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

Responding to calls for more theoretical and empirical research on ‘effective’ environmental education pedagogies, the author explores the difficulty in doing this in the case of arts- and place-based learning. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, investigations into performances of these practices reveal that they do not lend themselves to causal inquiry; in talking about their ‘effects’, we mean something very different from the ‘effects’ of climate change or of technologies. The latter, scientific language-game provides for a greater degree of certainty, drawing more on formal education than the ‘system of verification’ operating across the knowledge conveyed through the liberal arts. The former language-game, that of 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.