Towards a Political Education Through Environmental Issues. Melki Slimani
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situations (Van Poeck and Östman 2017). The work of Sund and Öhman (2014) and Sund (2016) proposes a reconsideration of the political in environmental education and sustainable development according to several guidelines (unmasking the political dimension, repoliticizing education, seeing beyond the relativistic and objectivistic divide and using emotion as a driving force).
Curricula are objects of formal schooling that privileges the universalization of its contents and strives to prohibit the unexpected and heterogeneous (Ardoino and Berger 2010). Non-formal education systems are also formalizations of the informal with normative drifts (Barthes 2017). Taking these two facts into account leads to the problem of the “fate” of the political in the EDIs when it comes to its inflections in non-formal and formal education.
This book aims to build a model in order to structure the political in educational content involving EDIs. The components of this model serve as didactic guidelines for the elaboration of the content of a possible curriculum for a political education through these questions. The book consists of six chapters.
Chapter 1, which follows the introduction, suggests that EDIs should be categorized into metathemes: environmental policies and environmental change, environmental ethics, sustainable development, agri-food issues, environmental technology and environmental management and, finally, the issue of transitions. This chapter also proposes a differentiation of the constitutive themes of these metathemes according to their anti-political or political trend. This thematic categorization refers to a historical analysis of human political thought.
Chapter 2 focuses on the development of a conceptual and analytical framework for the political potential of EDIs. This analysis identifies this potential in four components: environmental literacy, environmental deliberation, ecological citizenship and collective environmental action.
Chapter 3 presents a conceptual elaboration of political learning in educational content involving EDIs in relation to the socialization process. This learning is categorized according to four areas: learning about ecoliteracy in relation to disciplinary cognitive socialization, learning about citizenship in relation to political socialization, learning about deliberation in relation to critical cognitive socialization and learning in action regimes in relation to democratic socialization.
Chapter 4 presents the methodology for data collection and analysis. This chapter introduces the empirical research by justifying the choice of two case studies and sources of evidence considered in this study: analyses of official documents, guided interviews for teachers and learners, and observations of classroom sessions using observation grids.
Chapter 5 presents the results of analyses of educational content in a first case study chosen in non-formal education: that of learning content in the UNESCO document entitled “Education for the Sustainable Development Goals”.
Chapter 6 presents the results of the analysis of in the case of formal education: that of content involving EDIs in Tunisian secondary and undergraduate curricula.
1 1 The urban transition movement initially originated in Great Britain in 2006 with Rob Hopkins who, along with his students, proposed a transition model for a city. Today, there are several other transition initiatives in several countries around the world, which form an international transition network.
2 2 In Europe, Climate Justice Action is a network of European grassroots movements that came into being in October 2014 at a time when COP21 symbolized the collective struggle for climate and social justice.
3 3 This report is entitled “Our Common Future”.
4 4 Accessible online on the Tunisian legislative portal: http://www.legislation.tn/sites/default/files/files/textes_soumis_avis/texte/mshrw_qnwn_lqtsd_ljtmy_wltdmny_1.pdf.
5 5 Informal education corresponds to learning that takes place in daily activities outside the academic framework of formal education and all other organized educational processes, such as those of non-formal education and its devices, including popular education or literacy (Brougère and Bézille 2007).
6 6 These non-formal education mechanisms are absent in Tunisia. No Tunisian school is registered on the network of eco-schools website: http://www.ecoschools.global/national-offices/.
1
The Political Trend in Environmental Issues
1.1. Politics, the political and depoliticization
To characterize the political field that intersects with EDIs, we have drawn on Gachkov’s (2012) advanced reading of the main concepts of the French philosopher Lefort1 (politics, democracy, revolution and human rights). In this reading, the author proposes a conceptual distinction between “politics” and “the political”, where the first term is conceived as a more niche sphere of social phenomena that exists among others (religion, law, civil society, etc.). Politics is seen as an institutionalization of the political (a symbolic field), actualizing it through the participatory civic form of radical democracy as “a democratic order in which the irreducibility of the plurality of understandings of the common good, the necessity of openness and transparency, an acceptance of fundamental uncertainty and the impossibility of ending the democratic quest are central” (Blokker 2014, p. 379).
According to Gachkov’s reading of Lefort, paradoxically, liberal politics through its insistence on individual liberties cannot provide decent protection for them because most of the people involved (the bourgeois) are depoliticized. This depoliticization, which is the consequence of the refusal of the bourgeoisie to participate in political debates because “their will is to take care only of their families and their advancement” (Gachkov 2012, p. 385; author’s translation), can provoke the appearance of totalitarian power sacrificing the lives of citizens based on a logic that “consciously confuses political power and civil society” (Gachkov 2012, p. 384; author’s translation). Thus, liberal politics (of which representative democracy is a component) makes democracy vulnerable to totalitarianism. In democratic society, where politics as an activity that questions the entire social domain, political power and civil society must coexist without domination in a social field where “power, law, knowledge are tested by a radical indeterminacy” (Gashkov 2012, p. 383; author’s translation). In contrast to a totalitarian society that wants to be certain of its future, political freedom in democratic society corresponds to the capacity of such a society to open up to uncertainty.
1.2. The political and the anti-political
According to Howard (2010), the history of human political thought can be traced back to two trends that originated from the first political experience of human society: democratic Athenian city.
The first trend constitutes a descending line of Platonic thought, itself interpreted as a reaction to the defeat of Athenian democracy. It is an anti-political trend that took shape at different moments in human social history. Christian theological thought fed this current, with Augustine and Luther as outstanding examples in the 5th and 15th centuries. Hobbes’ philosophy in the 17th century is representative of this trend in political philosophy, which culminated towards the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century in an anti-political project that reabsorbed politics into a logic of historical progression playing the role of a source of legitimacy anchored in a type of reasoning rooted in economics.
The