Teaching In The Anthropocene

This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability. Referring to the uncertainty of the time in which we live and teach, the term Anthropocene is used to acknowledge anthropogenic contributions to the climate crisis and to consider and reflect on the emotional responses to adverse climate events. The text begins with the editors’ discussion of this contested term and then moves on to make the case that we must decentre anthropocentric models in teacher education praxis. The four thematic parts include chapters on the challenges to teacher education practice and praxis, affective dimensions of teaching in the face of the global crisis, relational pedagogies in the Anthropocene, and ways to ignite the empathic imaginations of tomorrow’s teachers. Together the authors discuss new theoretical eco-orientations and describe innovative pedagogies that create opportunities for students and teachers to live in greater harmony with the more-than-human world. This incredibly timely volume will be essential to pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators. FEATURES: - Offers critical reflections on anthropocentrism from multiple perspectives in education, including continuing education, educational organization, K–12, post-secondary, and more - Includes accounts that not only deconstruct the disavowal of the climate crisis in schools but also articulate an ecosophical approach to education - Features discussion prompts in each chapter to enhance student engagement with the material

"Today's children and youth face an uncertain world with a myriad of global crises, including increasing pollution, environmental degradation, species extinction, climate change, and social injustice. In this four-part volume, the contributors offer their understandings and knowledges of what it means to educate in this time of uncertainty, termed the Anthropocene. This term is used to acknowledge anthropogenic contributions to climate and environmental crises and to encourage discussion of the emotional responses of these adverse events. Teaching in the Anthropocene discusses (1) challenges to teacher education practice and praxis, (2) the affective dimensions of teaching, (3) relational pedagogies, and (4) ways to igniting imaginations. (1) The first part explores challenges in teacher education practice and praxis in educating ecological justice and sustainability and the need to decentre anthropocentric teaching models. (2) The second part describes the rise in anxiety in children and youth and what it means to care for them in the classroom while equipping them to face the world. (3) The third part ponders relationship and its importance between each of ourselves and between the more-than-human companions with whom we share this planet. (4) The fourth part discusses ways of igniting teachers' imaginations, providing examples in youth activism, community art installations, and other innovative projects. Presenting various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of global crises and in a bid to live in greater harmony with the more-than-human world, this timely collection is essential reading for pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators."--

In the burgeoning field of ecolinguistics, little attention has been given to the ways in which English language teaching is and has become implicated in global ecological crises. This book begins a dialogue about the opportunities and responsibilities presented to the TESOL field to re-orient professional practice in ways that drive cultural change and engender alternate language practices and metaphors. Covering a diverse range of topics, including anthropogenic climate change, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration, chapters argue that such crises require not only technological innovation, but also cultural changes in how human beings relate to each other and their environment. Arguing that it is incumbent upon the field of English language teaching to reckon with such cultural changes in how and what we teach, TESOL and Sustainability addresses the ways in which discourses such as eco-pedagogy, the critique of neo-liberalism, non-Western philosophy and post-humanist thought can and must inform how and what is taught in ESL and EFL classrooms.

This book explores new pedagogical challenges and potentials of the Anthropocene era. The authors argue that this new epoch, with an unstable climate, new kinds of globally spreading viruses, and new knowledges, calls for a new way of educating and an alertness to new philosophies of education and pedagogical imaginations, thoughts, and practices. Addressing the linkages between the Anthropocene and Pedagogy across a broad pedagogical spectrum that is both formal and informal, the editors and their contributors emphasize a re-imagining of education that serves to deepen our understanding of the capacities and values of life.

This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity.

This book puts forward a radical, unorthodox thesis with respect to the Anthropocene, the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari and education. This book analyses the Anthropocene for its unconscious drives and develops a parallel mode of education and social change.

This unique book compares anthropogenic challenges in science and technology teacher education between the northern and southern contexts of Sweden and South Africa, respectively. Presenting the results of a three-year research collaboration between science and technology teacher education researchers from South Africa and Sweden, the book explores theoretical perspectives and pedagogical experiences in response to challenges in the Anthropocene. It discusses research-informed practice in teacher education to address sustainable development. Chapters in the book collectively investigate the influence of current environmental and societal changes on the education of teachers, answering the question of how science and technology teacher education can adjust to current changes in the world and prepare new teachers for work in their future profession. Touching on issues such as climate change, global warming and pandemic diseases, the book uses a comparative approach and explores opportunities and possibilities for fulfilling the goals of science and technology education for sustainable development. The book offers recommendations and opportunities to implement sustainability issues and develop sustainable teaching strategies. It will be a key reading for researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of teacher education, science and technology education, sustainability education and comparative education.

This book draws on posthumanist critique and post qualitative approaches to research to examine the pedagogies offered by imaginaries of the future. Starting with the question of how education can be a process for imagining and desiring better futures that can shorten the Anthropocene, it speaks to concerns that are relevant to the fields of education, youth and futures studies. This book explores lessons from the imaginaries of apocalypse, revolution and utopia, drawing on research from youth(ful) perspectives in a context when the narrative of ‘youth despair’ about the future is becoming persistent. It investigates how the imaginary of 'Apocalypse' acts as a frame of intelligibility, a way of making sense of the monstrosities of the present and also instigates desires to act in different ways. Studying the School Climate Strikes of 2019 as 'Revolution' moves us away from the teleologies of capitalist consumption and endless growth to newer aesthetics. The strikes function as a public pedagogy that creates new publics that include life beyond the human. Finally, the book explores how the Utopias of Afrofuturist fiction provides us with a kind of 'investable' utopia because the starting point is in racial, economic and ecological injustice. If the Apocalypse teaches us to recognize what needs to go, and Revolution accepts that living with ‘less than’ is necessary, then this kind of Utopia shows us how becoming ‘more than’ human may be the future.