This document discusses various pedagogies and teaching practices, including ecojustice pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, and queer pedagogy. For ecojustice pedagogy, it describes key points of ecojustice theory, methods for disrupting anthropocentric mindsets, and teaching methods focused on exploring intersections between cultural value systems and ecology. For feminist pedagogy, it outlines classroom practices like invitational rhetoric, empowerment, building community, giving voice, incorporating diverse experiences, and challenging traditional views. For queer pedagogy, it provides examples of lessons that investigate queered relationships, knowledges, and communities.

1. PEDAGOGIES &
TEACHING PRACTICES
Kurt Love, Ph.D.

2. ECOJUSTICE
PEDAGOGY

3. You & Nature
What is your relationship with nature?

6. You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so no one sees you anymore.
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight—
and it is possible: its great strength is
breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by David Whyte in Fire in the
Earth)

7. “Now he seeks to become nobody for a while, to disappear into
the woods so that the person he really is might find him.”
(Plotkin, 2003, p. 244)

8. Ecojustice Theory
The roots of our domination over each other come from
the same root of domination we feel over the earth.
When biodiversity is threatened so is cultural diversity
Dominant elites exploit the earth and subordinated peoples
for their own benefit.
Social justice, critical social theories, and multiculturalism
are often anthropocentric

9. Summary Points of Ecojustice Theory
1. Eliminating eco-racism
2. Revitalizing the commons to create a balance between market
and non-market aspects of community life
3. Ending the industrialized nations’ exploitation and cultural
colonization of third-world nations
4. Ensure that the hubris and ideology of Western industrial
culture does not diminish future generations’ ways of living and
quality of life
5. Support an “Earth Democracy”--the right of nature to flourish
rather than be contingent upon the demands of humans
From ecojusticeeducation.org

10. Disrupting a Mindset of
Anthropocentrism
Thick Description includes:
Questioning “root metaphors” in language
Questioning human domination over nature practices
Exposing “technology as our ecology” in curriculum
Analyzing history through an anti-anthropocentric lens

11. Ecojustice Teaching Methods
Exploring the intersections of
cultural value system and ecology
1. Teacher-as-Mediator
Aiming for thick description
(relationships and tensions)
2. Investigating Mindsets
Disrupting anthropocentric thinking
and language
3. Commons-Based Learning
Using the cultural commons as place-
based learning experiences
4. Ecological Selves
Deconstructing our technological/
ecological selves

12. Ecojustice Teaching Methods
Exploring the intersections of
cultural value system and ecology
5. Sustainable Feast
Making dishes with foods that are
in season and from within 100
miles away
6. Community Mapping
Investigating the surroundings of
an area including its buildings,
natural areas, types of land usage
7. Earth-Walking
Knowing the mythological and
practical significances of the
natural area

13. Feminist Pedagogy

14. Classroom Practices
1. Invitational Rhetoric
2. Empowerment
3. Building Community
4.Voice
5. Diverse Experiences
6. Challenge Traditional Views
(Webb, 2002)

15. Classroom Practices

16. Invitational Rhetoric
Does not try to change or control
students
Validates various perspectives
Creates safety, value & freedom

17. Invitational Rhetoric
bell hooks states that she does not intend to
create a classroom space that is comfortable.
It is turbulent, frank, (fiery) and full of emotional
disequilibrium
That is the space that allows for us to get to what
is real, honest, and authentic
It should be done with great care and support,
though.

18. Cooperative Learning
Moving away from a top-down lecture
At the college level:
Small group discussions
Papers that incorporated personal
living experiences and reflective
thinking

19. Empowerment
Education is not neutral
“Practice of freedom” - critically
questioning reality so that we may be
able to transform our world

20. Voice
Path for learning
Being heard
Sharing voice in community
Exercising one’s agency -
empowerment
Affirming personal
experiences

21. Building Community
Sharing of power or “power-with”
Shifting from individualism to
cooperative mindsets
Service learning projects

22. Building Community
Daring to “Care”
Nel Noddings states that classroom spaces become
sites of working on issues and concerns that students
care about
Learning (in the school setting) becomes a process
that students can genuinely care about
Students support and encourage one another in their
learning experiences

23. Challenge Traditional Views
Education is not neutral
Questioning traditional
views & practices of
gender
Questioning traditional
content and presentations
of “knowledge”

24. Ways of Knowing
What are the different ways that we come to
know information and construct knowledge?
Observation Relationships Measurement
Experience Historically Power Relations
Intuition Intergenerationally Media
Spiritually Emotionally Senses

25. The Earth
Western Science:
The Earth is a collection of materials, minerals, and
chemicals in systems.
Which “ways of knowing” construct this
knowledge?
Which “ways of knowing” are excluded?
What is missing from this description of the Earth?

26. Ways of Knowing
Western Science:
The Earth is a collection of materials, minerals, and
chemicals in systems.
Observation Relationships Measurement
Experience Historically Power Relations
Intuition Intergenerationally Media
Spiritually Emotionally Senses

27. The Earth
Indigenous Science:
The Earth is an integrated, interdependent,
interconnected, nurturing and spiritual being that
reciprocates life through balance and sustainability.
Which “ways of knowing” construct this knowledge?
Which “ways of knowing” are excluded?
What is missing from this description of the Earth?

28. Ways of Knowing
Indigenous Science:
The Earth is an integrated, interdependent, interconnected,
nurturing and spiritual being that reciprocates life through
balance and sustainability.
Observation Relationships Measurement
Experience Historically Power Relations
Intuition Intergenerationally Media
Spiritually Emotionally Senses

29. Queer Pedagogy

30. In a Lesson
• As with any transformative pedagogy, it’s
not about having the “right” method...
• It’s about developing the “right” question.
• Meaningful, thought-provoking, connected
to real world issues

31. In a Lesson
• Investigating “queered” relationships in the content
• Investigating “queered” knowledges
• Combining with aesthetic (fine arts, performing
arts, Theatre of the Oppressed) to provide
divergent thinking and experiential processes
• Purposely “othering” knowledge so that students
can respond by calling out “othering”
• Investigating how a community produces “queering”

32. In a Lesson
• How was Boo Radley “queered” in To Kill a
Mockingbird?
• How was the Ugly Duckling “queered”?
• How did Harvey Milk and his supporters fight being
politically “queered”?
• Forum Theater on how queering happens in your
school/classroom
• How do boys “queer” each other based on
definitions of masculinity?