Developing (Transformative) Environmental and Sustainability Education in Classroom Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Children today face significant challenges in response to living in a globalised world and the impact of environmental threats to the planet, for example climate change, rising inequalities, and food and water security; as such, there is an increasing need for schools to have a global rather than merely local perspective and to cultivate in students a critical sense of environmental and social responsibility. Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in schools is frequently promoted as a route to achieving this as it has the potential to empower learners to ‘develop the necessary knowledge, understanding, skills, values, capabilities and dispositions to respond to the complex socio-ecological issues of the 21st century’ (Australian Research Institute for Environment and Sustainability, 2009, 3). UNESCO extend this, suggesting ESE has the capacity ‘to revisit assumption, world views and power relations in mainstream discourses and consider people / groups that are systematically underrepresented / marginalised’ (2014, 16). However, despite this significant potential, there remains a general lack of pedagogical consensus as to how to teach either about or for ESE within school contexts.

In order to develop effective ESE pedagogies, some educators look to transformative learning theory to encourage learners to move beyond simple acquisition of knowledge to a change in world-view which not only affects their deeper level of understanding but, importantly for ESE, a change in their behaviour. With this in mind, the purpose of this special issue is to explore the pedagogy and practice of ESE in schools, with a particular focus on transformative pedagogies. Themes may include (but are not limited to):

• The potential for different pedagogical approaches to support transformative learning for ESE.
• The mechanisms or processes which engender transformative learning within ESE.
• The intersection between ESE and global citizenship education.
• The impact of arts-based approaches on the development of childrens’ understandings, skills, values, capabilities and dispositions around ESE.
• The extent to which teachers’ understandings and dispositions around ESE impacts pedagogical approaches in the classroom.
• ESE pedagogies for early years and primary school settings.
• Postcolonial and decolonial pedagogies for ESE.
• Posthumanist or new materialist pedagogies for ESE.

References

Australian Research Institute for Environment and Sustainability (ARIES). 2009. Education for Sustainability: The Role of Education in Engaging and Equipping People for Change. http://aries.mq.edu.au/publications/aries/efs_brochure.

UNESCO. 2014. Global Citizenship Education: Preparing learners for the challenges of the twenty-first century. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002277/227729E.pdf

Prof. Dr. Nicola Walshe
Dr. Louise Sund
Guest Editors

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