Lessons from Feminists for Ecological Education

I recently submitted this abstract to a conference and for some reason it was not accepted! Luckily the other abstract I submitted to this conference was accepted. Anyway, I might as well publish the abstract - here it is.

Endeavors to create conditions that will develop an awareness of context, political consciousness and the potential for social action have a long history in adult education. The remarkable shifts in women’s rights in the late twentieth century were the results of over a century’s worth of struggle by feminists, a struggle that finally became institutionalised in universities in the 1970s with the emergence of women’s studies. This radical education transformed the daily lives and political realities of thousands of women.

In a 1975 American nation-wide study of women’s education, Jack Mezirow identified ten phases often encountered during consciousness-raising process within women’s education and developed the theory and practice of transformative learning. Transformative learning has now been developed into a practice that helps learners critically examine assumptions and as well as develop social capacities to put new perspectives into practice. This pedagogy is a powerful tool with the potential to help learners cross the infamous value / action gap in environmental education.

An understanding of the connections between oppression of women and the destruction of nature has deep reaching implications for the environmental movement and design education. Feminism, with its legacy of struggle to pull half of the human race out of oppression, has a comprehensive critique of the conceptual framework sanctioning domination and exploitation. Critical strategies that informed women’s struggles for liberation can be used towards an ecological transformation in design education to create a foundation for sustainable design practice.

Developing an understanding of ecology and humankind’s essential embeddedness within the ecological systems is an essential foundation for designers. Design disciplines are integral to the creation of new sustainable ways of living but without a grounding in ecological literacy designers can only continue to reproduce current unsustainable conditions. Responding to systemic conditions will require ecological literacy to become embedded in design education.

References

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Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity.

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Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Kahn, R. (2010). Critical Pedagogy, Ecological Literacy, and Planetary Crisis. New York: Peter Lang.

Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to Think Like an Adult. Learning as Transformation. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.

 

Mezirow, J. (2003). Transformative Learning as Discourse. Journal of Transformative  Education, 1, pp58-63.

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