1st Edition
Transformative Sustainability Education Reimagining Our Future
This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being.
Elizabeth A. Lange advocates for a new approach to environmental and sustainability education, that of rethinking the Western way of knowing and being and engendering a frank discussion about the societal elements that are generating climate, environmental, economic, and social issues. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous and life-giving cultures, the book covers educational theory, transformation stories of adult learners, social and economic critique, and visions of changemakers. Each chapter also has a strong pedagogical element, with entry points for learners and embodied practices and examples of taking action at micro/meso/macro levels woven throughout. Overall, this book enacts a relational approach to transformative sustainability education that draws from post humanist theory, process thought, relational ontology, decolonization theory, Indigenous philosophy, and a spirituality that builds a sense of sacred towards the living world.
Written in an imaginative, storytelling manner, this book will be a great resource for formal and nonformal environmental and sustainability educators.
1 Seeding Life-Giving Cultures 2 How Did We Get Here? 3 Waves of Environmentalism, Development, and Backlash 4 Environmental Education 5 Sustainability Education 6 Transformative Sustainability Education 7 The Modern Story of Education 8 Our Great Work: Reimagining Education and our Future
Biography
Elizabeth A. Lange is Honorary and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Futures of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. At three Canadian universities, she has served as a professor in adult and lifelong education with over 40 years’ experience as a formal and nonformal transformative educator. She is a scholar of transformative learning, sustainability education, and transcultural learning, winning awards for her research.
“I have just finished reading Transformative Sustainability Education. I am blown about by its comprehensive scope – its breadth and its depth. I am touched by the way arguments are presented with love and concern. It’s deeply personal and political, with inspirational pedagogical approaches from which educators, teaching across the life course, will learn, unlearn, relearn. This is one of those ‘must have’ books as you will go back to it over and over again”.
Emerita Shirley Walters, University of the Western Cape, South Africa and President of PIMA"Lange is bold in the task she undertakes, and this boldness inspires! With the Copernican Revolution, Nicolas Copernicus changed our worldview from an earth-centered universe to a heliocentric one. Lange challenges us to change our worldview again, this time from the mechanistic clock-like universe of to a relational view of interconnected systems. This book is a “labour of love” moving Lange’s pen in a flow state, only possible Csikszentmihalyi says, when we have put in our ten thousand hours. It is this flow state that carries one to read what might otherwise be a tedious history; but this version has such life and passion that it moves through the reader. This book is quite a ride. Strap in and get ready!"
Betsy Jardine, Cape Breton University, Canada
"This book asks educators to accept a vanguard role in questioning and replacing the dominant narratives of consumption and growth. The curriculum for doing so is the book itself, which immerses the reader in its title, namely, a transformative sustainability education experience. One can also consider the entire book as a deeply self-reflective exegesis on how formal educators can shed their complicity in unsustainability by contributing to a vision for the radical reconstruction of education, both as institution and teacher."
Robert Vanwynsberghe, Professor, Education for Sustainability Program, University of British Columbia, Canada
