Unit 6: Learning in transition − perspectives and practices

Environmental activism

Welcome to Unit 6 of Sustainable pedagogies.

At this moment in time, there is globally agreed scientific data on the impacts of human-induced planetary warming. There are also lived experiences of a changing climate and widespread environmental degradation. Our climate is changing but actual societal changes are not keeping pace. What is lacking is a sufficient urgency to respond to the certainty of the consequences of climate change. Indeed, the urgent need for change is ultimately about human survival. Over vast geological timespans the climate has warmed and cooled and extinctions have occurred along the way. Climate change at the rate it is occurring today affects the immediate environment that allows humans to flourish. However, human flourishing has both historically impacted and is presently impacting, the survival of many other species and ecosystems. As the impacts of change become more obviously related to human behaviour, goals and actions to mitigate damage and adapt to change are beginning to emerge.

Empowering learners to develop new understanding, skills and practices is foundational to an effective transition from a society dependent on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy and regenerative resources. In this sustainable transition, eco-literacy is as critical a literacy as numeracy and traditional literacy have always been. Understanding our place in nature and natural systems is fundamental to developing a society that can care for and protect, the Earth and its diversity.

Goleman et al. (2012) suggest that ecological intelligence is inherently collective and cannot be built in isolation. Rather it is constructed because of a shared understanding and shared actions that support networks of relationships where ecological sensibility can be built. This presents opportunities for existing collectives to create new spaces for learning and practice towards a sustainable transition – whether they be formal learning places in the form of schools or colleges or informal learning environments such as workplaces and communities. Transition demands interventions in existing systems to facilitate change.

Activity planner

Figure 1  United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – Goal 4: Quality Education, interpreted by Lene Sørensen Rose

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The image shows a young child reading under a tree. A glass of water and a magnifying glass lay on the grass beside them. Lines trail up from the child's head, showing them connected to the trees, clouds and birds. In the sky, a line reads 'educatiton for everyone'. At the bottom of the illustration it reads: Education can change the world. No. 4 of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Quality Education.

Figure 1  United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – Goal 4: Quality Education, interpreted by Lene Sørensen Rose...

There are many different views on education for sustainability or sustainable development, where the latter term is more often used. A global goal for sustainable education is defined as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under Goal 4 Quality Education:

In this SDG (Quality Education – Target 4.7) sustainable development is clearly stated alongside issues of social equity, diversity, and global citizenship. Less emphasised is the environmental imperative and the relevance of ecological literacy in understanding and responding to the climate crisis. Historically, environmental education and environmental citizenship have been identified as important areas of education for sustainability.

The concept of environmental education was first formalised by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1970 and further supported by the establishment of the International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) in 1975, following the recommendation from the United Nations (UN) conference on Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972.

The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convened the first intergovernmental conference on environmental education in Tbilisi in 1977, to unanimously declare the significant role of environmental education in the preservation and improvement of the world's environment, and in supporting equitable global development. Known as the Tbilisi Declaration, it built on the Belgrade Charter (UNESCO, 1975) that defined the goal of environmental education (EE):

The Tbilisi Declaration promoted clear goals and objectives of EE and defined a series of guiding principles (Box 1).

The ambition for environmental education in the context of sustainable development was further promoted in the Agenda 21 framework generated as a result of the Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, where a reorienting of education towards sustainable development was developed (Box 2). After this event the UK created a Sustainable Development Education Panel (SDEP) to look at the development and application of Agenda 21 across levels of education and proposed seven concepts of sustainable development (Box 3) to be covered across wide-ranging curricula.

The different agreements and policy initiatives are evidence of growing calls for a much-needed transition in education. They are a window on some key initiatives of education for sustainability over the last 50 years that show a common pattern calling for an environmental imperative to be integrated within formal, and informal learning structures. Core to these calls for education for sustainability is the importance of seeing sustainability in the round and its:

• concepts and complexity
• multi-scale
• diversity
• interdependency of systems
• inter and intra-generational impact
• local and global
• the rights of human and non-human
• equity and justice
• citizenship
• stewardship
• precautionary approaches.

These components describe the various facets (the ‘what’) of education for sustainability over a 50-year period. However, the concept of transition requires us to not only scope the agenda but to actualise change through practice. The rest of the unit will explore the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of education for sustainability.

