Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education

Transformative Standards

Julie Andrzejewski, Marta Baltodano, Linda Symcox, Julie Andrzejewski, Marta Baltodano, Linda Symcox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135889227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The concept of "standards" seems antithetical to the ways critical educators are dedicated to teaching, but what would "standards" look like if they were generated from social justice perspectives and through collaborative and inclusive processes? Such is the central question posed by the contributors of this groundbreaking collection on the interconnectivity of social justice, peace, and environmental preservation. Challenging education that promotes consumerism, careerism, and corporate profiteering, they boldly offer examples of a new paradigm for practicing a transformative critical pedagogy. Rather than just talking about coalition building within and across educational communities, they demonstrate how we might communicate from different vantage points and disciplinary boundaries to create a broader picture of social and eco-justice. Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education will be required reading for educators and students who want to envision and practice living, acting, and teaching for a better world.

1 Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education

Global and Indivisible¹

Julie Andrzejewski, Marta P. Baltodano, and Linda Symcox

This book seeks to demonstrate that social justice, peace, and environmental preservation are integrally connected, that they are of equal importance, and that educators should play a major role in teaching students how to understand global problems and take corresponding social action. Inspired by the Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools (Assembly of Alaska Native Educators, 1998), we present standards and guidelines to assist educators who want to integrate social justice, peace, and environmental education (SJPEE) into classrooms and schools. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in this book, and sets the stage for how urgently educational reform is needed.

Education for Urgent Global Problems

As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, humanity faces problems of a magnitude unknown to previous generations. We are now living in an “epidemic of extinctions: decimation of life on earth” according to the latest Living Planet Report (Loh, 2008) which measures species extinctions. The 2008 report documents a loss of 27% of 4,000 monitored species in the last 35 years, all related to human activities: climate change, pollution, destruction of natural habitat, invasive species, and overexploitation of species. Every life system is experiencing decline or stress from human activities: oceans, rivers, lakes, forests, plains, mountains, tundra, deserts, arctic regions, and the earth’s atmosphere. Global warming is finally being acknowledged and verified in spite of continued corporate campaigns to spread doubt (Dauncey 2001, Robinson, 2007).

Increasing competition for scarcer resources spawns wars and ethnic conflicts, imposing a terrible toll on humans, animals, and ecological systems. The affluence and consumption of some people continues to increase while others are born, live, and die in utmost despair and deprivation, and while millions have experienced hunger and starvation for decades with inadequate global response, the global food crisis is intensifying. Agricultural production continues to shift from grains for human consuption to crops for biofuels and feed for animals, as meat consumption increases for the affluent. Food riots erupting around the world illustrate people’s desperation, while giant agribusinesses report huge profits (Lean, 2008). The world’s supply of water is shrinking dangerously, raising the specter of conflict over this most vital of natural resources (Barlow, 2008).

While each of these crises may seem separate and distinct, they are interrelated in profound and complex ways. The economic and political activities of humans, which benefit some people and some species at the expense of others, now dominate the earth by maximizing short-term gains for a few without regard for the long-term survival and well-being for all. Regardless of the “reasons” manufactured to justify these inequities, all living beings are negatively affected by them, directly or indirectly, sooner or later (LaDuke, 1996; Shiva, 1995).

People are now confronted with evidence that many of the products and activities that we have been taught to associate with “the good life” actually undermine our health and the ecosystems in which we live. The problems we face locally are interrelated, and thus global. If we are to understand them, and change our lives for the better, and help to preserve the planet, we must think globally, and act locally and globally.

Yet despite the seriousness and urgency of these problems, preK-12 schools and higher education institutions have experienced political pressure to avoid study, discussion and action on these issues, for fear of being accused of political bias. While some exceptional educators have courageously educated students about these urgent issues, institutions have been reluctant to provide the leadership needed to prepare effective global citizens who can act to save the planet, other species, and humanity itself. To meet this need, educators can provide leadership by preparing ourselves and our communities for active global citizenship; citizenship focused more on restoring the earth and the web of life than on personal wealth, consumption, entertainment, comfort, and status.

Our Purpose: Increasing Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education

Inspired by the Alaska Native Knowledge Network’s Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools (2001), a dedicated group of educators has worked for the past several years to draft social justice, peace, and environmental education standards or principles. We believe SJPEE is best understood and taught in a global context, drawing upon many intellectual traditions, ways of knowing, and social movements. A global perspective increases awareness of the interconnections between all forms of suffering and liberation, and compels us to move beyond a self-centered, single-issue, or national focus to consider what is good for all, what is necessary for survival and recovery of the planet, and how our treatment of other species matters.

Too few people are aware of the principles collaboratively distilled into international agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations Conventions on Racial Discrimination, Discrimination Against Women, the Rights of the Child, Biological Diversity, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Indigenous Rights, and the Coolangatta Statement, the Earth Charter, or the Animals’ Platform. Based on such documents, the authors share a single goal: to increase the quantity, quality, visibility, credibility, and accountability for social justice, peace, and environmental education in local communities and national educational agendas. We believe that central to our future well-being is our abil-ity to foster the practice of these values in our own lives and in the lives of people around the world through education.

