2 Exploring a transformative approach to learning

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.