Tag Archives: uncertainty

Imagining Sustainability: A Nomadic Inquiry of Applied Drama in Higher Education

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At last a chapter appeared in the wonderful Handbook of Ecological Civilization published by Springer that I am proud of both for its content and for the pleasure of working with PhD candidate from Stockholm University, Julia Fries. Julia over the years has developed a wonderful collection of arts-based, drama-inspired research in a somewhat unusual setting: business education. Her research embodies her pedagogy which is fascinating. This chapter explores how drama can contribute to the necessary renewal of higher education to meet the sustainability challenges of our time. Results are presented from a drama-based research project in higher education, and in a youth project. In the chapter, so-called nomadic enquiry is combined with an arts-based approach to participant interviews. Through this innovative method, an image of a rhizome emerged. This rhizome of expanded learning highlights five necessities or critical nodes for expanded sustainability-oriented learning: emer-gence, expansion through role, embodiment, connection to self and others, and crucial conditions. The rhizomatic perspective not only shows the transformative potential of drama in higher education and adult learning but also identifies the levers and barriers teachers, students, and the academy as an institution are likely to encounter when trying to move towards a socio-ecologically more civilized world. The results point to how the integration of knowledge and wisdom that are striven for in the philosophy of ecological civilization can be put into pedagogical practice through the holistic learning of drama.

The Handbook of Ecological Civilization, unfortunately, is not an Open Access Handbook – but your library may have access. But I am happy to share the corrected proffs for your own use here!

ImaginingSustainabilityThroughNOmadicInquiry_Fries_Wals_CorrectedProofsDownload

Full citation: Fries, J., Wals, A. (2025). Imagining Sustainability: A Nomadic Inquiry of Applied Drama in Higher Education. In: Peters, M.A., Green, B.J., Misiaszek, G.W., Zhu, X. (eds) Handbook of Ecological Civilization. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-8101-0_73-1

New book: Civilizational Collapse and the Philosophy of Post-apocalyptical Survival

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“Collapse” “The end of the world as we know it” “Amargeddon” “Dystopian Futures” “Maintaining hope on a dying planet” – words, concepts, phrases, pointing at the serious state of Earth. This remarkeable book with a range of perspectives on what to do, is a must read for educators, activitsts, researchers and composites thereof. From the back cover:

“The collapse of civilization, the end of the world as we know it, has long been a cultural imaginary, but has rarely been as topical as it is today. Beyond the phantasmagoria of violence, depression and despair, the conviction of being doomed has always been present It can be a challenge to imagine a new, post-apocalyptic world, be it utopian or dystopian. Beyond questions of immediate survival, there is a growing concern about how to educate humanity for a new life after the end of this world. In this volume, the editors, Michael A. Peters and Thomas Meier, renowned scholars of educational and apocalyptic studies, have brought together 31 contributions that offer a diversity of perspectives on such post-apocalyptic education, from abstract philosophical reflections to applied studies, from historical and political analyses of how we got into the current situation of global devastation to decolonial perspectives and essayistic explorations.”

I was invited to contribute a chapter on what I have dubbed ´Earth-centered education´: Earth Centred Education: An Invitation to Relational Transgressive Learning as a Counter-Hegemonic Force in Times of Systemic Global Dysfunction Have a look at the ToC and consider getting a copy of the book from Peter Lang here

I am providing a link to the table of contents of the book and the typeset version of my chapter here.

Wals_ ApocalypseChapterDownload

New chapter – On Cotonomy and Eco-Bildung as a Relational Transitional Pathway Toward Post-sustainability.

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Photo above comes from Wanås Konst – Center for Art & Learning, presents and communicates contemporary art that challenges and redefines society, working outside in the landscape around Wanås in Skåne, southern Sweden

Here is a chapter I have been wanting to write and get out for a while. In it I pose that fifty years of education and learning in relation to the environment and sustainability have not made a dent in the current systemic global dysfunction that is propelling humanity toward collapse. In many parts of the world, education, learning, and capacity-building have been hijacked serve an extractivist and exploitive economy that cultivates materialist lifestyles and promotes extreme wealth inequality.

