Radical pluralism and the challenges of educating for democratic-ecological civic identities: Reflections from the Mexican school context

Abstract

This paper builds on the growing importance of concepts of identity and diversity in citizenship education studies, and argues for an expanded conception of diversity that ultimately includes the non-human and even inanimate realm. The dramatic pace of human-induced global climate change requires a commensurate urgency in developing forms of citizenship education that shape new ecological as well as political civic identities, and which expand democracy beyond the human community. Situating my empirical work on Mexican civic education reform in a global, comparative context, I consider the challenges that all schools and school systems will need to address to incorporate even deeper practices of respect for diversity and acknowledgement of the radical pluralism that life (and non-life) on earth presents.