| This dissertation seeks to explore how a burgeoning ecopedagogy movement, born out of the work of Freirian and Illichian educators primarily based in Latin America, might develop ecopedagogical praxis relevant to critical pedagogues working institutionally in North America and, via the Internet, to the new ecological movements taking place the world over. Drawing upon elements of new social movement theory that have explained that environmentalism has sought social transformation in three primary areas---described as cosmological, technological, and organizational change---this thesis seeks to analyze and offer theoretical interventions that demonstrate: (1) I how an ecopedagogical worldview may critique the Western cosmology that has informed the history of Western education and offer transformative perspectives on education, (2) how a theory of multiple technoliteracies is necessary to critique the present moment of educational technology and media spectacle, and how this theory might drive support for cultural and environmental sustainability projects such as the United Nations Project 2000+ as well as provide the basis for a democratic reconstruction of education, (3) how Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich offered complimentary theories of educational technology that should be dialectically engaged with in order to produce a critique and reconstruction of established education, and how Freirian-Illichian perspectives, combined with ecopaedogy, can provide alternative pedagogies and technopolitics of education, (4) how indigenous knowledge practices, such as the Shoshone sweat lodge ceremony, should be interpreted institutionally as "real science," thereby allowing ecopedagogical critique and reconstruction of the bureaucratic organization of mainstream technoscience in the academy and other educational policy-making bodies, and (5) how Herbert Marcuse's theoretical corpus offers a central foundation from which to formulate a North American ecopedagogy that militates in defense and understanding of radical ecological activists, while it opposes and reconstructs capitalist ecologies as part of the pedagogical search for new life sensibilities, beauty, and world peace.;In closing, I seek to over a brief chronicle of my journey as an ecological educator at UCLA and attempt to iterate some of the institutional challenges to and possibilities for effective ecological education realized by my curricular experiment. |
