1 Published in Dan Butin, editor, Teaching Context: A Primer for the Social Foundations of Education Classroom. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elrbaum Publishers, Inc. 2004. Chapter 4 Social Foundations as Pedagogies of Responsibility and Eco-Ethical Commitment Rebecca Martusewicz and Jeff Edmundson Introduction The approach to teacher education that we will address here begins from a fundamental commitment to the recognition that we live together on this planet among all kinds of living creatures, human and non-human, in a fragile but essential interdependence. To push this further, to be human is to live engaged in a vast and complex system of life, and human well being depends on learning how to protect it. As Wendell Berry (1996) says, “In taking care of fellow creatures, we acknowledge that they belong to an order and a harmony of which we ourselves are parts. To answer to the perpetual crisis of our presence in this abounding and dangerous world, we have only the perpetual obligation of care” (77). To behave otherwise is suicidal. To become educated as humans means that we must learn how to engage with others to consider questions of how to live on this planet, how to live just and sustainable lives without destroying the immensely diverse system that makes life possible. We will argue in this chapter that teachers using a pedagogy of responsibility recognize these relationships as critical to both human and non-human well being. Their work is aimed at fostering the necessary interconnectedness and interdependency between individuals, groups, species and the environment. While other critically oriented, social justice perspectives on teacher education may pay lip service to environmental concerns, adding it on to the list of race, class and gender injustices to be studied, we see these approaches as limited by individualism and by an anthropocentric concentration on human culture as separate from and even dominant over the rest of the living world. In contrast, we believe that diversity must be understood as a motivating factor in all life systems, and not just a matter of cultural politics. If diversity is the generative force in biological as well as cultural systems, it must be protected via the development of democratic and sustainable communities. And this is where a pedagogy of responsibility begins, with the development of attitudes, languages and practices, in short, the engagement of ethical responsibilities oriented toward the protection of life systems supporting diverse human cultures. We see this approach as “just good teaching” in a way that goes much deeper than conventional or critical approaches to teacher education. Thus, this paper lays out the fundamental principles and practices underlying what we call a cultural ecological perspective necessary to the development of eco- ethical consciousness in teachers. While we will describe the educational practices and relationships as a “pedagogy of responsibility,” such an approach is part of a larger movement toward what C. A. Bowers has called Ecojustice (2001). Our intent here is to focus specifically on how a pedagogy of responsibility grows out of principles of ecojustice, and is required if we are to address the rising