You have looked back across time at different perspectives on education for sustainability. This overview illustrates the legacy of education transitions that have aimed to address sustainability agendas. Such perspectives highlight the urgent need to scope, integrate and apply sustainability concepts in both formal and informal learning spaces. UNESCO (2017) identifies eight sustainability competencies and highlights the importance education plays in meeting global sustainability goals. Their sustainability competencies include:

• systems thinking
• anticipatory (future thinking)
• normative (values thinking)
• strategic thinking
• collaboration
• critical thinking
• self-awareness
• integrated problem solving.

The characteristics that underpin these competencies show a shift from specialism and seeing things in disciplines and parts, to a more integrative, holistic and relational thinking that values patterns and new ways of approaching uncertainty and complexity.

These competencies and associated knowledge and skills are critical for the (green) economy that new graduates will enter. This is an emergent economy with many unknowns. We are in transition, journeying across paradigms from industrial to information to the emergent structures of organisms as an organising paradigm. Humans have experienced great shifts in knowledge, skills and technology over a relatively brief period of history, and on a minuscule scale in geological time. Educators have yet to catch up. What is needed is an education paradigm that shakes off its original brief of delivering skilled people for industrial service. Education must reframe its learning scope as systemic, holistic, relational and transdisciplinary to meet the needs of sustainability in the twenty-first century. The sustainable education transition cannot be achieved with the same thinking that created unsustainability through earlier (and current) practices; we need a wisdom revolution to proliferate effective, sustainable transitions (Sterling, 2001). This is the ‘why’ of sustainable education transitions. The ‘how’ is perhaps the most difficult to grapple with.

Educationalist, Sterling (2001), asks educators to consider how we can design an ecological paradigm for education. He presents three different elements which need to be considered in this new educational paradigm:

1. Ethos – where education is reoriented to reflect ecological thinking in terms of education theory, research and practice: in other words, how is education perceived?
2. Eidos – how do the organising structures of education align with whole systems thinking and how can they recognise the importance and value of new patterns of relationship: in other words, how do we connect?
3. Praxis – how teaching and learning approaches embed a systems view of the learner and develop participatory and transformative practices – in other words, how do we integrate?

Perhaps similarly to the sustainability competencies outlined by UNESCO, Sterling suggests a number of characteristics of the ecological education paradigm (transformative education) in contrast to the more mechanistic view (transmissive education) that dominates in education today (see Table 1).

Table 1  Characteristics of transmissive and transformative education practice and policy

Transformative learning demands new frames of thinking, being and doing. The ‘how’ of achieving this is indeed tricky and perhaps speaks to the fact the same agendas for sustainable and environmental education have been debated repeatedly, as we have shown, for the last 50-years, but ineffectively implemented, at least in mainstream education.

Systems thinker, Donella Meadows identifies the achingly difficult job of rethinking the present in terms of conceptualising system change through a series of intervention points. Although the paper was first published in 1999, it is still of great value in its ability to discuss the complex scope of systems change in ways that resonate with non-experts.

Meadows (1999) posits that there are several opportunities to intervene in a system but, society tends to only focus on ones that are familiar in terms of what is observed and understood and that resonate with known ways of evaluation and decision making. In broad terms this links to quantitative, visible stocks and resource flows and feedback that can be measured (in numerate ways), analysed and redistributed.

Figure 3 shows the points of intervention Meadows describes, with the current system on one side of the fulcrum, and points of system intervention reaching out on the other side. The nearer the intervention to the fulcrum, the less impact it has on changing system parameters (e.g. a force pushing down near the fulcrum has negligible impact on the system on the other side). Conversely, intervention opportunities far away from the fulcrum, once initiated, can make significant differences in system organisation where forces pushing down at the far end of the lever have greater impact (e.g. there is more leverage for pivoting the system to a different position (or paradigm)). Meadows shows that even small interventions can provide shifts in paradigms and many small changes at the right point in a system can have a big impact:

Figure 3  Leverage points – places to intervene in a system (adapted from Meadows, 1999)

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On the left of the image is the ‘System’ which is on the left-hand side of a balancing platform that rises up towards the right of the image. There is a fulcrum under the platform to the right of the ‘System’, then 12 leverage points to the right of the fulcrum. Underneath are four zones, which categorise the leverage points. From left to right, leverage point 12 is ‘Constants, parameters, numbers’. Leverage point 11 is ‘Buffer sizes’. Leverage point 10 is ‘Materials, stocks and flows’. Leverage points 12, 11 and 10 sit within the ‘Physical events’ category. Leverage point 9 is ‘Relative delays’. Leverage point 8 is ‘Negative feedback loops’. Leverage point 7 is ‘Positive feedback loops’. Leverage point 6 is ‘Information flows’. Points 9, 8, 7 and 6 sit within the ‘Informational / patterns of behaviour’ category. Leverage point 5 is ‘Rules of the system’. Leverage point 4 is ‘Structure of the system’. Leverage point 3 is ‘Goals of the system’. Leverage points 5, 4 and 3 sit within the ‘Social / system structure’ category. Leverage point 2 is ‘Mindset / paradigm’. Leverage point 1 is ‘Power to see the paradigm as such’. Leverage points 2 and 1 sit within the ‘Conscious / mental models’ category.

