Tag Archives: uncertainty

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

Cultivating imaginative disruptions and light-heartedness in times of gravity

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Some journals are truly hidden gems – Airea is a peer-reviewed journal on Arts & Interdisciplinary Research. Together with wonderful colleague Anke de Vrieze of Wageningen UR and Åse Bjurström of University of Gothenburg, former PhD and MSc-student of mine, Natalia Eernstman and current PhD Kelli Rose Pearson, we contributed a paper to a Special Issue on ‘Interdisciplinary relationships within spaces and bodies of collaboration‘. Our paper is titled:

Designing Collective Artist Residencies – Cultivating imaginative disruptions and light-heartedness in times of gravity

A nice feature of this special journal is that it is fully open access: all wonderful papers can be freely downloaded from the journal’s website here! Please find below the abstract of our paper:

The Case for Transformative Public Education: Responding to Covid-19 now while addressing long-term underlying inequalities

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Last Fall a consortium of which I am proud to be a part, along with the Education & Learning Sciences Group of Wageningen University received funding from the UK-government to a so-called GCRF Network Plus on Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures. The network is co-ordinated out of the University of Bristol and includes partners in India, Rwanda, Somalia/Somaliland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. TESF undertakes collaborative research to Transform Education for Sustainable Futures. We have just released an introductory video (see above) and just released a timely paper:

TESFBriefing

Here is the link to the briefing paper:

The Case for Transformative Public Education: Responding to Covid-19 now while addressing long-term underlying inequalities

This paper addresses the following topics:

  • What is Transformative Public Education
  • Why Transformative Public Education matters to the COVID-19 response
  • Why Transformative Public Education matters for addressing long-term underlying risks to communities
  • Examples of Transformative Public Education responses to COVID-19
  • Suggestions for governments and state welfare actors seeking to work with Transformative Public Education
  • Suggestions for community leaders working with Transformative Public Education
  • Transformative Public Education in times of physical distancing
  • Key readings and resources

On the TESF website you will also find other resources you may find of interest. Have a look here TESF Home Page

This is TESF’s first response to the C-19 situation, and we would like to see it widely distributed, given the timely nature of this topic.  Please do all you can to share it widely across your networks. https://tesf.network/resource/transformative-public-education/

Transformative Sustainability-oriented Open Education

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This new book published by Brill just came out and I am pleased to have been ablte contribute to its contents together with one of my colleagues from the University of Gothenburg, Anne Algers. Our chapter is part of a rich collection of chapters focusing on ways of opening education to allow for more dynamic forms of learning to emerge in a world that is trying to grapple with many of the existential and ecological crises that, both ironically and sadly, humanity itself has created. The chapter that Anne and I wrote (have look at the pre-print here: Sustainability_orientedOpenLearningAlgersWals2020) asks the question of “How can open education play a role in making academia more responsive and responsible in addressing ill-defined and ambiguous, but ever so urgent, sustainable development challenges?”  In our chapter, a case study from the field of sustainable development of food systems provides a narrative that illustrates the possible impact of open education; and the value of a culture of openness to individuals, to a community, and to society.

First, we provide a contextual background on the implications of openness in higher education. Second, we introduce the subject of sustainable development (SD) of our global food systems; and third, we discuss the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD). Fourth, by means of thick description (Geertz, 1973), we report a case study on open education which we discuss in light of learning theory, critical pedagogy, and sustainable development.

In the end we argue for a radical interpretation of open education which we refer to as transformative sustainability-oriented open education, where ”open” refers to inviting and expressing critique and marginalized perspectives in controversial societal issues, while transformative refers to enabling learners to bring about change.

Suggested citation: Algers, A. & Wals, A. J. (2020). Transformative Sustainability-Oriented Open Education. In: Conrad, D. & Prinsloo, P. (Eds.).  Open(ing) Education. (pp. 103-120). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense. doi.org/10.1163/9789004422988_006

 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Imaginative Disruptions: Creating Place- and Arts-based Responses to Climate Urgency

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Imaginative disruptions

The Video

Taking place in 3 countries (Sweden, United Kingdom and The Netherlands) three ‘collective residencies’ brought together an intergenerational group of people who played, ate, (re)imagined, learned and created together, to design alternative futures around a selected ‘glocal’ issue, and explore what needs to be disrupted to realise these imagined realities; what is working with us and what is working against us? Two hopeful examples of local residents and one from academia show the power of arts-based approaches and the importance of hope and lightheartedness. The research was initiated and led by former MSc and PhD-students of mine, Natalia Eernstman

You can find more information and a link to the video here: Imaginative Disruptions Video

The Research

Imaginative Disruptions was a two-year creative research project that explored the transgressive potential of art and making to engage groups of citizens and experts in imaginative conceptions of alternative environmental narratives.

Underneath the project is the assumption that the structures and mind-sets of our modern society have made unsustainable living the default and sustainable living the exception. Acknowledging that environmental issues occur in the every-day lives of people rather than on drawing boards of technocrats, implies that designing and transitioning towards a more environmentally sustainable alternative should include citizen, lay or situated knowledges.  There are some signs that such knowledge is recognized and demanded in both science and society (e.g. the push for citizen science and multi-stakeholder social learning). However, the practical realisation of processes that include public dialogue, in which citizens become critics and creators of knowledge, are fairly under-developed.

