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13 Working for Change: Reflections on the Issue of Sustainability and Social Change 177

from below’ could help to close this gap” (p. 17). It would help activists get a
clearer picture of the complex subtle ways in which globalization works and what
could be “the political, economic and pedagogical benefits of counterglobalization”
(p. 17). Appadurai finds that intellectuals have largely been remiss in this effort. It
is a work that we urgently need to do. When viewed from this angle, George
Glasson’s chapter indeed comes across as an admirable attempt to shoulder this
responsibility.
4. Propagating a pedagogy of grassroots globalization: While reading Glasson’s
chapter, I could not help but wonder whether Glasson’s coworkers in the field
were as knowledgeable about the ecojustice aspects and wider import of their
work as Glasson definitely is. For people on the ground who are suffering from
the effects of corporatized globalization, participation in counterefforts is a direct
struggle for their lives, livelihoods, and dignity. As Holt-Gimenez (2006) discov-
ered in his study, the campesinos “were very aware of globalization” (p. 180).
However, he also found that their information is “patchy, and their understanding
of where and how they might resist is unclear and limited to sustainable farming
and migration” (p. 180). Thus, Holt-Gimenez expressed the opinion that the
farmer movement in Latin America would benefit if farmers were also able to
acquire structural literacy, i.e. an understanding of the larger structural, politi-
cal, and economic conditions undergirding globalization and their sustainable
agriculture-related work. In my own work as an educator, I too have found that
pre- and in-service teachers are quite knowledgeable about the institutional and
structural conditions that influence their work, but are generally lacking in their
understanding of the wider social, political, and economic environments that are
so instrumental in influencing their conditions and possibilities of work.
However, according to Appadurai (2000), many an intellectual who speaks for the
poor and oppressed also lacks, on account of their distance from the dust and
grime of daily struggles against globalization, “the means to produce a systematic
grasp of the complexities of globalization” (p. 18). Thus, according to Appadurai,
what is needed is a “new architecture for producing and sharing knowledge about
globalization [which] could provide the foundations of a pedagogy that closes this
gap and helps to democratise the flow of knowledge about globalization itself”
(p. 18). Expressing hope, Appadurai further says that “this vision of global col-
laborative teaching and learning about globalization may not resolve the great
antinomies of power that characterize this world, but it might help to even the
playing field” (p. 18).

A Few Concluding Thoughts

Reading George Glasson’s chapter, and writing this response to it has enabled me
to reflect upon my own experiences with grassroots efforts in education and social
forestry on the much larger canvass of worldwide corporatized globalization and its