Figure 3  Leverage points – places to intervene in a system (adapted from Meadows, 1999)

A takeaway here is that change is impossible (or at least immeasurably difficult) if we try and make change in contexts where success, or not, is measured by existing ways of knowing and valuing.

Sterling’s call for a wisdom revolution is poignant in terms of creating new ways of seeing, being and doing, and in our case, of reframing education as sustainability (rather than just learning about it). So, the ‘how’ of change is going to require not only new knowledge but also the mechanisms, structures, organisation, policy, processes and communities to generate new curricula and learning practices that reflect the social system structures and conscious mental models of a new ecological paradigm.

This is a transition in practice.

On the one hand Meadows says that small system interventions in the right place, can make a meaningful impact to systems change; on the other hand, Sterling (2001) gives a long list of comparisons between transmissive and transformative education practices which indicate the difficulties in shifting from one operating space to another. There are multiple ways of viewing the changes to systems required for an effective sustainable transition. At some point though, individuals must ask the questions:

• So, what can I do?
• How can I influence sustainable change as a citizen, an educator, a businessperson, a community worker, a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a child …?
• What is my role in moving us towards a sustainable future?

Amongst all the doom and gloom of predicted outcomes of a warming climate, hope and opportunity for new horizons and outcomes that transformative education can bring must be demonstrated. The UN poster designed to support UN SDG 4, shown in Figure 1 (repeated below), states ‘Education can change the world’. This last section begins to explore what this might mean and how you can be part of a new learning practice.

Figure 1 (repeated)  United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – Goal 4: Quality Education, interpreted by Lene Sørensen Rose

Show description|Hide description

The image shows a young child reading under a tree. A glass of water and a magnifying glass lay on the grass beside them. Lines trail up from the child's head, showing them connected to the trees, clouds and birds. In the sky, a line reads 'educatiton for everyone'. At the bottom of the illustration it reads: Education can change the world. No. 4 of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Quality Education.

Figure 1 (repeated)  United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – Goal 4: Quality Education, interpreted by Lene Sørensen Rose...

The European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020 research project, CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures, summarised in Video 1, is an interesting example of transdisciplinary responses to current social and ecological challenges. Its activities and outcomes result from an amalgamation of dialogue and exploration across different creative and critically reflective art and design practices, and related cultural fields.

The work shows the value of supporting transformational change by providing equitable spaces for discovery and building new networks and capacities. Participants’ imaginations provide a leaping-off point to other worlds and ways of seeing, and together sprout opportunities for different ways of existing in transition. As one participant articulates in the summary film, ‘It is important to realise that there is no future that would look the same for everyone and there is just a shared sense of urgency’ (CreaTures EU, 2023, 2:05 minutes).

One of the projects supported by CreaTures is the ‘Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025’ (Figure 4) which explores new ways to build empathy to non-human lifeforms through play. The five-year project focuses on a local green space, Finsbury Park, and develops creative and playful ways such as an immersive, role-play festival, through which connecting communities can nurture a much deeper understanding of that green space and its human, animal, fungi and plant inhabitants.

Figure 4  ‘The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025’ (Catlow and Diehm, 2020)

The CreaTures project certainly has resonance with many of the elements of transformative practice: from construction of meaning and capacity building, to open-ended enquiry, emergence and processes of iteration. Alongside transformative learning characteristics, Sterling calls for the ecological design of education for sustainability. He asks the question ‘How can we design in an open and non-deterministic way, educational systems and institutions that promote healthy emergence?’ (Sterling, 2001, p. 80).

Design as a reflective and iterative practice should enable such reflective action towards a vision and purpose, that includes the core values and ideas underlying it, to deliver sustainable education. However, to date, there has been little evidence of success in this area. While there has been significant scoping and agenda setting around education for sustainable development (ESD) there has only been marginal examples of integrated and emergent transformative education practices. There are various reasons for this but one big one must be the chasm that exists between the values, structures, and measurement of existing, transmissive education, compared to an education ethos of a transformative learning approach.

