Decolonizing Environmental Education for Different Contexts and Nations

List of Figures

Figure 2.1:Buddy at the Saskatoon Zoo and Forestry Farm

Figure 2.2:Cartesian Representational Knowing

Figure 2.3:A Rhizomic Assemblage of Relations

Figure 3.1:Axes of Curriculum (Ecosystem, Fundamentals of Science and Agroecology), Scales of Experience (Municipality/Locality, School, Classroom and Municipality/Locality), and the Respective Year of the Course (UFSC, 2009)

Note from the Series Editors

We are very pleased to introduce Decolonizing Environmental Education for Different Contexts and Nations, the third volume of the book series (Post-) Critical Global Childhood & Youth Studies. This edited volume pushes us to expand existing theories and approaches to environmental education and to consider new possibilities for exploring, understanding and embracing situated knowledges across diverse contexts in countries such as Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ghana and Bangladesh. This investigation supports an important debate on our mutually entangled futures—in Kathryn Riley’s words, which is crucial at a time when environmental and public health crises are destroying the livelihoods of those least responsible for these. As the authors of this volume argue, there is an urgent need to trouble and challenge the Western worldview that dominates science, society and education in the twenty-first century.

We hope that this third volume of (Post-)Critical Global Childhood & Youth Studies highlights the importance of the exchange of ideas on contemporary issues affecting children and young people around the world while exploring possibilities for local and global social change, which is indeed the focus of the Series. The Series encourages novel approaches to co-producing knowledge in fields such as: urban, rural and Indigenous childhood & youth; children’s rights; social policy, ecology and youth activism; faith communities; immigration and intersectionality; mobile Internet, digital futures, and global education. It discusses the geopolitics of knowledge, and decolonial and anthropological perspectives, among others. (Post-)Critical Global Childhood & Youth Studies is addressed to relevant scholars from all over the world as well as to global policy makers and employees at international organizations and NGOs. This book is indeed an invitation to draw upon such different fields of expertise and areas of activity, and to co-develop a ←xi | xii→different environmental education from within the most diverse cultural and geographic contexts.

Acknowledgments

This book is a collective process of decolonizing ourselves. It emerged as a result of sharing our experiences, listening, and standing in solidarity with Others, despite our often-diverging perspectives as situated in different contexts and nations. Decolonizing Environmental Education for Different Contexts and Nations describes individual and collective paths of reflection, animated by history and stories that connect environment and education through, and from, different lands and territories. Over the last two years we have organized meetings and have exchanged thoughts, materials, arguments, challenges, and hopes through our work and actions in our contexts. Based on these conversations, we connected contexts and nations, proposing not to produce a guide on how to decolonize environmental education, but, above all, make explicit our effort to change priorities and decenter human cultures in, and for, environmental education. Most of the authors in this book contributed throughout the meetings, others contributed through their connections with authors in the book.

First, we would like to acknowledge the work from Márcia Mascia, Silvia Grinberg and Michalis Kontopodis in editing this series. We are especially grateful to Michalis Kontopodis for helping us with our book proposal and moving us forward to conclude the book. Our thanks to Juliano Camillo for first connecting ideas of this book with Peter Lang. Thanks also to Dani Green, our primary contact at Peter Lang.

We are grateful to all of you from our contexts that helped us in the process of decolonizing our philosophies, theories, and practices: Rodrigo Ramirez (in memoriam), Buddy, the grey wolf, the doctoral research award from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Dr. Rui Feng Geological Sciences Graduate Studies Award (University of Saskatchewan, Canada), and The University of Saskatchewan Ph.D. Fellowship. Thank you ←xiii | xiv→to the Laitu Khyeng Indigenous Elders, knowledge holders, leaders, and youth participants and to the Campesinas and Campesinos for your warm welcome into your communities and for patiently sharing your stories and knowledge about sustainability and land and water management. Thank you to Marla Guerrero Cabañas, the coordinator of the Calakmul field team of Fondo para la Paz for your trust, openness, time and friendship, and the facilitators and community technicians of Fondo para la Paz: Reynaldo Zepahua Apale, Ezequías Hernandez Torres, and Gelasio Maldonado de Paz for your accompaniment, kindness, patience, and humor. Thank you to the community of La Loche for your trust in the education of your youth, and for your compassion, humor, forgiveness, and kindness. Marci Cho!

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