Category Archives: sustainability

Catharina de Pater successfully defends: ‘Spirit in the Woods – the grounding of spiritual values in forest management’

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Last Tuesday – April 16th, 2024 – was a special day as the day before her 72nd birthday, Cathrien de Pater received her PhD-degree with some goundhealing research on the role of spirituality in forest management. What used to be a taboe topic in the world of academia, now receives the attention it deserves as we are grappling with finding more sustainable ways of living. The defense took place in a full auditorium at Wageningen University and was preceeded by a symposium featuring Prof. Bron Taylor, University of Florida, founder of the International Society & Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Ms. Shaohua Wang MA, University of Barcelona, PhD researcher in Spiritual Tourism and Prof. Vykintas Vaitkevicius, Klaipeda University, Lithuania, author of Studies into the Balts’ Sacred Places.

It was a pleasure and an honour to be Chairing Cathrien’s dissertation committee, together with co-promotor Dr. Bas Verschuren of the Forestry and Nature Conservtaion Policy Group at WUR. I would like to acknowledge in particular the role of the late Dr Birgit Elands who played a key role in the early stages of this research but sadly passed away too soon to see this journey come to a close. Fortunately both Birgit’s spirit will travel further through the wonderful work Carthrien has done over the years and will concitnue to do in the years to come.

Below you find the introductory part of the summary of the dissertaion. The full dissertation will be made available via the Wageningen UR Library.

Rethinking pedagogy in the face of complex societal challenges: helpful perspectives for teaching the entangled student

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This paper appeared online in 2022 and was a part of the wonderful dissertation of Koen Wessels which was later published by Springer Nature as a book within the publisher´s SDG 4 ´Quality Education´ Series. Now has been formally published in open-access form as a part of the latest issue of Pedagogy, Culture and Society. Full citattion: Wessels, K. R., Bakker, C., Wals, A. E. J., & Lengkeek, G. (2024). Rethinking pedagogy in the face of complex societal challenges: helpful perspectives for teaching the entangled student. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 32(3), 759–776. View and download here: https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2022.2108125

Here is the abstract to give you a bit of a flavor of the paper:

Yanyan Huang successfully defends her thesis ´Exploring the Role of Externalization of Shared Values for Sustainability Transformation´

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Yanyan Huang receving her PhD degree with on her side second promotor Prof Marie Harder of Fudan University, Co-promotor Dr. Renate W<esselink and myself.

On December 19th Yanyan Huang successfully defended her thesis in the aula of Wageningen university. Her thesis presents an in-depth exploration to unravel the roles/potential of the externalization of shared values in facilitating sustainability transformation. Although the need for sustainability transformation is increasing globally and the profound influence of values for sustainability transformation is already established, there is still not sufficient understanding in how to purposefully navigate values for sustainability transformation. This thesis strives to fill this gap by introducing a new perspective: conceptualizing values as tacit knowledge and leveraging the SECI model from the Knowledge Creation Theory. Synthesizing results from empirical data collected from cases conducted in Shanghai, China, this thesis identifies the roles of externalization of shared values with respect to its outcome (shared values) and the procedure (externalization) for sustainability transformation. Further, this thesis presents discussions of the underlying mechanism through which shared values, when externalized, facilitate substantial sustainability transformations, and reflections on the implication for researchers from the field of sustainability science. For those who aim to promote sustainability transformation, this thesis not only enhances the understanding of the dynamic interplay between shared values and sustainability transformation, but also provides a specific roadmap to unleash the potential of the externalization of shared values for sustainability transformation to respond to the above- mentioned gap. With its new perspective, this thesis also underscores the necessity of considering the procedures through which values/shared values are involved.

The entire thesis can be downloaded via the Wageningen University Library.

Exploring environmental stewardship among youth from a high-biodiverse region in Colombia – new study!

