Pääluento

Ecopedagogy is (post-)critical environmental teaching and research grounded in, and reinvented through, the popular education work of Paulo Freire. Ecopedagogy's goal is "globally all-inclusive socio-environmental justice and planetary sustainability". The innate inseparability between acts of unsustainable environmental violence and social violence grounds this keynote in posing various questions leading to responses to be (re)problematized and reinvented throughout the conference on social pedagogies.

The questions posed will revolve around how (post-)critical reinventions of Freire's work can deepen and broaden our reflexivity in constructing praxis that moves towards ecopedagogy's goal. What ecopedagogical-based paradigm shifts do we need in teaching practices, research on education, and theory building and reinvention? How do education's goals of "development" and citizenship help or hinder (eco)pedagogical praxis? For development, whose “development” is being taught towards, politically influenced by contested terrains of globalization; what are the (dis)connections with “sustainability” as a contested term itself; whose "development" is many others' de-development; and how to teach to disrupt anthropocentric development? How does/can education for local-to-national-to-global-to-planetary citizenships instill collectivism towards ecopedagogy's goal, but also othering and anthropocentrism for "non-citizens." These are some of the questions that will be posed.

Calling for ecopedagogical literacy teaching will be highlighted in order to (post-)critically unpack the politics of environmental violence and the accompanying roles of (environmental) teaching.

Greg William Misiaszek, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Education in Japan. He has been the Associate Director at the Paulo Freire Institute, UCLA (PFI-UCLA) since 2018 and became an Honorary Founder in 2009, with various positions at the Institute since 2006. He is most known for his scholarship on ecopedagogy, the work of Paulo Freire, (post)critical theories, and comparative/international education. Throughout his work, Misiaszek uses various (post)critical theoretical lenses to unpack and often reinvent Freire's work for teaching and research to counter socio-environmental racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, violence, injustices, (neo)coloniality, anthropocentrism, epistemicide, and post-truthism, among other socio-historical oppressions. Misiaszek is the Chief Editor of the Freire In Focus Bloomsbury Book Series (with Carlos Alberto Torres) and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Environmental Education (with Karen Malone), as well as an Executive Editor of the Teaching in Higher Education journal. His latest solo-authored books include Ecopedagogy and the Global Environmental Citizen: Critical Issues, Trends, Challenges and Possibilities (2025, Routledge) and Freire and Environmentalism: Ecopedagogy (2023, Bloomsbury). His latest edited books include the Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories (Springer, 2023, with Ali Abdi) and Handbook of Ecological Civilization (2025, with Michael Peters, Ben Green & Xudong Zhu). He has four solo-authored books, six edited books, and over 70 other publications. Dr. Misiaszek holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Education, an M.S. in education (University of Southern California (USC)), and a B.S. in Environmental Studies (USC).