Professor Bob Jickling, from Lakehead University is visiting ELRC, RU for three weeks. Bob Jickling is Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University where he taught environmental, experiential, and outdoor education and environmental philosophy. He founded the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (1996) and more recently Co-Chaired the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montreal (2009). He has also received the North American Association of Environmental Education’s Awards for Outstanding Contributions to: Research (2009) and Global Environmental Education (2001). As a long-time wilderness traveller much of his inspiration is derived from the landscape of Canada’s Yukon.
Part of his activities here is to present a paper in an open lecture on Friday 3 May by 9h00 – 10h30 (lecture and discussion) at ELRC, Room 20. The title of his presentation is Normalizing Catastrophe: An Educational Response.
The abstract of the paper is as follows: Processes of normalizing assumptions and values have been the subjects of theoretical framing and critique for several decades now. Critique has often been tied to issues of environmental sustainability and social justice. Now, in an era of global warming, there is rising concern that the results of normalizing of present values could be catastrophic. Often, when such concerns arise, education is invoked as a remedial tool, a solution to a crisis, a way of imposing change. However, education is a much-used, yet complicated and sometimes paradoxical, term. Appropriate educational responses to “catastrophes” are contentious, messy, and inherently interdisciplinary. This paper will explore intersections of educational philosophy, environmental ethics, and social theory to provide some considerations for framing educational responses to the “normalizing of catastrophe.”
Everyone is invited.