Decolonizing Environmental Education for Different Contexts and Nations

As Dominant Western Worldviews (DWWs) proliferate through ongoing structures of globalization, neoliberalism, extractive capitalism, and colonialism, they inevitably marginalize those deemed as ‘Other’ (Indigenous, Black, Minority Ethnic, non-Western communities and non-human ‘Others’, including animals, plants, technologies, and energies). Environmental Education (EE) is well-positioned to trouble and minimize the harmful human impacts on social and ecological systems, yet the field is susceptible to how DWWs constrain and discipline what counts as viable knowledge, with a consequence of this being the loss of situated knowledges. To understand the relationships between DWW and situated knowledges and to thread an assemblage of ontological views that exist in unique contexts and nations, authors in this book take up decolonizing methodologies that expand across theories of Indigenous Knowledges (IK), Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK), two-eyed seeing, hybridity, and posthumanism. As EE opens to emplaced and situated socio-cultural and material stories, it opens to opportunities to attend more meaningfully to planetary social and ecological crisis narratives through contingent, contextualised, and relevant actions.

Kathryn Riley obtained a Ph.D. from Deakin University, Australia, in 2019. Kathryn is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Janet McVittie obtained a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada in 1999. She is currently retired from a 23 year career teaching and researching in the departments of Curriculum Studies and Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Marcelo Gules Borges obtained a Ph.D. from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil in 2014. He is currently a Tenured Assistant Professor at the Department of Teaching Methodology, School of Education, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.