Teaching justice-based environmental sustainability in higher education: generative dialogues

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are not only potential sites of teaching environmental (un)sustainability but are essential sites to curb environmental injustices, planetary sustainability, and devastation to Nature, including humans. A key question is, what are the politics that support or oppose higher education’s (HE) role of critically teaching environmental sustainability for students’ praxis? Questioning also includes if this is a central role of HE. In other words, what are the influences on and from HE teaching that helps or hinders students’ critical reflexivity for acting environmentally? Criticality is essential in HE teaching because transformative actions are crucial to ending anti-environmentalism by disrupting perverted commonsense that falsely justifies acts of socio-environmental injustices and planetary unsustainability (Gadotti 2008a, 2008b; Misiaszek 2020b; Misiaszek et al. 2011; Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023; Misiaszek and Torres 2019). Directly or indirectly, teaching environmental (un)sustainability is tethered to local-to-global politics of HE’s other roles, such as sites of knowledge production and legitimization, economics, labor, and activism. We argue that problematizing the complex and often contesting roles of HE teaching as helping or hindering environmentally sustainable praxis is essential for disrupting Nature’s demise, including our own as humans. This includes teaching to actively counter the politics upon and from HEIs and unlearn anti-environmental commonsense. To respond to this need for HE teaching worldwide, we have this Special Issue (SI) within Teaching in Higher Education (TiHE) entitled ‘Higher Education Teaching of Environmentally Just Sustainability.’ The SI was constructed rather uniquely by asking the authors to ‘dialogue’ with the questions we posed in our TiHE Points of Departure (PoD) article entitled ‘Six critical questions for teaching justice-based environmental sustainability (JBES) in higher education’ (Misiaszek and Rodrigues 2023). In the PoD, we provided key groundings for JBES but emphasized that contextualizing JBES’s definitions and framings is essential within HE teaching and research. The six questions revolve around problematizing the following themes: the ideologies of ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ taught in HE, the politics and responsibilities of teaching JBES in HE, and the epistemological groundings of HE teaching JBES, as well as asking what epistemologies are frequently absent (e.g. epistemologies of the South, Indigenous knowledges). This last theme includes questioning if prominent epistemologies instill anthropocentrism. or not. In addition, SI authors dialogued with each other’s work by sharing several versions of their abstracts and manuscript versions between them. In addition to normal review activities as the SI editors, we also suggested possible specific connections with other papers to support dialogues between the authors. This dialogical process as an ‘assemblage’ methodology used in this SI has been a pattern used in The Journal of Environmental Education for SIs since 2016 (Payne 2016, 2018; Rodrigues and LowanTrudeau 2021; Rodrigues et al. 2020). It ‘aims to potentialize constructive dialogue and cross-referencing among authors in order to create a coherent and generative unity that is, indeed, a “special” issue’ (Rodrigues and Lowan-Trudeau 2021, 301).