Ecologizing Bildung: (Re)Framing five questions for future environmental education practice

Abstract

This paper develops a critical and ecological re-interpretation of Bildung, a German educational concept commonly translated as self-formation, but more accurately understood as the formation of persons in relation to culture, society, and the world. The paper is structured in three parts. First, we outline and “ecologize” critical constructive Bildung, a particular strand of Bildung theory. We argue that this approach offers a generative framework for linking education to aims such as ecosocial justice, cultural transformation, and mutually beneficial forms of human and more-than-human flourishing in an age of eco-social-cultural polycrisis. Second, we return to the work of the German educational theorist Wolfgang Klafki, one of the main architects of critical-constructive Bildung and revisit his five central educational questions. We re-read these questions through a lens that explicitly seeks to challenge anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, multiple forms of injustice, and the extreme individualism of late modern humanism. In doing so, we propose an alternative, eco-democratic and dialogical orientation grounded in concerns for justice and flourishing across human and more-than-human worlds. On this basis, the third part points toward the kinds of environmental education practices that might be generated by these reframed questions and goals, while also attending to the forms of community, institutional culture, and ecological relations that would be required to sustain them over time. Together, the paper offers a theoretical contribution to environmental education by articulating how an ecologized concept of Bildung can reorient educational purposes, questions, and practices in the Anthropocene.