Unfortunately, many of today’s educational agencies and policymakers are engaged in political agendas or remain uninformed or lackadaisical about the growing threats to the quality of human life and the environment. Instead, policies and curricula designed to uphold a world order grounded in a competitive, exploitative, global economy continue to be uncritically followed. The current neo-liberal educational agenda has banished democratic ideals and social justice issues from preK-12 curricula, replacing them with corporate-inspired goals and values, norm-referenced testing, and punitive bottom lines. Propelled by a sense of urgency for change, this book offers an alternative view to the prevailing corporate orthodoxy. The devastating social and ecological problems we face today stem from dominant patterns of development, production and consumption that are validated and reinforced by the current educational system. We hope, therefore, that the issues covered in this book will become integrated into curricula, institutional policies, and everyday educational practices. If education is to become a positive force helping to resolve the crises facing the world, social justice, peace, interspecies and earth education must move into the educational mainstream.

This project also strives, in multiple ways, to cut through the artificial boundaries dividing social justice education, peace education, and environmental education.

• First, we see global capitalism as the common denominator forming and/ or exacerbating the conditions for: human oppression; militarism and war; and destruction of species and environment.
• Second, we move beyond essentialism within and among social justice issues toward embracing the multiplicities and complexities of oppression and emancipation.
• Third, we illustrate the necessity of an educational vision and practice that recognizes that social justice, peace, and eco-justice are indivisible.
• Fourth, we strive to bridge the mythical divides between the local, regional, national, and global. Too often educators view ourselves and our work within a certain context—a school, a community, or a nation, and we may not recognize or understand the impact of global policies on our local community. Conversely, educators may not be familiar with the proposals and actions by international bodies that can exacerbate or ameliorate these problems. We highlight the connections between the local and global, between personal well-being and the well-being of others and the earth.
• The chapters in the book follow a general format; first presenting a synthesis of the challenges being faced within a global context and their interconnections with other issues. Second, they introduce national, international or key organizational documents to provide positive goals. Finally, they present a set of standards or principles to encourage self-reflection, and generate practical ideas and actions by and for students, teachers, administrators, staff, and teacher educators. We know that writing standards for social justice, peace, and environmental education is a new activity, and that its results must be provisional. Hence, we chose deliberately not to stipulate a single organization or language for the “standards,” leaving authors to name their own with a richness of variation and detail to maximize the potential for adaptation by educators.

Benefiting Educators, Students, and Institutions

Although we hope this book can be useful to multiple constituencies, we expect it will be especially beneficial to teacher education candidates, graduate students, or other educators at all levels of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions. As educators ourselves, we are products of the neo-liberal educational system previously described, so we know what it is to feel ill prepared to teach about issues of social justice, peace, and the environment. It is our hope that the practical visions, standards, and guidelines in the following chapters will help educators teach how to mitigate, alleviate, and repair some of the damage we humans have done, and even more importantly, how to inspire students to forge creative new (and old) ways of living in harmony with the natural world, other humans and other species.

An integrated and timely agenda is unfortunately still unavailable to students in most educational institutions. While students may encounter fragments of information, they rarely have more than a rudimentary sense of the problems, how their own behaviors might be contributing to them, or what organizations or social movements might be working on solutions. Many students freely admit that they do nothing to alleviate the global problems that concern them and frankly have no idea what they can do. This is not intended as a criticism of students or teachers but of the educational structures within which we find ourselves. It highlights the urgent need for committed and knowledgeable educators to make a substantial difference in the lives of students, and by extension, create a better world by facilitating new social consciousness, life changes, and action choices.

Claiming Standards for Justice

Education has always been the battleground for political struggles between those who want to control others for their own benefit and those who want to liberate themselves and the oppressed. Those who wished to maintain slavery made it illegal to educate slaves while those who opposed slavery educated slaves in violation of the law while organizing to change the law. As social movements challenged injustices, new ways of denying equal education to oppressed groups were continually developed through segregation, tracking, hidden curricula, and the like. Techniques were devised to create the appearance of fairness and equality while in essence replicating the same stratified system to maintain advantages for some groups at the expense of others. In the latest of these endeavors, a system of “standards” and tests with the egalitarian title of “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) has been established to deliver an education which is just and caring in name, but which in practice proves to be neither just nor caring.

At this point we should perhaps clarify why we have chosen to use the word “standards” for this project. Through several years of work, the authors have struggled with the idea of using the language of standards, because standards suggests both an orthodoxy and a means of measuring deviations from prevailing norms and behaviors. In addition, the controversy that raged around the US National History Standards in 1994–95 warns us of the pitfalls and dangers inherent in any attempt to create a canonical set of standards (Symcox, 2002). However, the term, standards, also refers to the establishment of goals, and the identification of specific ways to reach those goals. Using standards in this way requires going beyond a critique of existing standards, toward a positive outcome for progressive educators and their students. This book represents the first steps in this direction by laying out sets of proposed standards, and inviting criticism and revision for continuing to improve SJPEE standards, guidelines, and best practices. These standards and principles are designed as starting points in the process of implementing social justice goals, and perhaps more importantly, for redirecting educational discourse about accountability to include social justice, peace, and environmental sustainability.

An inspirational example of such standards is the work of the Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ANKN). Over the last decade and more, the ANKN has been influencing educational systems in Alaska through a series of ground-breaking Standards and Guidelines for students, parents, educators, curriculum, co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: An Eco-Pedagogy in the Pursuit of Social Justice and Peace
• 1 Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education: Global and Indivisible
• PART I Learning from Native Educators and Indigenous Communities: Transformative Principles and Cultural Standards
• PART II Transforming Education for Human Rights, Peace, All Species, and the Earth
• PART III Community Struggles for Global Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education
• PART IV Themes, Challenges, and Potential of SJPEE Visions and Guidelines
• Contributors