Conceptualising a justice approach to environmental education in the Global South: six pedagogical dimensions

This paper conceptualises a pedagogical approach to environmental education that embeds multiple forms of justice and incorporates six dimensions. This pedagogical approach was developed as a response to findings from a large, comparative study of diverse forms of justice in policies relevant to education, pedagogical practices, and 14-17 year-old learners’ experiences in Nepal, Peru and Uganda. In researching the connections across environmental, epistemic, transitional and social justice, our study showed three key barriers to transformative environmental education. In response, we propose that teachers using this pedagogical approach may help young people to understand the complexity of justice and its relationship to sustainable development through systemic and interdisciplinary thinking, developing critical and reparative pedagogies of place, encouraging individual action alongside an appreciation for collective responsibility and by promoting critical thinking.