Listening to Voices from the Margins: Transforming Environmental Education

In the past, women, indigenous, gay and disabled people, and race, class and body size issues have been overlooked in most environmental education programs through being subsumed into the notion of 'universalized people', the ‘norm’. However, each of these groups has a distinctive contribution to make to environmental education, as a form of anti-oppressive resistance, which needs to be foregrounded. In this chapter I problematize the relative silencing of anti-oppressive theory and theorizing in environmental education – particularly that related to feminist, queer, disability, body size and class oppressions – and discuss the contributions each of these perspectives brings to environmental education, with particular emphasis on queer theory. In particular, I discuss some possibilities for new directions when anti-oppressive pedagogies and research methodologies are used in environmental education to listen to, and work with, the voices from the margins.