3.1 An ecological design 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’.
Box 4 Principles of ecological design
Principle 1: Solutions grow from place – this is the counter view to the dominant one that supports centralisation and standardisation, economies of scale and decisions in isolation from a context of practice.
Principle 2: Ecological accounting informs design – we have become removed from, and ignorant of, natural systems of resource and waste flows in favour of solutions dominated by economic costs. Ecological accounting traces all ecological costs (resource depletion, pollution, habitat loss), to address system impacts.
Principle 3: Design with nature – a regenerative approach; to understand and work with the patterns and processes favoured by the living world to limit the ecological impacts of our activities.
Principle 4: Everyone is a designer – understanding the value of listening to shared experiences, knowledge, values and needs. Diminishing the idea of expert in favour of participatory process, dialogue, emergence, and action.
Principle 5: Make nature visible – developing an understanding of our place in nature and in the systems that support us. Create opportunities for engagement, responsibility, and accountability.
(Van der Ryn and Cowan, 1996, pp. 72–74)
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.
3 Designing eco-literacy for sustainable transitions