Experiential learning and critical pedagogy are central to providing opportunities for learners to engage in transformative sustainability learning...
Pedagogically, a return to education associated with significant life experiences, such as hiking in wilderness areas as a youth; as well as strategically significant education, action competence, social learning, and variations and combinations of those and many other pedagogical approaches developed in the past 40 years. Some of these pedagogical approaches have been disputed—for example, the belief that experiencing environment first hand is an essential component of engaging people in conservation has been disputed by arguments that these education efforts have been informed by behaviorist socio-psychology models that assumed a linear causality between education experience and pro-environmental behavior.[16]...
Ecofeminism and deep ecology have been in dialogue for some time now, and while the debate between them has been very fruitful over the years, the exploration of their relationship remains important. As valuable as our individually reconnecting with the natural world may be, and as much as such experiences should be encouraged, some have questioned whether this approach is sufficient, given the magnitude of the threat that human encroachment poses to the nonhuman world. With this in mind, the call has been made for a broader challenge to the dominant culture than deep ecological experience may offer. This call has come most forcefully from another school of environmental ethics: ecofeminism. While sharing with deep ecologists a general concern for biocentrism and an appreciation for personal interaction with nonhuman reality, ecofeminists have also offered some harsh criticism...
Like deep ecology, ecological feminism stresses the importance of experience, and personal experience at that. However, the ecofeminists seem to be talking about experience in a sense more related to bioregionalism than deep ecology...
Experiential deep ecologist Joanna Macy has attempted to avoid these conflicts and criticisms through her Work that Reconnects. By focussing deep ecology on the experience of the consciousness of personal depth within the participant, she speaks of "the greening of the self", which is part of the epochal journey of our times from an egoic or egotistical self to an ecological self.
