Eco-centric Versus Anthropocentric Approach in Literary Pedagogy Inclusion of Non human Narratives as Teaching Social Justice

Abstract

Inter-cultural approaches in literary pedagogy aim to enlighten the learners, researchers, and literary practitioners on social justice concerns, for instance, human rights, gender roles, and power relations, in their course objectives. Culturally responsible pedagogy theorists state that the inclusive litculture teaching method evades borders and boundaries of biases. However, the eco-centric approach argues that most pedagogical perspectives are human-centric in literary discourse. As a result, the powerrelation between 'voices': human and non-human, heard and unheard, exists as a binary non-symbiotic relation even in academic practices. This article investigates how an eco-centric approach can be implied in literary pedagogy by revisiting the undergraduate literature curriculum through qualitative and quantitative inductive methods. Firstly, undergraduate literature course objectives are diagnosed from an interdisciplinary lens that aims at developing symbiotic relationships among living beings.