The rest of this section takes an ecological design approach to explore how transformative learning practices may be imagined and integrated.

Architects, Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, established a series of ‘principles of ecological design’ (Box 4). While these are generally reflective of design practices and processes associated with people, buildings, landscapes, and places, they nonetheless provide a useful stimulus to design ‘education as sustainability’.

How might we apply these principles to creating an eco-literacy practice in education?

We have seen through the work of Sterling (2001) that design should be a continuous learning process, and through Meadows (1999), that interventions to system change can be small and radical to enable a paradigm to shift at scale. Considering the large leap in underpinning ethos between transmissive and transformative modes of learning, the ecological design of education needs to frame the overview as well as enable smaller steps to be taken towards sustainable transition.

Let’s take the theme of ‘habitat’ as an illustrative example of a learning activity for school-age learners.

A series of lessons designed to foster eco-literacy in children are given here as an example for the learning experience you are asked to design in Activity 6.3 that follows.

Sustainability requires changes in the way we think and conceptualise ourselves as part of nature, rather than having dominance over it. In education terms it is important that this ethos begins early and, as educators, our challenge is to introduce important relational thinking to learners in creative, exploratory and playful ways as part of a transformative learning landscape to support sustainable transitions.

In this unit you have looked at what it means to develop eco-literacy and why doing so is so important. You looked back to how the concepts around sustainability have been developed and thought about your own understanding of sustainability, then considered where the points of leverage are within a system that could allow the system to become more attuned to sustainability. You finished the unit by designing learning that would allow the learners you teach to develop their eco-literacy.

Unit 6 cards

Click/tap each card to reveal the text.

Catlow, R. and Diehm, C. (2020) ‘The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025’, New Design Congress (10 April). Available at: https://newdesigncongress.org/ en/ pub/ finsbury-park-2025/ (Accessed: 10 March 2024).

CreaTures EU (2023) CreaTures (short version). 13 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iBDmPn4Am_s (Accessed: 10 March 2024).

EU Horizon 2020 (2020) CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. Available at: https://creatures-eu.org/ about/ (Accessed: 1 March 2024).

Fear, F. A., Rosaen, C. L., Bawden, R. J., and Foster-Fishman, P. G. (2006) Coming to Critical Engagement – An autoethnographic exploration. Maryland: University Press of America, Lanham.

Goleman, D. Bennett, L. and Barlow, Z. (2012) Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating, Emotional, Social and Ecological Intelligence. The Center for Ecoliteracy, San Fransisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Meadows, D. (1999) Leverage points: places to intervene in a system, Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute. Available at: https://donellameadows.org/ archives/ leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ (Accessed: 4 September 2023).

Sustainable Development Education Panel (SDEP) (1998) First Annual Report 1998/ A Report to DfEE/QCA on Education for Sustainable Development in the Schools Sector from the Panel for Education for Sustainable Development - 14 September 1998, SDEP/DEFRA. Available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ 20080305115859/ http://www.defra.gov.uk/ environment/ sustainable/ educpanel/ 1998ar/ ann4.htm (Accessed: 11 December 2023).

Sterling, S. (2001) Sustainable Education – Re-visioning learning and change. Schumacher Briefing no. 6. Schumacher Society/Green Books, Dartington. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ Sustainable-Education-Re-visioning-Schumacher-Briefings/ dp/ 1870098994 (Accessed: 11 December 2023).

UNESCO (2017) Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives. Paris: UNESCO. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/ 0024/ 002474/ 247444e.pdf (Accessed: 11 December 2023).

UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (n.d.) Core Publications – Agenda 21 Section IV Means of Implementation, Division for Sustainable Development. Available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ content/ dsd/ agenda21/ res_agenda21_36.shtml (Accessed: 6 March 2024).

UNESCO–UNEP (1978) Inter-governmental Conference on Environmental Education, 14–26 October 1977, Tbilisi, USSR: UNESCO–UNEP, Paris, France. Recommendation 2, pp. 27. Available at: https://www.gdrc.org/ uem/ ee/ Tbilisi-Declaration.pdf (Accessed: 6 March 2024).

UNESCO-UNEP (1975) The Belgrade Charter: A Framework for Environmental Education:, UNESCO-UNEP International Workshop on Environmental Education at Belgrade, 13–22 October 1975. Available at: https://www.eusteps.eu/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2020/ 12/ Belgrade-Charter.pdf (Accessed: 6 March 2024)

Van der Ryn, S. and Cowan, S. (1996) Ecological Design. Michigan: Island Press.