies behind our social and ecological crisis.

4.2 Understanding and responding to crisis in educational theories