A more cultured introduction for this project will be coming soon, but for now I can at least offer a semi-crude outline…
- The Holocene epoch has ended.
- The Anthropocene epoch is (already) here.
- For the first time in the Earth’s history, human societies (some more than others) have collectively exerted forces upon the Earth greater in scope and scale than many so-called natural ones.
- Most contemporary educational attitudes, beliefs, discourses, habits, practices, and curricula evolved in the (late) Holocene epoch to create distinctly Holocene pedagogies.
- Holocene pedagogies are not particularly well-suited to the Anthropocene epoch.
- We need to invent new pedagogies for the Anthropocene epoch.
- We need a broad suite of uniquely-tuned Anthropocene pedagogies (and we need them now).
My present ambition is to develop three semi-performative public service announcements (PSAs)…
PSA #1 – Setting the Cene
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- In the first, which is heavily informed by Earth Systems Science, I sketch the key contours of a critical shift occurring in the relationship between humans and the Earth. This shift is often summarized by geoscientists as a shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch.
PSA #2 – Holocene Pedagogy
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- In the second, which is heavily informed by strands of cultural anthropology, environmental histories, and histories of education, I sketch the key contours of a Holocene pedagogy, a term I’ve coined to describe the predominant pedagogy varietal cultivated in most contemporary Western education systems.
PSA #3 – The Art(s) of Educating on a Damaged Planet
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- In the third, I use the two fashioned sketches to ground my main message: Contemporary educators need radically new forms of pedagogy; ones less attuned to the (now-ending) Holocene epoch and more attuned to the (now-present) Anthropocene epoch. Put differently, Western educational systems urgently need to articulate an entirely new suite of Anthropocentric pedagogies attendant to the full scope and scale of the radically–and demonstrably–altered relationship between humans and the Earth.
