Abstract
This paper describes how Changing Practice courses, developed by environmental activists in South Africa and based on social learning practice, have seeded cognitive justice action. For the educator-activists who facilitated these courses, it became apparent that we needed a bold emancipatory pedagogy which included cognitive justice issues. This enabled us and the activist-researcher participants to understand the extent to which local, indigenous, and spiritual knowledge had been excluded from water governance. The paper investigates how participants in the ‘Water and Tradition’ change project, established by the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA, engaged with cognitive justice, to demonstrate how African spiritual practice offers a re-visioning of the natural world. Finally, using the tools of critical realist theory, the paper reviews how VEJA bring about transformative social action through their participation in the Changing Practice course.
Highlights
This paper explores the transformative capacity that emerged from a cognitive justice approach to transformative environmental learning
Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA)’s research showed how environmental and social justice is integrally linked to cognitive justice
It showed that the knowledge held within African spirituality provides a way of relating to a river as a living system central to a community’s well-being
Summary
This paper explores the transformative capacity that emerged from a cognitive justice approach to transformative environmental learning. In learning from the first course [2], I designed the second course by drawing on Freire-inspired critical and emancipatory pedagogy [2] which emphasizes how a learning process has to respond to the historical and material realities of participants, and at the same time take into account how the learning process itself is situated historically [3] This approach led to generative moments where we, the facilitators and the participants, all had to engage with inequalities such as gender violence and exclusion, and the politics of knowledge—i.e., how knowledge is used to support the values and interests of the powerful in a neoliberal economy. A focus on cognitive justice praxis as transformative learning led to VEJA seeding transformative social action in their change project and influencing the design of the course
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