3 Designing eco-literacy for sustainable transitions
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.
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.
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.
2.1 Systems thinking and new paradigms