Act Now for Environmental Education – A renewed global pledge for strengthening education and learning for a more sustainable world

Posted on 02/10/2018 by arjenwals

GlobalAction The Global Environmental Education Partnership (website) has created a pledge for reinvigorating Environmental Education world-wide in light of urgent sustainability challenges. In the pledge the global environmental education community is asked to work toward three visionary goals:

1 Every nation has an environmentally informed, empowered, and active populace and

workforce.

2 The leadership of every government, business, NGO, and educational institution uses

environmental education to achieve environmentally sustainable outcomes.

3 Every educational institution incorporates environmental literacy into its mission, goals,

and activities.

A tall order? Yes. But goals should be tall to keep them in sight as we advance step-by-incremental-step towards attaining them.

A pledge letter can be found here. By signing it you are endorsing these long-term goals and committing to do your part to achieve them. This website highlights 10 suggested areas for action. Hundreds of educators around the world have vetted these actions and helped outline key areas of focus for the field. Over time, GEEP will provide resources and support, including ongoing campaigns and activities, to help inspire action to move our collective agenda forward. By signing the pledge, you can stay connected to this global network.

Groundbreaking Network ENSI hands over the baton with a great collection to accelerate sustainability in schools

Posted on 10/09/2018 by arjenwals

ENSIBook

Last week a wonderful collection of contributions recognizing the work of the Environment and School Initiatives network (ENSI) became available as a free online open-access pdf. In 32 chapters people who have played a role in the network reflect on history, trends and prospects of education engaging with sustainable development in a meaningful way. Below a part of the introduction by one of the editors and driver of ENSI Christine Affolter. Here you find the link to the book.ENSI Final Book

ENSI – 30 Years of Engagement for Education and School Development

by Christine Affolter

ENSI has been an independent, self-managed network of experts drawn from the fields of Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and financed by member countries and individual members. During the life time of the organisation ENSI often anticipated upcoming themes and new demands and through analyses, reflection, and participative debates drew up an annual working programme to meet these needs.

Often ENSI was the forerunner of themes and developments and as a result its work had a significant impact on schools in Europe, Asia and Australia through curriculum development, teacher education, and quality indicators. But having the favourable status of a self-managed network also involved a permanent challenge to find appropriate financing and over three decades ENSI had to find a balance between the professional quality of its work and the available funding resources.

Thanks to the commitment of the ENSI experts the network gained a high international reputation. Initially ENSI was founded by OECD/CERI in 1986 and aimed to respond to two related triggers (Elliott, 2018):

The increasing pressure from ‘grassroot-groups’ concerned about the impact of economically driven developments on the environment that were asking for school programmes to support students and teachers in the development of new competences such as critical thinking, dealing with complexity, and reflectivity.

Governments and schools that had to deal with the educational implications of the increasing social complexity resulting from rapid economic and social change. Schools needed to find answers in their local environment realising that centralized curricula couldn’t completely fulfil the needs of the local communities.

The chapter I wrote (see below) can be found here: Wals_Lessons_from_the_ENSI_Network-split-merge (1).

Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education – now available

Posted on 27/02/2017 by arjenwals

bookcoverfutures

Last month the fifth book in the Wageningen Academic Publishers Series on Education in the context of Sustainable Development, that started almost 10 years ago with Social learning towards a Sustainable World, appeared. Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education invited educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on – and craft visions for – the future of environmental and sustainability education. The book, I co-edited with Peter Blaze Corcoran and Joe Weakland, explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today.

Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. ‘Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education’ builds on this earlier work – as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.

The future of environmental education is an urgent question in the larger context of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activities have become the dominant driver in the ongoing evolution of Earth’s biosphere. Our contemporary ecological moment is characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and ‘accelerating change’ (Wals and Corcoran 2012). While the global impact of anthropogenic climate change is undeniable, the pace of temperature and sea level rise depends on ecological feedback loops that are not fully understood – and which may be increasing the rate of biosphere destabilization (Hansen et al.2015). From a social perspective, the Anthropocene is an age of what humanities scholar Rob Nixon (2011) terms ‘slow violence,’ or ecological violence and environmental injustice that occurs on spatial and temporal scales that are hard to understand or represent, most often against the world’s poorest peoples. In light of such developments, educators need strategies for anticipatory engagement with changing socio-ecological realities – both in the present and future – in order to be effective within their various embodied contexts. This volume explores how environmental educators can engage in imaginative mapping concerning large scale global processes, as well as create useful, situated knowledge for dissemination within their respective socio-ecological contexts.

Keywords: sustainability education, environmental education, education, sustainable development, social learning, transformative leadership, intergenerational learning

The opening chapter is available here: introchapterenvisioningfutures for free as an open access publication or at the publisher’s website where the book can be purchased: http://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/abs/10.3920/978-90-8686-846-9

Unreasonable doubt, viral nonsense and the Post-truth Trump era – avoiding hopelessness and creating sustainability by default

Posted on 13/12/2016 by arjenwals

BeyondUnreasonableDoubtInvite

On December 17th, one year ago, the warmest December 17th on record on The Netherlands, I gave my a second inaugural address at Wageningen University titled: Beyond unreasonable doubt – education and learning for socio-ecological sustainability in the anthropocene (link to the text) the address took place exactly 6 months after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the USA. At that time nobody really thought he had any chance but that was then. Now that we have entered a new phase of potential depression, hopelessness, psychic numbing, withdrawal, giving up, loss of energy, it seems like the challenge of moving towards a more sustainable world has become greater than ever before which is why I am re-posting the video that Wageningen University made back then about the role of education in creating more critical, mindful, empathic and responsible citizens willing and able to turn the tide and making living lightly and equitably on the Earth the default rather than the exception.

Here is the link to the 2,5 minute video that may be more accessible than the booklet (I hope it spreads as rapidly as some of the non-sense that spreads with lightening speed these days):

Breathing sustainability

Link to the video

Milestone in an evolving field: International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education

Posted on 08/04/2013 by arjenwals

2013 marks the year in which the world’s largest and most diverse educational research organization – the AERA – jointly with Routledge, published the International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education (Stevenson, Brody, Dillon & Wals, 2013). The field of Environmental Education has roughly existed for just under 50 years and has over time developed its own research, research networks and research journals. The AERA commssioned the editors in 2009 to compile this Handbook as a part of AERA’s Handbook Series on Education Research.

The International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education describes the important concepts, findings and theories developed by the research community and examines the historical progression, current debates and controversies, missing elements from EE research agenda, and the future.
The environment and contested notions of sustainability are increasingly topics of public interest, political debate, and legislation across the world. Environmental education journals now publish research from a wide variety of methodological traditions that show linkages between the environment, health, development, and education. The growth in scholarship makes this an opportune time to review and synthesize the knowledge base of the environmental education (EE) field. The purpose of this 51-chapter handbook is to illuminate the most important concepts, findings and theories that have been developed by EE research and critically examine the historical progression of the field, its current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the EE research agenda, and where that agenda might be headed.

You can find the orginal proofs of chapter 1 here: Stevenson, B., Brody, M., Dillon, J and Wals, A.E.J. (2012). International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education_Ch01_1pp In: Stevenson, B., Brody, M., Dillon, J. and Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.) (2012) International Handbook of Environmental Education Research. London: Routledge, 1-12

The Handbook can be order through Routledge or any on-line bookseller. Here’s a link to the Routledge Handbook page which also contains the Table of Contents. Should you be working for a university you may want to recommend the Handbook for you library.

Transformative learning

Learning and change within people and society towards a more sustainable world

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