An Evolutionary-Ecological Perspective in Teacher Education: A Transdisciplinary Approach in Ecopedagogy

Abstract The article seeks to answer the question “Can ecopedagogy mitigate the impact of unsustainable education?” The aim of the article is a phenomenological and hermeneutical reflection on some issues relevant to ecopedagogy at the beginning of the Anthropocene era, when education policy, its governance, the transformation of the holistic approach into a more holistic one and the biological origins and deep cosmological roots of the human species have started to diminish. These and other wicked problems have been used in a reflexive participatory action research setting, which was initiated in 2000 for the development of a teacher program and a reflexive ecopedagogy course. The study adopts a holistic evolutionary-ecological perspective. Through this perspective, the indivisibility of the evolutionary-ecological phenomenon is highlighted, which opens, highlights and “fuses” the natural cosmic relation of human beings to the environment and society in the pursuit of humanity’s goals . The evolutionary-ecological framework of the phenomenon is considered in the context of the emergence and understanding of a transdisciplinary approach. Two types of transdisciplinary platforms developed within the evolutionary-ecological phenomenon are examined. Through the origins of these platforms, educators are offered the opportunity to discover the relation between the transdisciplinary approach and the evolutionary-ecological phenomenon in pedagogy and the emergence of ideas or emergent recursion in complex evolutionary-ecological processes at different levels, which is enacted through the teacher as living learning aimed at a noble humanity.