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Source: Salva La Selva

Led by Daniel Couceiro, I was priviledged to join a group of reflective practitioners and colleague Valentina Tassone on the meaning of stewardship in a troubled highly biodiverse region Here you have the main premise of the paper but please go to the full paper for a more in-depth encounter with the work.

Nature degradation is rooted in the disruption of the human-land connection. Its restoration requires the regeneration of environmental stewardship as a way to live within environmental limits, especially for younger generations. In this study we used the implementation of a year-round, non-formal environmental education program during COVID-19 times to explore environmental stewardship in adolescents between 14- and 18-years old from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. Using a qualitative methodology, we mapped expressions of environmental stewardship among local youth. We found several barriers that can be challenged and levers that can be nurtured through inclusive, place-based and collaborative environmental education strategies to foster youth’s environmental stewardship in Colombian’s high-biodiverse regions.

Full citation and link to open access paper:

Daniel Couceiro, Ivona Radoslavova Hristova, Valentina Tassone, Arjen Wals & Camila Gómez (2023) Exploring environmental stewardship and youth engagement in biodiversity among youth from a high-biodiverse region in Colombia, The Journal of Environmental Education, DOI: 10.1080/00958964.2023.2238649

Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice – now available through open access

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Source: movingrivers.org

This multi-authored paper comes out of two groundbreaking riverfocused programs that are highly interconnected: Riverhood and Rivercommons. This is a foundational paper looking at the consequences and possible ways out of mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper’s framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

The full paper can be found here while the team´s website movingrivers can be found here!

Do students have anything to say? Student participation in a whole school approach to sustainability

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Source: https://www.undp.org/blog/placing-meaningful-youth-engagement-heart-environmental-action

Today, the first article from Ane Torsdottir’s PhD Research on High School student’s partcipation in schools trying to work within a Whole School Approach in Southern Norway, was published in Environmental Education Research. The article, co-authored by her supervising team with Daniel Olsson, Astrid Sinnes and myself, demonstrates how a questionnaire gauging students’ experiences of participation in decision-making at their school can operationalise student participation in a whole school approach (WSA) to education for sustainable development model.

Some 902 students in three upper secondary schools participated in the study by giving their answers to Likert-scale items developed to tap into their experience of participation in the decision-making at their school.

The students identified four distinct pathways of participation:

(i) School and Leadership,

(ii) Teaching and Learning,

(iii) Community Connections, and

(iv) Student Council.

The results are discussed in the light of focus group interviews with eleven of the participants. The student WSA participation questionnaire proved to be a reliable and valid instrument that, together with the student WSA participation model, can be used by school leaders wanting to increase student participation, and by researchers investigating student participation throughout the whole school.

Article link: here

Full citation:Torsdottir A.E, Sinnes A, Olsson D. & Wals, A. (2023) Do students have anything to say? Student participation in a whole school approach to sustainability, Environmental Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2023.2213427

Pedagogy of Entanglement and other groundbreaking works – Springer SDG4-Series taking off

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Recently, a few more titles appeared in the Springer SDG4 Series that are expanding horizons, addressing blind spots and offer guidelines for alternative ways of thinking and acting in and through education in light of pressing global sustainability challenges. One of them finally arrived on my desk today: Koen Wessel’s “Pedagogy of Entanglement: a response to complex societal challenges that permeate our lives”. This book is a real treasure that is based on Koen’s dissertation which he completed last year at Utrecht University (with joint supervision from Wageningen University).  You can find the book here.

The Springer Sustainable Development Goals Series aims to provide a comprehensive platform to the scientific, teaching and research communities studying issues in the fields of geography, earth sciences, environmental science, social sciences, engineering, policy, planning, and human geosciences in order to contribute knowledge toward achieving the current 17 Sustainable

Development Goals. Volumes in the series are organized by relevant goal and guided by an expert international panel of advisors.

The subseries that I am co-editing together with Nicole Ardoin of Standford University, focuses on SDG 4: Quality Education and more specifically on the following questions: What kind of quality or qualities must education have in order to be able to contribute to Sustainable Development as expressed by the SDGs? How can such education be developed, implemented and assessed in a wide range of contexts across the globe? How can quality education, that contributes to the well-being of all people and the whole planet, becomeaccessible for everyone?