In this chapter, published in a fascinating handbook, I introduce the related concepts of cotonomy and eco-Bildung as a way to transgress this dysfunction and to break with hegemonic structures and systems that are underneath. Ideas from Daoism, ecopedagogy, and Bildung are brought together as socio-critical transitional pathway that moves humanity beyond sustainability.

Full citation:

Wals, A.E.J. (2025). On Cotonomy and Eco-Bildung as a Relational Transitional Pathway Toward Post-sustainability. In: Peters, M.A., Green, B.J., Misiaszek, G.W., Zhu, X. (eds) Handbook of Ecological Civilization. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-8101-0_8-1

Note: this is not an open-access chapter unfortunately but do send me an email: arjen.wals@wur.nl or via LinkedIn @arjenwals and I might be able to share the proofs with you.

Characteristics and challenges of teaching and learning in sustainability-oriented Living Labs within higher education: a literature review – Open Access!

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This paper led by ELS-WUR PhD-candidate Marlies van der Wee – Bedeker was published earlier this Fall. The paper is the first peer reviewed article based on her research that is grounded in the City of Rotterdam using her home institute Hogeschool Rotterdam as a base. Below a summary of the main fiindings. The full paper can be found here!

Full citation:

van der Wee, M.L.E., Tassone, V.C., Wals, A.E.J. and Troxler, P. (2024), “Characteristics and challenges of teaching and learning in sustainability-oriented Living Labs within higher education: a literature review”, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 25 No. 9, pp. 255-277. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-10-2023-0465

New Open Access Paper: River Co-Learning Arenas: principles and practices for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation and multi-scalar (inter)action

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This collaborative multi-authored paper develops the methodological concept of river co-learning arenas (RCAs) and explores their potential to strengthen innovative grassroots river initiatives, enliven river commons, regenerate river ecologies, and foster greater socio-ecological justice. The integrity of river systems has been threatened in profound ways over the last century. Pollution, damming, canalisation, and water grabbing are some examples of pressures threatening the entwined lifeworlds of human and non-human communities that depend on riverine systems. Finding ways to reverse the trends of environmental degradation demands complex spatial–temporal, political, and institutional articulations across different levels of governance (from local to global) and among a plurality of actors who operate from diverse spheres of knowledge and systems of practice, and who have distinct capacities to affect decision-making. In this context, grassroots river initiatives worldwide use new multi-actor and multi-level dialogue arenas to develop proposals for river regeneration and promote social-ecological justice in opposition to dominant technocratic-hydraulic development strategies. This paper conceptualises these spaces of dialogue and action as RCAs and critically reflects on ways of organising and supporting RCAs while facilitating their cross-fertilisation in transdisciplinary practice. By integrating studies, debates, and theories from diverse disciplines, we generate multi-faceted insights and present cornerstones for the engagement with and/or enaction of RCAs. This encompasses five main themes central to RCAs: (1) River knowledge encounters and truth regimes, (2) transgressive co-learning, (3) confrontation and collaboration dynamics, (4) ongoing reflexivity, (5) transcultural knowledge assemblages and translocal bridging of rooted knowledge.

Citation:

De Souza, D. T., Hommes, L., Wals, A., Hoogesteger, J., Boelens, R., Duarte-Abadía, B., … Joy, K. J. (2024). River co-learning arenas: principles and practices for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation and multi-scalar (inter)action. Local Environment, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2024.2428215

The full paper can be downloaded here!

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!

High school biology students’ use of values in their moral argumentation and decision-making in times of polarization, confusion and unsustainability

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Another paper based on PhD Tore van der Leij just appeared in the Journal of Moral Education. I took the liberty to add a few words to the title… ‘in times of polarization, confusion and unsustainability’ to emphasize the importance of this work.

In this qualitative case study Tore examined the impact of a specially-designed classroom intervention for a group of 15–16-year-old Dutch biology students’ use of values in contemplating five socioscientific issues in the human-nature context. The students worked in small groups to support various aspects of their morality. An ethical matrix was used as a heuristic to explore different arguments and moral values from different perspectives. The collected data consisted of written assignments, group conversations, and individual interviews. The results show that students’ use of values differed from one issue to another. The values they used in their moral decision-making indicated that the influence of the intervention activities, aimed at enhancing a relationship between moral agent (student) and moral object (topic), was limited. The study provides evidence that the intervention positively conduced to students’ cognition of the values that are personally relevant. Recommendations for further theorization, research and practice are discussed.

