(En)Countering Climate Coloniality in Education: Thinking with the Subjectivities and Pedagogies of Climate Educators of Colour
Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This doctoral dissertation is a narrative study on racialized climate educators’ subject and knowledge formation processes pertaining to climate justice. Drawing from survey data and data collected from 14 semi-structured interviews, I argue that educators’ climate justice knowledge is informed by two interrelated subject formation processes. First, their knowledge and connections from ‘back home’ in the Global South have shaped their embodied understandings of climate injustice. Second, their complex reckoning with ‘racialized settler’ subjectivity on Turtle Island, in the context of K-12 schools and informal community-based contexts, continues to shape their understanding of themselves as local climate educators working on stolen Indigenous land. These subject formation processes orient educators’ pedagogical work, especially while engaging racialized youth. Educators demonstrate a commitment to engage youth with epistemic shifts through various anticolonial land education pedagogies. They also enact climate justice pedagogies to help youth build solidary relations to marginalized communities most impacted by the climate crisis. In theorizing this work, I trouble the representations educators use in their climate teaching by tracing how competing educational discourses puts pressure on educators to generate individualist responses to the climate crisis. However, despite the salience of these discourses, I argue that climate educators of colour are seeking ways to enact collectivist climate justice pedagogies. Finally, across these theorizations, I conclude with a brief speculative discussion on the future of climate change education to ask what is needed to further resist climate coloniality. I think with teachers’ hopes for the future to present two speculative ‘moves’ for climate education. I suggest that the analytic of geopolitical borders is a generative one to bring to the forefront of climate justice pedagogy, especially in recognizing emergent threats associated with the ballooning climate crisis, such as the rise of eco-fascism and xenophobia towards climate refugees. Second, I call for more explicit educator engagement with anti-capitalist pedagogies that enable youth to envision alternative economic models that may nurture just and liveable futures. I suggest these analytics may open generative pathways for researchers and climate educators alike, in considering and striving towards paradigms of anticolonial climate education.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Nayak, Preeti
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7132941103