ONE OF THE PRIMARY challenges facing educational reformers educated in the last decades of the 20th century is recognizing how previous understandings of social justice issues failed to account for reports on climate change. As the rate of change in the earth’s ecosystems continues to impact individuals’ daily lives through droughts, warming, acidifying oceans, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and the disappearance of species and their habitats; the emancipatory vocabulary handed down from the long tradition of social justice struggles in the West must be revised.
This does not mean abandoning common educational reforms that challenge how the West’s consumer-dependent industrial, and now digital, revolution continues the old forms of injustice and perpetuates new ones as globalization continues. What needs to be revised is the vocabulary that supports the West’s interpretation of progress. Ironic as it may be, the social justice agenda of educational reformers, as well as the neoliberal...