Here are some of the things we aimed to find out:

What arrangements and conditions are needed to disrupt daily routines and generate new ones?

Does the recognition and inclusion of situated knowledges generate radically different perspectives on how we can live well and environmentally, or do they represent the fine-tuning and, thereby, the maintenance of the status quo?

What happens if you put adults and children in the same learning arrangement and invite them to learn, play and experiment collectively? Chaos or…?

(How) is the knowledge produced through this heterogenous, vernacular, artistic, non-hierarchical and intergenerational process ‘useful’ to the community in question and a wider subject arena around it?  

What is the added value of creative / artistic techniques in the social learning that will take place?

The ‘data’ of the research project emerged from the residencies with people talking, creating and reflecting together. We aimed to collect what the residencies generate in ways that don’t disrupt the activities, and allow us record things that we didn’t know we were going to document in advance.

More background information can be found on our Imaginative Disruptions website here: Imaginative Disruptions Home Page.

Imaginative_2

The Funding

The project was funded by the Swedish SEEDBox small grant scheme for innovative approached to education and research aimed at realizing a more sustainable world.

Should and Can Education Save the Planet? ECER2019 Keynote now online

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ECERKN

Last month I attended the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER in Hamburg this year. Around 3000 participants from over 60 countries attended the conference. Since the overall theme was ‘Education in an Era of Risk – the Role of Educational Research for the Future’ I had the honor of being asked as one of the plenary keynote speakers, as was my good colleague and friend Heila Lotz-Sisitka from Rhodes University in South Africa who, like myself, is a member of ECER/EERA’s subnetwork on Environmental and Sustainability Education (Network 30), one of the youngest and rapidly expanding networks.

The title of my talk was: Should and Can Education Save the Planet? In the talk I outlined the current global sustainability challenges form a learning perspective and I introduced the concept of sustainability-oriented ecologies of learning. I also introduced the notion of sustainability Bildung in which Biesta’s three tasks of education are reconfigured with Planet in mind to become eco-subjectification, eco-socialization and eco-qualification.

You can watch the full keynote here (also understandable for the deaf and hearing impaired as the talk was kindly supported with sign language).

Here is the official ECER2019 abstract of the keynote.

Education unwillingly has become a key mechanism for fostering economic development, innovation and growth. In the meantime, humanity is facing a range of sustainability issues that include: rising inequity, loss of democracy, runaway climate change and mass extinction. These issues can be so overwhelming that they can easily lead to apathy and despair which will only make them bigger. We appear to be at a tipping point where the decisions we make about how to live together will be crucial for the future of our planet. There is no better time than now to ask:  What is education for? What if education would serve people and planet rather than just or mainly economic interests?  Is this a role education should play? And, if so, what does such an education look like?

Based on emerging research and practices from around the world, I will sketch forms of education and learning that are: responsive, responsible and transformative in light of global sustainability challenges. Sustainability here is not seen as another subject to be added to an overcrowded curriculum, but rather as a continuous quest for finding ways to live more equitably, meaningfully and healthier on the Earth without compromising planetary boundaries and the futures of the coming generations. Such a quest requires a more relational pedagogy that can help establish deeper connections with people, places and other species. Such a pedagogy not only invites reflection on values and ethics, and the utilization of diversity, but also the critiquing and transgressing of the structures and systems that make living unsustainably easy and living sustainably hard.

 

Towards a Framework for Designing and Assessing Game-Based Approaches for Sustainable Water Governance – New paper (open-access)

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WaterCombined

Together with Alice Aubert and Wietske Medema I co-authored a review paper on the designng and assessing of game-based approaches for sustainable water governance. In the paper we try to map these approaches using a heuristic that is derived from work Bob Jickling and I did well over 10 years ago on the positioning of sustainability-oriented education and learning. The resulting paper you can find below. Here is the abstratc. Disclosure: The paper appears in the journal Water which is part of MDPI whose publishing model I critiqued in an earlier blog post.

Abstract 

Most of the literature on serious games and gamification calls for a shift from evaluating practices to using theories to assess them. While the former is necessary to justify using game-based approaches, the latter enables understanding “why” game-based approaches are beneficial (or not). Based on earlier review papers and the papers in this special issue of Water entitled “Understanding game-based approaches for improving sustainable water governance: the potential of serious games to solve water problems”, we show that game-based approaches in a water governance context are relatively diverse. In particular, the expected aims, targeted audience, and spatial and temporal scales are factors that differentiate game-based approaches. These factors also strongly influence the design of game-based approaches and the research developed to assess them. We developed a framework to guide and reflect on the design and assessment of game-based approaches, and we suggest opportunities for future research. In particular, we highlight the lack of game-based approaches that can support “society-driven” sustainable water governance.
Here is the link to the full paper which is freely downloadable.