Unit 8: Growing skills and understanding for a sustainable world
Introduction
Welcome to Unit 8, the final unit of Sustainable pedagogies.
Education can be seen in many ways; as a process that helps people gain qualifications that enable them to get a good job or as a process that helps people discover themselves and realise a complete sense of being human. In this latter sense, it is a process that helps a person find meaning and purpose in being useful to society, and which can equip them with an acute sense of justice, order and equity.
Such learning and transformation are at the heart of the sustainable pedagogies you have studied in this course. You will have seen that across the world there is a growing movement seeking to redefine and redesign education so learners are allowed to grow the skills and understanding they need to live sustainably in the world.
Sustainable pedagogies allow learners to:
grow empathy with others and use compassion
work and learn in partnerships that require full participation
explore the power of transdisciplinarity
know that there is much to learn from ecological wisdom in traditional knowledge.
Connecting all these ideas can lead to a transformation of the way that learners approach the world and see their place within it.
This unit will start with exploring ideas of ecologies and networks of resilience and then will look back on the learning from the other units to look forward to how you will embed the principles of sustainable pedagogies in your practice. You will be asked to focus on your learners – are they equipped to work and think sustainably using current pedagogical practices?
Next go to Unit 8 learning outcomes [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .