1st Edition
Social Ecology and Education Transforming Worldviews and Practices
Social Ecology and Education addresses "ecological understanding" as a transformative educational issue: a learning response to emerging insights into social-ecological relationships and the future of life on our planet.
In the face of the existential threats posed by climate change, loss of biodiversity, pandemids and the associated ecological and social challenges; there is a need to extend our responses beyond scientific inquiry and technological initiatives. This book seeks to move the dialogue towards a deeper and broader understanding of the complexities of the issues involved. To achieve this, the book discusses issues rarely addressed through programs in "Education for Sustainability" and "Environmental Education," such as student defined knowledge systems, deep engagement with the implications of indigenous understandings, climate change as symptomatic of broad epistemological problems, social disengagement and differentiated barriers to meaningful change. This work is enriched by its focus on the learning and the learning systems that have led to our current predicament.
This book seeks to initiate considerations of this kind, to invigorate education for sustainable, equitable, healthy and meaningful futures. As such, this book will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of education and environmental courses.
Part 1: Transforming Learning
1. (Edge)ucation by Design
Ann Dale and Hilary Leighton
2. Teaching Social Ecology
David Wright
3. Transformative Learning Priorities
Stuart B. Hill
4. What was Education for? Learning in the Shadow of Climate Change
Isak Stoddard
5. Wild Pedagogies and the Promise of a Different Education: Challenges to Change
Bob Jickling and Sean Blenkinsop
Part 2: Transforming Practice
6.Community Education and Partnerships for Sustainable Development: A Way Forward for Indigenous Asia
Subarna Sivapalan and Ganakumaran Subramaniam
7. Leadership of the Future, for the Future: An Insight into a Unique Transformative Learning Program for Sustainability Capability
Kate Harris
8. The Gift of Presence in Groups: An Unfolding Story of Transformative Learning
Dale Hunter and Stephen J. Thorpe
9. Art, Imagination and the Environmental Movement
Rachael Jacobs and Christine Milne
Part 3: Learning Nature–Culture
10. Being Effective: Social Ecological Understanding in Action
Cathy McGowan (with David Wright)
11. Transformative Learning Through Maori Migration to Australia
Roseanna Henare-Solomona
12. Passionate Immersions in Nature: Cultures of the Everyday
Jen Dollin
13. Please Explain!
Brendon Stewart
14. Have You Ever Found a Gawuraa?
Christy Hartlage and Jo Clancy
15. Sustainability Work: An Urgent Need for a New Profession
Werner Sattmann-Frese Stuart B. Hill
Biography
David Wright is a senior lecturer in Education at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Stuart B. Hill is Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at Western Sydney University, Australia.
"The portfolio of essays is excellent, ranging widely, incorporating many different voices, stretching it seems (thankfully) beyond academia into the world of environmental practice, emphasizing the experience and first-hand accounts of the authors. I’m impressed, too, at the emphasis on personalizing educational experience, the developmental orientation, and the openness to multiple forms of learning. The essays challenge the reader to encounter some of the existential challenges that are inevitable in contemplating environmental issues. The authors are highly qualified, very experienced, and surely in Stuart Hill’s case, among the founders of academic environmental studies."
Mitchell Thomashow, leading author on education and environmental change and director of the Second Nature Presidential Fellows Program. Former president of Unity College and former Chair of Environmental Studies at Antioch University.
