John Lupinacci

(Un)Learning Anthropocentrism: An EcoJustice Framework for Teaching to Resist Human-Supremacy in Schools

In the Living Planet Report 2014 by the WWF (formally known as the World Wildlife Fund), researchers introduce a new index that considers “10,380 populations of 3,038 species of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish from around the globe” (p. 136). This report indicates that since 1970 the planet has experienced a 52% loss in species (WWF, 2014). Further, this index states that the world’s freshwater species have dropped by 76% in that same time span. These statistics come to us amid an ongoing debate among scientists as to whether the designation of our current time period, the Holocene (meaning entirely recent), is outdated, and whether Anthropocene (combining human with the new) might be a more accurate identifier. Despite the continued contestations, scientists agree that “human-kind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altered the atmosphere, among other lasting impacts” (Stromberg, 2013, para. 3).

Ecocritical contestations with neoliberalism: Teaching to (un)learn “normalcy”

This article seeks to address often overlooked cultural assumptions embedded within neoliberalism; specifically, the researchers explore what ecofeminist Val Plumwood describes as centric thinking, leading to a logic of domination. The authors argue that social justice educators and activists who are committed to critiquing neoliberalism must take into consideration the ways in which a logic of domination undergirds the unjust and destructive social and economic ideologies and policies that constitute neoliberalism. The authors examine and share pedagogical moments from experiences in teacher education seeking to: (a) challenge and disrupt dualistic thinking; (b) interrupt perceptions of hegemonic normalcy—referring to a socio-cultural process by which actions, behaviors, and diverse ways of interpreting the world are perceived by dominant society as “fitting in” and being socially acceptable; and, (c) contest false notions of independence—the degree to which an individual is perceived as able to meet their social and economic responsibilities on their own—as measures of success in schools and society. The authors detail how they work with(in) teacher education programs to introduce how an ecocritical approach, drawing from ecofeminist frameworks, identifies and examines the impacts of neoliberal policies and practices dominated by “free” market ideology. The authors assert that educators, especially teacher educators, can challenge harmful discourses that support the problematic neoliberal understandings about independence that inform Western cultural norms and assumptions. Concluding, the authors share a conceptualization for (un)learning the exploitation inextricable from the policies and practices of neoliberalism.

Inserting Critical Mathematics into STEM Education

The chapter begins by asking whether STEM education is a friend or foe to the field of critical mathematics education (CME) by reviewing how mainstream STEM conflicts with CME but also provides spaces for critical work. Tensions between CME and STEM include mainstream STEM’s emphasis on human capital, inattention to environmental degradation, and soft-critical orientation to social justice issues. However, STEM’s emphases on interdisciplinarity can provide opportunities for critical mathematics education to take place. We argue that STEM education as policy can be an opportunistic space to simultaneously resist and reconstitute in line with the values and goals of CME. We extend CME’s goals with deeper theoretical consideration to the nature of the ecological and social crises, in so doing we draw on ecofeminism and EcoJustice Education. The chapter concludes with a model “critical STEM” unit plan sketch that is appropriate for the Junior Secondary level. CME, ecofeminist theory, and internationally benchmarked content standards provide the foundation for our STEM unit plan titled “A Story of Incarceration.” By this example, we intend to show that critical STEM projects can be transformative for learners as well meet the content goals of standard STEM education.

Food for a Common(s) Curriculum: Learning to Recognize and Resist Food Enclosures

In this chapter we discuss a case study from Detroit, Michigan, that highlights what educators can learn from community efforts to address food insecurity. Advocating that educators and policy makers rethink how they recognize and come to understand food enclosures—socio-political and economic arrangements that limit access to the production, preparation, and consumption of local, healthy, and culturally relevant food—the chapter emphasizes the importance of working together to learn from and with food movements.

Resistance Wisdom and Grassroots Urban Education: Lessons from Detroit

This chapter focuses on how radical educators in Detroit, MI are working through an ecocritical pedagogy to expose the absurdity of the destructive habits of today’s society and to propose grassroots alternatives. Acknowledging the impacts of Western industrial culture on the racially segregated neighborhoods systematically decimated by the racism, sexism, and classism of the North American industrial revolution, this chapter provides an overview of environmental justice and eco-racism in connection with youth engagement in the context of urban education. Drawing on the author’s experiences as a Detroit scholar-activist educator, this chapter shares how—despite the strong efforts of a neoliberal State government to gentrify and privatize land, water, and food in Detroit—activist educators have been able to politically mobilize communities through advocating for rights that ensure access to food and food traditions that support a healthy community and argue that for the importance of an education that supports the best possible standard of living for all. Asserting that activist-educators at the grassroots level in Detroit are exploring education that moves beyond the boundaries of formal schooling, this chapter shares examples of how students, educators, and members of the local community engage in identifying and examining issues relevant to the local neighborhoods while simultaneously developing a worldview supportive of social justice and sustainability.

Introduction: From Addressing the Problems to the Solutions of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Through a Food and Environmental Justice Perspective

This book emerged out of the book From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Nocella et al. 2014) and the work of Save the Kids, a national grassroots organization dedicated to alternatives to and the end of the incarceration of all youth and the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), grounded in Hip Hop and transformative justice. Save the Kids was founded in 2009 by four African American boys in a New York juvenile detention facility. Save the Kids, along with other youth justice activists saw a lack of discussion on environmental and food justice when discussing the causes of the STPP.

Education that Supports All Students: Food Sovereignty and Urban Education in Detroit

In the context of recognizing and resisting an educational system that sorts young people into prisons, and the systemic violence of exposing youth to poisonous amounts of environmental pollution through toxic food, air, and water, I find Detroit—like so many other communities around the world for which modern economics has failed—to be rich with hope and promise despite the clearly visible economic abandonment and worldwide notoriety for bankruptcy, violence, and crime. While there is plenty of research that exist to tell stories that further pathologize poverty and criminalize youth, the work in this chapter resists such a fetish and turns attention to the resilience and political organizing of educator-activists as cultural workers recognizing that schools ought to focus learning around a fundamental student need—the need and right to nourishing and culturally appropriate food.

Science and Technology Studies × Educational Studies: Critical and Creative Perspectives on the Future of STEM Education

This special issue presents a collection of articles that multiplies Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Educational Studies, in an attempt to think differently about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. We hope this cross product of the two fields amplifies the philosophical insights from each, stretching scholarship in new directions and across disciplines. While diligently refusing reductive scientisms, we open up this manifold space so as to cultivate discussions of a possible rapprochement between the physical and social sciences (Wilson, 2015). This work responds to the changing theoretical landscape across the humanities or posthumanities, following the ontological turn and the shift to consider more-than-human agencies. This work is thus highly relevant for the field of educational studies and the social foundations of education, providing insights into alternative onto-epistemologies, and tracking the impact of these across education policy, research, and curriculum. As part of the shifting theoretical terrain, we see philosophers today exploring newmixtures of politics and nature by looking to mathematics (Badiou, 2011; Kirby, 2011; Meillassoux, 2010), the physical sciences (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Coole&Frost, 2010; DeLanda, 2011, 2015) as well as indigenous cosmologies (Avelar, 2013; Chakrabarty, 2009, 2014; Danowski & Viveiros