Education and ecological precarity: Pedagogical, curricular, and conceptual provocations

Abstract

Too big to imagine and too urgent to ignore, climate crisis is the text or the subtext of many of the news headlines as we write the editorial introduction to this special issue. We write while still in the COVID-19 pandemic, just after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, just after a summer of deadly heatwaves, just after a highway collapsed due to flooding in British Columbia, and just after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police again invaded Wet’suwet’en, where land defenders are engaged in the ongoing protection of their lands and waters from construction of a gas pipeline. No matter when you read this or where you are reading from, you will also be reading during and “just after” the devastation caused by climate crisis. We can count on the permanence of crises popping up, eroding away, and worsening. We are in times of guaranteed precarity. Youth climate activists continue to inspire; they hold corporations and governments to account for the lack of substantive action and bring attention to the need for action. Amidst the disappointments of the COP26 summit (including those identified by youth from all corners of the world1) somehow scaling up and escalating a response to climate crisis remains ever more urgent. We are reminded of this urgency every day. A recent headline announced: “Extreme weather events are ‘the new norm’” (McGrath, 2021). The article proceeded to name some of the extreme events of the year from around the world including drought, extreme rainfall, and an accelerated rise in sea levels. We are drowning in stories of ecological devastation, its disproportionately distributed effects, and colonial governments’ insistence on capitalist extractivism. The ruinous times illustrated by these stories demand urgent responses at multiple levels. We have convened this special issue as a call to consider possibilities for curricular and pedagogical responses. In particular, we see a disconnect between how quickly human and more-than-human lives are changing as a result of climate change and the lack of accompanying responsive and responsible changes in curriculum and pedagogy in preK–12 schooling and in higher education. In this introduction, we elaborate on key themes that inspired the special issue and how article authors have taken up these themes in various curricular projects and pedagogical interventions. These themes include centering nature-culture relations and witnessing relational stories, disrupting colonialism, attending to Black ecologies, and engaging with interdisciplinary pedagogies. We bring the articles into conversation with critical interviews we conducted with Black and Indigenous climate change scholars, including Megan Bang, Ananda Marin, Max Liboiron, Katherine Crocker, Deondre Smiles, J.T. Roane, and