Toward an Expanded Identity: Ecological Self and Inclusion within the Ecopedagogical Paradigm

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of expanded identity as a pedagogical category for rethinking the relationship between the ecological self, learning, and inclusion within the ecopedagogical paradigm. Drawing on the theory of the extended mind and on Arne Næss’s ecosophy, the article argues that ecological education cannot be limited to the transmission of environmental knowledge or the prescription of sustainable behaviours; rather, it must address the formation of the self and processes of identification with the living world. The transition from extended mind to expanded identity is understood as a pedagogical transposition of the extended paradigm: if cognition is distributed across the body, the environment, and relationships, then identity formation must also be conceived as a situated, embodied, affective, and relational process. From this perspective, the ecological self becomes the foundation of a subjectivity capable of distinguishing itself without separating itself, and of recognising places, communities, other living beings, and ecosystems as constitutive dimensions of its own experience. Finally, the article shows how this perspective makes it possible to redefine inclusion not merely as access to educational contexts, but as an ecological quality of relationships and as an expansion of the field of care and responsibility.