This short account is about my monograph Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems, published by Routledge in 2022.[i] I share here the various contexts that shaped the development of the monograph. Central here is my experiences as a student and researcher in India and as a lecturer in Bhutan. In this monograph, my experiences of being a student, lecturer and researcher have been interwoven with the existing curricular and pedagogical challenges to higher educational institutions in India and other parts of the world, especially those that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic may or may not have been a temporary event, but the various sociopolitical and ecological factors that caused the pandemic such as reckless industrialization, destruction of the natural environment, laboratization of natural resources, celebration of the capitalistic Euro-North American-centric education systems, marginalization and demonization of the indigenous knowledge structures; long existed.
During the pandemic, the closure of educational institutions and the unequal access to online modes of learning aggravated existing inequalities. The rote learning usually practised in classroom-centred teaching tends to focus on theories and philosophies as givens, with little reference to either their contexts or their applications. This has led to a flourishing industry of predatory degrees. This glosses over the hierarchies that are hidden within such problematic ways of learning. The book Green Academia focuses on the necessity of building ecocentric methodologies of teaching and learning.
Many readers may wonder that so much has already been written on the necessity of creating ecocentric methods of teaching and learning across the globe, so how different would be my monograph from others? My plea is that a majority of the existing works address the ecocentric methods of teaching and learning from a theoretical lens and fail to share how the theories can be put into practice.
Apart from the various theoretical aspects of ecocentric systems of knowledge production, the monograph seeks to outline a few eco-centric teaching and learning patterns that are practised in Bhutan, India, New Zealand and Kenya. The arguments perused in the monograph draw from my experience teaching within the green education (which is officially known as Green School System) system in Bhutan and personal observations about how different ecocentric educational institutions in India, Kenya and New Zealand function. The monograph also explores how such patterns of teaching and learning may effectively assist in countering the pandemic of Covid-19 and any other pandemics in the future.
The monograph is divided into five chapters. The Introduction reflects on how the colonial culture that undermined non-European indigenous knowledge systems persist to date. It further argues how the dominant anti-nature knowledge systems contributed to the Pandemic. The second chapter, “Eco-friendly Academic Systems: A Journey to the Roots,” talks about some of the already existing nature-based pedagogical and curricular practices that different organizations across the world follow. The third chapter, “Transformations: Curriculum and Pedagogy,” focuses on how the various nature-based pedagogical and curricular initiatives can be adopted on a pan-global basis by weaving ecology and the environment within the pedagogical practices of mainstream educational institutions in the post-Covid-19 era as a usual long-term intersectional framework of habitual teaching and learning.
The fourth chapter, “Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies: Weaving Intersectional Academic Spaces,” argues that to interlink various knowledge disciplines in the post-Covid-19 era, it is necessary to position the alternate eco-friendly modes of education within the knowledge fields of political ecology and Science and Technology Studies. But, as this chapter argues, there is a lack of collective effort to engage with the fields of political ecology and Science and Technology Studies as an intersectional academic discipline across the globe. The chapter, therefore, navigates possibilities of developing political ecology and Science and Technology Studies as an interwoven academic discipline within educational institutions. The final chapter, “Non-conclusion: A Multidimensional Mechanism,” summarizes the findings of this monograph.
I am aware of the fact that the arguments in the monograph are inconclusive and many aspects of ecocentric patterns of teaching and learning have not been discussed. I am however hopeful that the monograph will provoke wider thinking on the limits of mainstream knowledge systems through ecocentric pedagogical methods.
[i] The book is available at https://www.routledge.com/Green-Academia-Towards-Eco-Friendly-Education-Systems/Dey/p/book/9781032126043.
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Sayan Dey grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com.