Kirsi Pauliina Kallio: The environment as a pedagogical question
“Environmental pedagogy is a multidisciplinary and multifaceted field that concerns both everyday living environments and the earth as a space for all life. It begins from approaching the environment as a pedagogical issue,” says Kallio.
According to Kallio, the constantly changing environmental relations pose pedagogical challenges that educational professionals must be ready to meet. In unexpected situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic that has challenged our routinised ways of living, the need to redefine environmental relations is emphasised.
“We need research, research-based pedagogical development and wide-ranging social interaction and public debate to create a contextual understanding of the current transformations and to incorporate them into educational practices,” Kallio says.
According to Kallio, the challenging task of environmental pedagogy is to affect people’s environmental relations. This requires theoretically premised perspectives to such topical issues as climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
“Environmental pedagogy acknowledges, first, a subjective right to forming environmental relations, secondly, directs attention to different kinds of environments, and third, offers sustainable perspectives to interpreting these experiential and cognitive knowledges,” Kallio explains.
