A Foucauldian Analysis of Environmental Education: Toward the Socioecological Challenge of the Earth Charter

This article examines recent trends in environmental education (EE) and argues that its institutionalization within general education works against its own socially and ecologically transformative goals. EE emerged as a cultural response to international awareness that human beings were negatively impacting their environments and causing ecological and social crises. Yet the institutionalization of EE within general education has diluted it of its political purpose of acknowledging and transforming these crises. A Foucauldian lens is employed to explore how EE, seeking legitimacy within general education, constitutes itself as “disciplinary practice.” Disciplinary practices discussed include the EE trends of claiming contentarea integration, supporting academic standards and testing, and developing disciplinary standards specific to EE. As disciplinary practice, EE becomes absorbed by general education; consequently, its value as a political project is undermined. The absorption of EE as disciplinary practice is further analyzed as an expression of the root metaphors of modernism. A Foucauldian analysis is then extended to examine how critical ecological discourse often neglects a related critical social discourse. Dissenting ecological traditions that unite social and ecological perspectives are briefly introduced. Finally, the Earth Charter is offered as a socioecological, visionary text that might help shape educational theory and practice in ways that avoid the cooptation and neglect suffered by environmental education.