Here is the link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057240.2023.2185595

Full citaton:Leij, Tote, van der, Martin Goedhart, Lucy Avraamidou & Arjen Wals (2023) High school biology students’ use of values in their moral argumentation and decision-making, Journal of Moral Education, DOI: 10.1080/03057240.2023.2185595

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

Just out: Embodiment Talk – a podcast on what embodiment might mean for education and creating true connections with ourselves, the other and the world

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In this Embodiment Talk I am interviewed by Marjon van Opijnen of the Embodiment Lab

We talk about the importance of embodiment in education. And how we can create education systems that create space for connections with ourselves, the other and the world. We talk about:

• What embodiment means for education;

• How education can help to create true connections with ourselves, the other and the world;

• The different forms of learning in eduation and how these can contribute to a more sustainable world;

• How education can teach us to criticize, connect and care. And that vulnerability can exist next to strength;

• How to integrate a systemic perspective in the education system.

Here you can go straight to the Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJlpE3rK0MM&t=153s

Go to: https://www.youtube.com/@embodimentlab-marjonvanopijnen for all the podcasts Marjon has made so far.

 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.

Exploring Drama-based Methods Higher Education for Sustainability – an invitation

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Empatheatre is one example from South Africa showing how drama can educate towards empathy and social and environmental justicehttps://www.empatheatre.com/about

One of the Swedish PhD-Candidates I have been working with over the last few years, Julia Fries, based at Stockholm University, is co-organising two fascinating workshops focusing on drama-based approaches in higher education for sustainability.

Below you find an invitation to participate in two international workshops on new formats for Sustainability teaching, funded by the Swedish Research Council and organised by Stockholm Resilience Center and the Department for Teaching and Learning at Stockholm University.

The project explores how drama-based methods can support reflective, embodied and transformative learning about sustainability amongst higher education students. The research ambition is to further current understanding of the role of experiential learning and how these methods support such learning. The format designed will allow to both support pedagogic development in participants academic teaching practice, and address the research questions.

Two international workshops will bring together drama educators and educators in fields related to sustainability, to share different drama-based, interactive methods and explore what these can bring to education in sustainability sciences or sustainability in other subject areas.

Quote from project description:

This project concerns teaching and learning for Sustainability in Higher Education. The cross-disciplinary field of sustainability can be characterised as extremely unsettled and value-loaded, a challenging academic subject for both teachers and students. Consequently, adequate teaching methods has to be developed in order to tackle sustainability issues in a creative and inclusive way. This has been recognised in relation to primary and secondary education but not so much at university level. Attempts are made to achieve this, by adopting a less traditional teaching approach and relation to the world outside the university. Based on this, we propose two explorative workshops for university teachers/researchers.   The purpose of the first workshop is to introduce and explore a set of highly interactive teaching approaches to a group of university teachers/researchers in Scandinavia and Europe. After the first workshop, these teaching approaches will be applied, tried out and documented, as part of the participants ongoing teaching at their universities. The purpose of the second workshop is to evaluate these interactive approaches, by sharing teaching experiences and learning outcomes among students in higher education. The overarching aim is to explore and compare a set of interactive teaching approaches, in terms of applicability and student impact in Higher Education for Sustainability. Based on the outcome, scientific papers will be presented and/or a book will be published.

Practicalities: The first workshop will be in Stockholm 6-9 Sept. 2022 and the second in May or June 2023. Thanks to a grant from the Swedish Research Council we are able to offer 15 participants free meals and accommodation, but travel expenses are not included in the offer. Participants are expected to take part in both workshops. A detailed program for the first event will be presented later this spring. Questions can be directed to eva.osterlind@su.se or t.wall@ ljmu.ac.uk

Are you interested? Please register here: https://forms.gle/frRFxrbgdoL8mrabA