Topics covered by the SDG 4 subseries include, but are to limited to: education policy and governance for ESD/ESE and Global Citizenship Education (GCE), conceptualizing sustainability competence other possible learning outcomes of ESD and GCE, pedagogical approaches to ESD/ESE and GCE, the role of teacher training/professional development in fostering ESD/ESE/GCE,

assessment of ESD/ESE and GCE-related learning, creating whole school or whole institution approaches to sustainability, making ESD/ESE and GCE accessible and relevant for all learners in a wide range of context across the globe.

Should you be interested in writing or editing a book for this Series, contact Zachary Romano in Springer’s New York office or drop me or Nicole a line!

White Paper on Regenerative Higher Education – Rethinking education in times of dysfunction and collapse

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Regrettably this white paper is only available in Dutch. Some ot the ideas artuclated in the paper can also be found in The Regenerative Education Podcast Series created by PhD Bas van den Berg see: The Regenerative Education Podcasts – Planting the seeds of change

Ik maak sinds een paar jaar deeluit van een Nederlandse  Community of Practice rondom Regenerative Higher Education bestaande uit PhDs en medewerkers van verschillende universiteiten en hoge scholen. Dit White Paper is het resultaat van de samenwerking in de Community of Practice en is samengesteld door Martine de Wit en gebaseerd op interviews met Bas van den Berg, Daan Buijs, Mieke Lopes Cardozo, Marlies van der Wee en Arjen Wals. Met input van Nina Bohm, Linda de Greef, Michaela Hordijk, Naomie Tieks, Koen Wessels, Rosanne van Wieringen, en Roosmarijn van Woerden. De illustraties en vormgeving zijn verzorgd door Mari Genova.

Het paper vertrekt vanuit de vraag:

Onderwijs dat het beste haalt uit onszelf en onze studenten, op weg naar herstel van de aarde. Hoe komen we daar?

Lees hier ons verhaal en laat ons weten wat resoneert, schuurt of wat het anderzins losmaakt!

whitepaperrenerativeeducationDownload

A regenerative decolonization perspective on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) from Latin America – new research

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Central Figure in the article:  Regenerative education through decolonial praxis.

Led by former Wageningen University PhD Dr. Thomas Macintyre and current Wageningen University Post-Doc, Dr Daniele Tubino de Souza, I was priviledged to collaborate on this new paper that appeared in the latest issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. This paper provides a Latin American perspective on ESD, with a focus on transformative and participatory learning in community contexts. With a long history of critical pedagogies, Latin America provides a fertile ground for exploring alternative forms of education as a means to address deep-rooted challenges in western traditional strands of education. We start by providing an overview of pertinent educational currents present in Latin America, then ground these perspectives in two case studies carried out by the authors – one from Colombia, the other from Brazil – which explore grassroots initiatives in community settings that utilise different forms of education and learning. We then propose an integrative model to foster alternative educational approaches that might lead to decolonial and regenerative praxis, finishing with a discussion on how Latin American-rooted regenerative decolonisation perspective and praxis can inform global ESD discourses.

You can find the full paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057925.2023.2171262

Full citation: Macintyre, T. Tubino de Souza, D. & Wals, A.E.J. (2023) A regenerative decolonization perspective on ESD from Latin America, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2023.2171262

Norwegian Life Sciences University Opens Transdisciplinary Sustainability Hub

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Last week I was part of the long awaited launch of NMBU´s Sustainability Hub. The Hub is a bold attempt by the university to connect all 7 faculties around wicked sustainability challenges in ways that are relevant to the local community and include the voices of the students and of societal stakeholders.

