2 For whose benefit? The case for participatory sustainable pedagogies

Participation as the co-construction of learning and for the development of democratically active citizens are both critical reasons why participation is central to sustainable pedagogies. However, a shift is needed in thinking about who benefits from such participation. Much of educational practice is focused on individualism – individual achievement, individual progress, individual cognitive understanding. This is strongly reinforced by the systems and processes that most educators work within, and therefore to think beyond these structures is challenging.

However, education as sustainability, where our concerns lie with the current and future challenges our learners will face, requires us to actively challenge this individualistic view. A key pillar of sustainable education is to connect, collaborate, share, and empathise, not only with other humans (individuals, communities and beyond), but with environments, material worlds, and non-human partners with whom humans live in symbiosis (Haraway, 2016).

Many authors within and beyond sustainability education, have drawn on ideas of indigenous participation in and with the world, where they conceptualise participation as more-than individual. In this way, participating is very local, contextual to the situation, and entangled with our environments and materials as much as it is with other humans. Mueller (in Kelly, 2022, p. 3) describes a:

while Kelly (2022, p. 3) describes how such an engagement changes us because:

These ideas will be picked up again in more depth in Unit 7.

This view of participation shifts the emphasis from benefits that are individual to benefits of participation which reach and spread well beyond the human/non-human, nature/culture, and I/them binaries that are so prevalent in our educational systems and societies.