What can we learn from these critical pedagogies to transform environmental education

Though environmental educational programs date to the 1960s, 60 years later, their impact falters under fragmented curricula, depoliticised content, and disconnection from lived realities. In a previous brief, I unpacked how modern education fails to adequately prepare STEM students for the cognitive, psychological, social and global repercussions of the environmental crises.

In this article, I will explore the critical pedagogies of the 20th-century thinkers Paulo Freire and Oskar Negt, which have long informed problem-based learning approaches. However, their radical core, being a systemic critique, risks dilution when reduced to mere ‘methods.’ Hence, I will return these foundations to reclaim what makes them profound, not just tools for learning, but catalysts for systems thinking and status quo questioning.

Freire’s aim to dismantle learning hierarchies and humanise learning

The first critical pedagogy to put under our microscope can be traced back to the Brazilian pedagogue and activist Paulo Freire. It is a pedagogy forged in Brazil’s favelas and rural communities, deeply influencing the theological liberation movement of the 1970s; the social movement framed poverty as a consequence of social injustice, rather than an individual failing.  In Freirean pedagogy, students become co-creators of knowledge, dismantling hierarchies between teachers and learners, and humanising learning through praxis-oriented learning, or in other words, learning by doing and implementing knowledge in real-world contexts.¹ 

This simple, but revolutionary educational approach stems from Freire’s deep critique of a banking model of education, i.e., where knowledge is deposited into passive students, and remains devastatingly relevant to modern conventional environmental education that prioritises facts over critical consciousness.^{1, 2} Although a learning by doing approach has now entered mainstream educational methods through problem- and project-based learning, Freire’s radical insistence on dialogue remains crucial for teaching the concepts of sequentiality from foundational to advanced knowledge; positioning and interaction with students’ social identities; historicity through recognition of historical contents, and plurality and inclusiveness of diverse perspectives in STEM classrooms.³

Negt’s exemplarity for connecting lived experience to systemic problems

Complementing Freire’s pedagogy is the work of the German philosopher and critical social theorist, Oskar Negt. Negt’s educational theory is grounded in his critical theory of socialisation and exemplary learning.^{4, 5} In the Negtian pedagogy, exemplarity is vital for connecting learning to personal experiences and societal structural forces, revealing systemic patterns and problems. In practice, using examples from real life helps students connect what they are learning to their own experiences and the bigger social systems around them. By focusing on what students actually live through, they can better understand issues of power, morality, and uncertainty, thereby transcending fragmented curricula and ultimately challenging the myth of STEM’s impartial objectivity.⁶

Similarly to dialogic learning, exemplarity advocates for learning approaches which are deeply connected to the students’ personal and collective lived experiences, allowing them to critically reflect and act upon their realities. Exemplarity involves demonstrating and modelling alternatives to oppressive or mechanistic ways of teaching and knowing, which is critical in fostering transformative education.⁷

Critical pedagogies from the 20^th century in 21st-century classrooms

Together, the critical pedagogies of Freire and Negt are the educational gift that keeps giving, even decades after their conceptualisation, as they provide the philosophical and practical bedrock for environmental education that is cross-disciplinary, critical, and action-oriented. Instead of being ‘all-knowing units,’ teachers can go back to Freire’s and Negt’s critical learning to facilitate students’ engagement in problem-posing rather than knowledge ‘banking’. Hence, a selection of educational methods and tools that teachers can utilise includes:

1. Problem-oriented project work (PPL)

As a method for learning, PPL involves having students work in groups of 3-7 on a larger, real-world problem, which they investigate over an entire semester. Students will define the problem themselves, guided by a project supervisor.^{8, 9} PPL shouldn’t be confused with problem-based learning (PBL), which refers to a method of learning in which students tackle (usually written) problems designed by content-experts, in sessions guided by a tutor.¹⁰ Through PPL, as pioneered by Roskilde University, students initially identify a problem, via field visits, interviews and data analysis, and through mixed-method research, e.g., scientific testing, policy analysis and stakeholder engagement, integrate theory and practice. Finally, students culminate the projects’ completion with tangible prototypes or products of social value, combining both academic rigour and real-world relevance.

2. Critically reflective dialogue

As iterated at Erasmus University Rotterdam, compared to traditional discussion-based learning, has been found to significantly improve students’ ability to engage in critical thinking. This method can be utilised for investigating real-world limit-situation examples; the kind of real-world problems that seem fixed and unchangeable, imposing “limits” and making all involved parties feel powerless in tackling the underlying problem.² This process of identifying how to tackle the “limits” of these real-world problems  helps students question assumptions, test ideas, and reflect on causal relationships rather than accepting superficial explanations, and ultimately improves their depth of learning, their sense of responsibility and creative thinking.^{11, 12} For instance, how can we analyse the pollution of a local river or urban food deserts not as fixed conditions but as transformable problems, to ensure the full humanity of the involved communities?

