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Indigenous worldviews remain at the margins of education, science, and sustainability efforts. The emergence of sustainable science holds promise as a means of advancing deep sustainability and recentering Indigenous knowledge. Transformative learning's engagement with sustainable science has the potential to play an integral role in this paradigmatic shift which necessitates a broader legitimation of our ecology as a deeply interconnected living system. An important part of this project is learner-centred critical onto-epistemological inquiry-the critical study of one's own reality and implications for ecological relationship. Drawing on Intuitive Inquiry and Kaupapa Māori research, this article illuminates the partial decolonization of my own Life-World and arrival at a deepened sense of ecological relationship. Initially focusing on ''the dreaming,'' it integrates my visceral experiences of the land and Indigenous constructions of reality through interviews with Ngāi Te Rangi and Plains Cree elders. The implications for transformative learning and sustainability are discussed.
Transformative Learning in Sustainable Education
Design Research Society: Experiential Knowledge Special Interest Group: SkinDeep ‘11. Farnham, UK. Paper published as EKSIG 2011 Conference Proceedings (on-line)., 2011
Both designers and educators have a unique role to play in the creation of sustainable futures due to their ability to help people see new realities, develop new cognitive skills for dealing with complexity and create the social capacity to act on the basis of new knowledge. Transformative learning aims to build new cognitive capacities as well the agency to put new knowledge into practice. This learning has the potential to transcend the notorious value/action gap that divides our awareness of environmental threats from our capacity to take appropriate action. Beyond the mere dissemination of information, transformative learning engages participants in dialogic and experiential learning processes with the aim of creating deep learning experiences. Because the problems with regards to sustainability are both complex and deeply entrenched into our culture, these transformative learning processes are essential for the learning associated with sustainability and ecological literacy. Transformative learning is a pedagogic practice developed in and women’s education in the 1970s offering frameworks and strategies that can be adapted to address current issues. This paper describes a transformative learning project I recently developed as part of my practice based doctoral research on the visual communication of ecological literacy.
Transformative Learning for Sustainable Education
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.
Transformative Education: Towards a Relational, Justice-oriented Approach to Sustainability
2020
This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning. The paper provides a reflexive case study of the design, content and impact of a course on eco-justice that integrates relational learning with an equity and justice lens. The reflexive case study provides a critical, exploratory self-assessment, including interviews, group discussions and surveys with key stakeholders and course participants. The results show how relational approaches can support transformative learning for sustainability and provide concrete practices, pathways and recommendations for curricula development that other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from. Sustainability research, practice and education generally focuses on structural or systemic factors of transformation (e.g. technology, governance and policy) without due consideration as to how institutions and systems are shaping and shaped by the transformation of personal agency and subjectivity. This presents a vast untapped and under-studied potential for addressing deep leverage points for change by using a relational approach to link personal, societal and ecological transformations for sustainability.
Article Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future
2013
Educators and policy makers have long recognised the central role that education can play in creating a more sustainable and equitable world. Yet some question whether current processes across mainstream higher education prepare learners sufficiently to graduate with the capabilities or motivation to shape and create a future that is life-sustaining. This paper presents findings from a qualitative research project carried out by Plymouth University in association with Schumacher College, Devon, UK. Schumacher College is an alternative, civil society college, owned by the Dartington Hall Trust that claims to provide transformative learning opportunities within a broad context of sustainability. The study explored the nature and application of transformative learning as a pedagogical approach to advance change towards sustainability. If learners claimed transformational learning experiences, the research asked whether, and to what extent, this transformation could be attributed to the pedagogies employed at the College. The paper begins by setting out the broad background to the relationship between marginal and mainstream educational settings, and definitions and theoretical underpinnings of transformative learning, and then leads into the research design and findings. The potential for transformative pedagogies to be applied to and employed within the wider higher education (HE) sector is then discussed, and the overall findings and conclusions are presented.
Transformative Sustainability Learning: Head, Hands & Heart.pdf
Purpose -The current UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development echoes many scholars' calls to re-envision education for sustainability. Short of a complete overhaul of education, the paper seeks to propose learning objectives that can be integrated across existing curricula. These learning objectives are organized by head, hands and heart -balancing cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains. University programs and courses meeting these learning objectives exhibit an emergent property here termed transformative sustainability learning (TSL). Design/methodology/approach -Theoretically, TSL grew from traditions of sustainability education and transformative education. Practically, TSL emerged from experimental learning collaborations sponsored by the University of British Columbia in 2003 and 2004 in an effort to enable explicit transitions to sustainability-oriented higher education. Primarily through action research, these community-based, applied learning experiences constituted cyclical processes of innovation, implementation and reflection. Findings -The paper finds: advancement of head, hands and heart as an organizing principle by which to integrate transdisciplinary study (head); practical skill sharing and development (hands); and translation of passion and values into behaviour (heart); development of a cognitive landscape for understanding TSL as a unifying framework amongst related sustainability and transformative pedagogies that are inter/transdisciplinary, practical and/or place-based; creation of learning objectives, organized to evaluate a course or program's embodiment of TSL. Originality/value -By enabling change within existing structures of higher education, the paper complements and contributes to more radical departures from the institution. The work to date demonstrates potential in applying this learning framework to courses and programs in higher education.
Sustainability, 2021
As with all educational policy and practice, Environmental and Sustainability Education, if it is to be effective and meaningful, has to be designed and implemented in ways that reflect twenty-first-century circumstances, which are characterized by a globalized society in which cultural diversities amongst individuals and populations have become increasingly more complex and prominent. Using a conceptual and philosophical analysis of the research and policy literature, this paper contends that current ESE tends to be trapped within a restrictive monocultural definition of sustainability that does not reflect the different cultural perspectives towards sustainability that exist across global populations as a whole. It further argues that if ESE is to become truly transformative for students, ESE teachers need to develop a transcultural capacity as part of their professional expertise, one that is more aligned with the reality of a more culturally diverse population and student body. ...
Transformative and restorative learning: A vital dialectic for sustainable societies
Adult Education Quarterly, 2004
This study explores the potential of critical transformative learning for revitalizing citizen action, particularly action toward a sustainable society. Through an action research process with 14 university extension participants, it was found that a dialectic of transformative and restorative learning is vital for fostering active citizenship. This study also found that transformation is not just an epistemological process involving a change in worldview and habits of thinking; it is also an ontological process where participants experienced a change in their being in the world. As participants shifted into a new mode of relatedness with their material, social, and environmental realities, they sought avenues for socially responsible involvement as active citizens.