Verifying the Efficacy of Eco-pedagogies During a Climate Crisis? Using Wittgenstein’s Post-foundationalism in Defense of Arts-based and Place-based Environmental Education

Dr Jeff Stickney (Speaker)
Dr Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley (Chair)

Responding to calls for more theoretical and empirical research on ‘effective’ environmental education pedagogies, the author explores difficulty in doing this in the case of arts- and place-based learning. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, investigation of these performative practices reveal that they do not lend themselves to causal inquiry; when people are talking about their ‘effects’ they mean something very different than when we talk about the ‘effects’ of climate change or of technologies. The latter, scientific language-game has a greater degree of certainty, drawing more on formal education and the ‘system of verification’ operating across the knowledge conveyed through the liberal arts. The former language-game, judging the efficacy of arts-/placed-based practices, hinges on more tacit, practical knowledge, acquired informally through acculturation and training. It is more like talking about the ‘effects’ of a concert than the ‘effectiveness’ of a light bulb. Sorting through this conceptual muddle, which is more than equivocation in terms, helps to therapeutically release us from the burden of justifying time honoured eco-pedagogies, embracing the shallow ground on which these ecstatic and emplaced practices rest. The aim is to free educators from a ‘picture holding us captive’: that of achieving a veritable pedagogical science.

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https://oise-utoronto.zoom.us/j/84201468880
Meeting ID: 842 0146 8880