Alberto Arenas, Ph.D.

Current Research

Professor Arenas’s research explores the intersection between environmental and sustainability education with sociology of education and history of education. Specifically, it seeks to explore what Arenas calls a Critical Pedagogy of Place, along three fundamental axes: Cultural decolonization; learning about and from place; and productive education. Each one of these dimensions is analyzed through different prisms to better understand how schools can be transformed into sites that promote social justice and environmental sustainability for individuals, communities, and nations.

With respect to cultural decolonization, educators have before them the colossal task of creating new forms of teaching and new knowledges that may be radically different from conventional systems that tend to be more tied to creating the workforce of tomorrow and serving the needs of the marketplace, regardless if the results promote community or environmental well-being.  With regard to learning about and from place, educators must strive to pass on knowledge and skills to students that can meaningfully improve the quality of life where they live. This includes a social, cultural, and biological history of the place, and how it has evolved over time, and just as importantly, lessons on how this wealth can be recuperated and protected to signal a unique footprint that can enter into dialogue with footprints from other places worldwide. And finally, productive learning, which teaches students the importance and dignity of work. Two authors who highlighted this concept were Karl Marx who wrote that productive work was “the only method of producing fully developed human beings” (1867) and John Dewey, who complemented this idea by stating that “the aim [of work] is not the economic value of the products, but the development of social power and insight” (1899).  

One article that addresses from a theoretical perspective these issues is:

Arenas, A., & del Cairo, C. (2009). Etnobotánica, modernidad y pedagogía crítica del lugar [Ethnobotany, modernity, and a critical pedagogy of place]. Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 14(44), 69-83.