Date of Award

Fall 2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Education

Abstract

The world is in the age of the Anthropocene, where humans are impacting the environment to disastrous effects. The capitalist economy, promoting neoliberal policies of mass consumption, has exacerbated the world's environmental deterioration and social inequity. The rights and responsibilities people hold have been rapidly changing with the fourth industrial revolution. Globalization and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) have further expanded notions of citizenship. While there have been numerous attempts to bring the environment into schools, it has not emphasized what this crisis deserves. Ecopedagogy, as a critical theory, explicitly examines the interplay between environmental and social problems and challenges students to be planetary citizens who acknowledge the value in all humans and non-human things. This thesis seeks to examine the extent to which ecopedagogy is taught in the construction of citizenship through analysis of high school social studies standards in the United States. To answer this question, a qualitative content analysis was conducted to identify the prevalence of ecopedagogies in social studies standards. The findings indicate states are teaching some aspects of ecopedagogy but not to the significance necessary to address the environmental challenges facing the world or to develop planetary citizens.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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