After an introduction of the Dean of Sustainability (NMBU is one of the few Universities in the world who has such a Dean), Professor Astrid Sinnes, and a short talk by myself delivered as a Visiting Professor at NMBU in which I started the journey to this moment in time with the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the report of the Club of Rome, more than 50(!) years ago, Professor Siri Ellen Hallstrom Eriksen sketched the intitial ideas and plans for the hub as an unfolding and emergent property that needs to be cocreated.

Still, the NMBU Sustainability Hub has the following initial objectives:

The Hub initiates, connects and supports innovative research, education and societal engagement in sustainability challenges using a Whole Institution Approach (WIA)

The Hub develops, critiques and supports evolving practices of sustainability in research, education, operations, societal engagement and professional development of staff

The Hub facilitates critical debate and reflection at the interface of science and society on sustainability in higher education

The Hub provides resources and support for capacity building of students and staff seeking to develop their sustainability competences

The Hub contributes to knowledge creation by participating in (inter)national research and professional development networks and initiatives of working on sustainability in higher education

It seeks to realize them by:

Providing a window/portal sharing evolving institutional practices of its partners/members and the resources, tools, modules, etc. they use;

Creating spaces both virtual and real where people working on sustainability in HEIs can meet, dialogue, co-create, innovate, reflect and connect;

Identifying and linking key staff members in all partner institutions working on the various components;

And, by eventually becoming a key innovation node in Norway for the advancement of sustainability in higher education by participating in and organizing networks, living labs, innovation hubs/arenas.

 Education in Times of Climate Change – comprehensive NORRAG Special Volume

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Climate change is not a new issue for education, but new levels of consensus and concern are emerging, suggesting that new policy developments may follow. This NORRAG Special Issue (NSI 07) addresses the question of how education is to equip learners to participate in climate action that would fundamentally disrupt existing problematic systems. This NSI has the potential to inform pedagogical praxis, co-learning, curriculum, climate action, policy formulation, frameworks for evaluating success, resourcing decisions and what we might consider educative acts for engaging with climate change and its multi-dimensional uncertainties, risks and opportunities. 

Edited by South African Professors Eureta Rosenberg and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, this is one of the most comprehensive and ground braking collections of papers available at the moment. The special issue is completely open access. You can find the full table of contents here.

I am very pleased to have found two wonderful Norwegian colleagues – Astrid Sinnes of the Norwegian Life Sciences University and Ole Andreas Kvamme of the University of Oslo who were willing to join in writing a contribution which is titled: School Strikes as Catalysts for Rethinking Educational Institutions, Purposes and Practices

I am also delighted to see two of my former PhD’s, Thomas Macintyre and Martha Chaves, based in Colombia in the special issue as well with a paper on Climate Change Resilience through Collaborative Learning in the Colombian Coffee Region – they co-authored with Tatiana Monroy who, like omas and Martha volunteers for Fundación Mentes en Transición, Colombia, South America

There will be an online launch of the NORRAG Special Issue 07 (NSI 07): Education in Times of Climate Change, will take place on 6 October 2022 at 16:00 – 17:30 CEST. For more information about the llaunch event have look here!

Rethinking pedagogy in the face of complex societal challenges: helpful perspectives for teaching the entangled student

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Another most interesting paper just came out in the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society. This time led by – now former PhD candidate – Koen Wessels who received his PhD last June. Here is some key info on the paper and its key concept ‘pedagogy of entanglement’ which is at the heart of Koen’s research.

Confronted by myriad interconnected societal challenges, this paper asks: what kind of pedagogy does justice to the experience and challenge of living in a complex world? Departing from a critical reading of a preparative-logic to education, this paper emphasises students’ entangledness: more-or-less consciously, students are uniquely shaped-by and shapers-of complex societal challenges in a here-and-now sense. Utilising this premise, the paper develops a set of pedagogical perspectives that might inspire and help teachers to design their own responses to particular complex societal challenges in their unique teaching contexts. Drawing on emerging outcomes from a narrative diffractive inquiry with 12 teachers as co-researchers and engaging with complexity thinking, six perspectives are presented and discussed: entanglement-orientedness, entanglement-awareness, hopeful action, inquiry within complex societal challenges, practicing perceptiveness, and practicing integrity. Together, these perspectives offer a heuristic for embracing complexity in education.

