Creating 21st Century Global Citizens. A design-led systems approach to transformative secondary education for sustainability (original) (raw)
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Deleted Journal, 2023
Environmental and sustainability education is critical to the world we live in today. Our World, Our Futures, a small-scale, cross-cultural participatory study, explored what transformative environmental and global citizenship education might look like in primary schools across two contexts. The study aimed to explore how teachers innovate curriculum through a flexible, cross-curricular approach within the constraints of the existing formal school curriculum. Informed by a culturally situated, responsive approach to researching with students and teachers, the research team supported the teachers in developing learning activities that forefronted the students' situated knowledge, ideas and concerns about the environment. The students were invited to create and share art and other texts reflecting their perspectives on local environmental issues, their aspirations for their future spaces and their active roles as global citizens. Teachers were invited to reflect on how, and the extent to which, ideas of global citizenship, environmental and sustainability education can be incorporated into the curriculum, exploring how the project supported teachers' pedagogical praxis, autonomy and professional learning. Through these activities, data such as teacher interviews, classroom observations and artefacts of student work were gathered. The data were analysed to identify ways in which students' cross-cultural dialogue developed along with teachers' pedagogical development in integrating transformative and contextually relevant pedagogical approaches for delivery of environmental and sustainability education. The findings demonstrate the complexities and challenges of collaborating across distances, cultures and time zones, and of using virtual platforms. Finally, the findings present curriculum development as a lived, dynamic and experimental process that develops teacher autonomy and professional learning.
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DRS - SkinDeep - Experiential Learning SIG, 2011
Designers and educators have a unique role to play in the creation of sustainable futures due to our ability to help people envision new realities, develop new cognitive skills for dealing with complexity and create the social capacity to act on the basis of new knowledge. This paper will describe the theory and practice of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to build the agency to put new knowledge into practice. Beyond the mere dissemination of information, transformative learning engages participants in dialogical and experiential learning processes with the aim of creating deep learning. Due to the fact that problems with regards to sustainability are both complex and deeply entrenched into our culture, these transformative learning processes are essential for the pedagogy associated with sustainability and ecological literacy. This paper introduces transformative learning and offers a short case study of a ‘Teach-in’ for ecological literacy in design education.
If sustainability is to be an integral part of rethinking the organization of multiple disciplines, then it is necessary to surface the mental models underlying our present curricular structures. Assumptions presently underlying design of most schools are based on the factory model, which raises two essential questions: 1) How can using the concepts of sustainability and structure be used to create a shift in our present thinking about schools and learning; and, 2) What will move schools to a more naturalistic way of designing learning environs, focused on nurturing the development of a sustainable future for our students? Upon collectively exploring these questions, we can begin to design innovative curriculum to prepare future students and teachers. This essay begins with an overview of the concepts of sustainability and structure, as found in systems thinking, and ends with a conceptual framework for thinking about possible new designs for a 21st century curriculum based on sustainability. These concepts are used to stimulate a dialogue about the essential questions that result in a shift, moving from the twentieth century metaphor of schools as “production-lines” to one of schools as “seedbeds” and students as “seeds,” based on principles of systems thinking and ecology.
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Journal of Transformative Education, 2018
Mainstream westernised educational policy and practice continue to be firmly rooted in ontological and epistemological traditions that reflect what Gregory Bateson referred to as the illusion of our separation from the living world. In response, there has been a flourishing of innovation at the levels of educational philosophy, curriculum, and pedagogy, drawing upon various indigenous and countercultural trends. For the most part, these are being fully expressed only outside of the formally accredited educational system. There are, however, a small number of pioneering centres of holistic educational innovation that are straddling this divide, operating within conventionally accredited systems. This article seeks to profile one such institution, Schumacher College in Devon, England. This article describes its principles; innovations in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment; and its approach to supporting transformative learning. Possible strategies are outlined for such institutions ...
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ICERI 2018 Proceedings, 2018
Many examples of mainstream curricula at all levels, as well as observations of common behaviour and discourse indicate that education has largely failed to prepare the necessary groundwork to make a ‘Great Transition’ possible, to give humanity a chance to achieve a sustainable future of acceptable quality [1]. The consequences of this failure in terms of human and non-human costs seldom inform actual policy making or official curriculum development. Beyond the shortcomings in curricula themselves, a multiplicity of causes for this failure include structural constraints and perceptual blind spots in the political, social, economic and cultural realms as well as certain intrinsic impediments in the learner that have been connected to ‘human nature’. Because those causes are so deep-seated, an effective reform of education that could address the failure seems both daunting as an undertaking and more urgently needed than ever. This paper outlines the major agenda points that such a reform effort will need to engage with at the levels of curriculum and educational practice. The first part deals with educational failure by commission and how it could be mitigated. The second part focuses on failure by omission and underlying socio-cultural contingencies, which leads into a discussion of new educational aims that would enable learners to actively contribute toward the Transition. This includes broad requirements for curriculum reform, for socio-cultural empowerment, and for the praxis of teaching and learning. Some pioneering efforts that have been made by avant-garde educators in those directions indicate that such educational achievements are realistically possible. The goal is to provide a blueprint for transformative education in the context of the sustainability imperative, beyond the inadequacies of ‘education as usual’. I shall argue that the following special focus areas deserve particular attention in the design of an effective curriculum for sustainability: human security, ecocentrist ethics, specific cognitive and affective skills, visioning change at the global and local levels, and empowerment.