3. Exemplary learning

Approaching complex systems can bring to life Negt’s pedagogy, e.g., the carbon cycle, through exemplars. In other words, concrete local examples of bigger problems. An exemplar like the deforestation of the Amazon can provide valuable insights into the global carbon cycle by integrating biology, for understanding biodiversity loss; chemistry, for carbon sequestration; economics, for crop supplies and their effects in the commodity markets;  political science, for indigenous rights, and ethics, demanding true cross-disciplinary command of knowledge.¹³ This cross-disciplinary approach can tie learning to students’ realities, an experience that can be used as an entry point to analyse broader societal dynamics and ecological relationships.

For exemplary learning, educators can also create the circumstances for community-based projects or service learning, through collaboration with community organisations, alignment of projects with course curriculum and inclusion of reflection activities between students and community partners, among others. In the steps of the University of Waterloo, supporting students in designing meaningful projects and making lived experience the centrepiece of learning is a key component for students to engage directly with challenges in their own neighbourhoods or communities, using these experiences as the basis for critical inquiry.

Conclusion

Freire and Negt offer the foundations for a transformative alternative to traditional environmental education. Their pedagogies, grounded in humanised education, learning by doing and exemplarity for critical thinking, anchor abstract and generic problem-based learning. They also offer tools to design cross-disciplinary learning interventions to cultivate ecologically literate, empowered citizens capable of healing a world in desperate need of repair.

In the “Is STEM education failing our students, our planet or both?” brief we dive deeper into such a STEM reform and foundational pedagogies, frameworks, methods and tools, tested by academics and university educators on how to integrate social studies and humanities (SSH) into STEM programmes to encourages students to intertwine concepts across disciplines, understand their networked structure, and comprehend how social and ecological systems are interconnected and influence one another.

References

1. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum, 356, 357-35.
2. Shudak, N. J., & Avoseh, M. B. (2015). Freirean-based critical pedagogy: The challenges of limit-situations and critical transitivity. Creative Education, 6(4), 463-471.
3. Ching-Chiang, L. W. C., & Fernández-Cárdenas, J. M. (2020). Analysing dialogue in STEM classrooms in Ecuador: A dual socioeconomic context in a high school. Journal of new approaches in educational research, 9(2), 194-215
4. Negt, O. (1971). Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen: zur Theorie und Praxis der Arbeitbildung. Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
5. Servant, V. F. C., & de Carvalho Guerra, A. O. P. (2019, September). Examining exemplarity in problem-based engineering education for sustainability. In SEFI annual conference 2019: Varietas delectat: Complexity is the new normality (pp. 1022-1032). SEFI: European Association for Engineering Education.
6. Rodriguez, A. (2014). A critical pedagogy for STEM education. In Activist science and technology education (pp. 55-66). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
7. del Junco, C. (2024). Critical Pedagogies and critical information literacy in STEM librarianship: A literature review. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, (105).
8. Andersen, S.A. & Heilesen, S. B. (2015). The Roskilde Model: problem-oriented learning and project work. Springer.
9. Kolmos, A., Fink, F. K. & Krogh, L. (2004). The Aalborg PBL model: progress, diversity and challenges. Aalborg University Press.
10. Moust, J., Bouhuijs, P., & Schmidt, H. (2021). Introduction to problem-based learning: A guide for students. Routledge.
11. Wedel, M. K., Boldizar, A., & Malmqvist, J. (2005). Active learning through group dialogue in a project-based course on environmentally adapted product development. In Proceedings of the 1st Annual CDIO Conference (pp. 1-9).
12. Boyd, V. A., Woods, N. N., Kumagai, A. K., Kawamura, A. A., Orsino, A., & Ng, S. L. (2022). Examining the impact of dialogic learning on critically reflective practice. Academic Medicine, 97(11S), S71-S79.
13. Suárez-Perales, I., Valero-Gil, J., Leyva-de la Hiz, D. I., Rivera-Torres, P., & Garces-Ayerbe, C. (2021). Educating for the future: How higher education in environmental management affects pro-environmental behaviour. Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128972.

Ready for more?

Curious about how to integrate praxis-oriented learning and critical reflection on an education programme? Then you may want to read the case study on the Experimental Pedagogics (XP) Framework, a progressive educational meta-approach developed by Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Déspina Kortesidou (author) is a senior consultant at UIIN and holds an MSc in Behavioural Neuroscience Sciences and a BSc in Molecular Biology. In her work, she supports institutions on topics relating to social innovation, institutional transformation and strategic partnerships.