You can get to the paper via this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681366.2022.2108125

Full citation: Koen R. Wessels, Cok Bakker, Arjen E.J. Wals & George Lengkeek (2022) Rethinking pedagogy in the face of complex societal challenges: helpful perspectives for teaching the entangled student, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2108125

Transgressive learning, resistance pedagogy and disruptive capacitybuilding as levers for sustainability

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Earlier this month the 8th Report from the Global University Network fir Innovation (GUNi) was published with a wealth of contributions critiquing current resilient modes and models of education and outlinig alternative one in light of the current systemic global dysfunction we find ourselves in. I was asked to contribute a chapter on transgressive learning. The link to the chapter is here

TransgressiveLearningResistancePedagogyWals_2022_GUNIDownload

You can find the entire book at www.guni-call4action.org

The full citation for my chapter is: Wals, AEJ (2022) Transgressive learning, resistance pedagogy and disruptive capacity building as levers for sustainability. In: Higher Education in the World 8 – Special issue New Visions for Higher Education, Barcelona: Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi). Open access: www.guni-call4action.org, p216-222.

Creating a sense of community and space for subjectification in an online course on sustainability education during times of physical distancing

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Handmade painting by a student on “Empowerment –
a rising sensation that liberates you from ‘sinking’ into negativity” – using artistic forms of evaluation of learning, helped both subjectification and creating a sense of community in the course

This paper recently appeared in International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. It explores students’ sense of community and belonging in an online course on environmental and sustainable education during times of physical distancing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a case study approach, the results show that students perceived a sense of community that was collectively build during the four week program. Sense of community was linked to and facilitated by the learning environment and the educators’ and students’ role throughout the course. Prominent factors here are interaction and inclusion created with mutual effort by design, the educator and student.

This research arose after the course ELS-31806 Environmental Education and Learning for Sustainability[1] was converted as an ‘offline’ course into an online course due to COVID-19. The original content of the course enables students to systematically discuss important concerns in the development of an effective curriculum and/or operation for the environment and sustainable development using a range of instrumental and emancipatory approaches. But foremost ELS-31806 is a course that has always been, well appreciated and highly valued by participants for its highly experiential and hands-on approach.

However, due to COVID-19 this year’s course (2020) was changed into a less experiential on-line format mediated by Zoom for interaction and by Brightspace for course structure and organisation. This somewhat ad-hoc and sudden departure from the traditional successful format, lowered the instructors, and probably also, the students’ expectations about the course’ ability to create a vibrant learning community. Yet, contrary to pre-course expectations, ‘something’ (i.e. a sense) arose over the course of four weeks online education that both students and staff considered to be special or meaningful. These hunches got confirmed several weeks after by Wageningen UR’s student evaluation system PACE which revealed that the students highly valued the course.

We were intrigued by the question of how this online edition evoked similar, or nearly similar outcomes to its offline counterpart. After first checking whether our hunches were right about the course and what might explain the high evaluation marks, we centre in the paper’s  main question:

What are key characteristics of an online course that fosters subjectification (personal development and inner-sustainability in relation to others and the other) and creates a sense of community?

The paper was led by former MsC student Robbert Hesen and co-authored by myself and ELS Postdoc Rebekah Tauritz.

Citation

Hesen, R., Wals, A.E.J. and Tauritz, R.L. (2022), “Creating a sense of community and space for subjectification in an online course on sustainability education during times of physical distancing”, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 23 No. 8, pp. 85-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-07-2021-0270

Triggered by these results we decided to investigate what might explain these results.

[1] A course within the Education and Learning Sciences (ELS) chair group at Wageningen University & Research (UR):  https://ssc.wur.nl/Handbook/Course/ELS-31806