Search

Over the past decade, the discourse within the early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) field has significantly changed. A central concept in the discussion is the notion of young children as agents of change for sustainability. Recent research has indicated that children are agents who are able to engage with complex sustainability problems and can be part of the solution for sustainability challenges. This belief works with the assumption that humans at large, and children in particular, are agents who can be taught to be ethical and rational to care for and safeguard the world. This approach is inherently anthropocentric, unintentionally overlooking the agentic characteristics of the non-human world. From the very beginning, this approach, albeit often unintentionally, declares ontological and epistemological separation between the human child and the wider more-than-human world, which turns the non-humans into a passive background for humans to act on. In this chapter, we challenge the idea of making the rational, ethical and agentic child, and explore possibilities for the unfolding relational child, and its implications for sustainability. Drawing on a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric perspective, we argue that the child is not a fixed autonomous and self-privileged subject, but rather is a situated being within an agentic, assemblaged world that he/she becomes-with, and is affected by multiple non-human actors and forces. Pedagogically, this moves ECEfS from focusing on the agentic child to recognizing diverse ways of knowing that include: affective learning, embodied learning and learning with others.The discourse within the early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) field has significantly changed. A central concept in the discussion is the notion of young children as agents of change for sustainability. In this chapter, the author challenges the idea of making the rational, ethical and agentic child, and explores possibilities for the unfolding relational child, and its implications for sustainability. Drawing on a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric perspective, the author argues that the child is not a fixed autonomous and self-privileged subject, but rather is a situated being within an agentic, assemblaged world that he/she becomes-with, and is affected by multiple non-human actors and forces. Pedagogically, this moves ECEfS from focusing on the agentic child to recognizing diverse ways of knowing that include: affective learning, embodied learning and learning with others.

The current sustainability crisis demands a radical reorientation of the way we learn. In this chapter, sustainability is considered an emergent property of an ecology of learning that is a reflexive purposeful mix of actors, perspectives, forms of learning, connections, and support mechanism, driven by an ethical concern for the well-being of people and planet both now and in the future. In this chapter, sustainability-oriented learning is defined as an organic and relational process of continuous framing, reframing, tuning and fine-tuning, disruption and accommodation, and action and reflection, which is guided by a moral compass inspired by an ethic of care. Such learning implies and demands a certain freedom to explore alternative paths of development and new ways of thinking, valuing, and doing. Sustainability-oriented ecologies of learning are visualised as a blended learning space where multiple actors having different backgrounds co-create sustainability organically using a variety of tools, relations, and forms of learning. The concept of whole school or whole institution approaches is introduced as a way to enact such ecologies of learning in a systemic way.

Around the world there are attempts by communities to re-create themselves based on values and customs that are more in harmony with the past and the future, and more mindful of people and planet. A question is whether these communities can do so in a globalising world where it is impossible to escape, for instance, digitalization and climate change. How to balance this attempt to live lightly, meaningfully and locally, while not becoming isolated and impaired by only looking inward with likeminded people? UNESCO identified the town of Omori in Japan as a town that seems to be successful in reviving a town in decline. A mixed group of international experts, scholars, practitioners and policy-makers from all corners of the world gathered in Omori to see for themselves what sustainable living might look like. By talking to the community and getting a sense of place they jointly reflected on the implications for education in the context of sustainable development. This chapter describes the town of Omori and offers insights in the future of sustainability education that are driven by practice as opposed to by theory.

When democracy can be hijacked, power corrupts and capitalism penetrates deeply into society, including into our schools, what prospects still exist for education for a more sustainable world? Democracy is painfully slow and open to manipulation: the question must be asked whether it is up to the task in the new global environment where action is through agreement of interest-based states. And yet in a post-truth world there are important issues that yoke science as empirical truth with democracy that we might christen ecological democracy which provides the warrant and justification for civil action, and demonstrates the new power of citizen science groups that can act autonomously in the interest of their local communities. In this paper, which is a short version of a more comprehensive chapter published in a book edited by Ariane König, titled “Sustainability Science: Key Issues” published by Routledge[1], we seek comfort, inspiration and support from emerging forms of ecological democracy, civic science and transgressive education. The latter invites conflict and disruption as mechanisms to break with stubborn, unsustainable routines, that encourage people to leave their comfort zone. The resulting discomfort can be generative when it invites people to explore other options, to build new alliances or to re-think what they always thought to be normal or true. Learning on the edge of one’s comfort zones amidst a plurality of ideas, can help us interrogate and rethink the way we frame – or are made to frame – our experiences, as well as our cultural narratives and associated encultured and embodied ontological pre-dispositions.

We have entered the Anthropocene (Gibson et al. 2015), an era of human-caused global systemic dysfunction where the same species that caused this dysfunction also has the responsibility to turn the tide and respond. How to live lightly, equitably, meaningfully and empathically (i.e. towards the past and the future, towards different cultures, the non-human and more-than-human world) on Earth is the key question of our time. Young people in particular might feel overwhelmed by such a heavy existential question as they have a full life ahead of them and may have serious doubts about having children of their own some day in the face of the declining state of our planet. How can schools help young people to engage meaningfully in such a loaded question? Or, morally speaking , how can they choose not to help them with this question or, worse, make them powerless witnesses and accomplices to this planetary demise by ignoring this question altogether and sticking to " education-as-usual " ? This edited volume brings together authors who are looking for principles , foundations and processes that enable educators, in a broad sense, to connect young people with the key questions of our time. This chapter is the afterword to the book with some critical observations.

Many academic curricula suffer from a teacher centred focus on knowledge transfer and do not consider the societal needs for competences. This paper reflects on the transformation from theory centred towards competency-oriented curricula at three Vietnamese Agriculture Universities with support of a Netherlands-funded project. Experts guided the implementation, from analysis of labour market to evaluation of new courses. Based on students' evaluation and lecturers' experiences, both types of respondents reported that after having been exposed to a series of trainings and hands-on experience in and outside classrooms, they gained new sets of knowledge and skills. However, some issues emerged in the process. Among these are the lack of competence among lecturers to design curricula based on outcomes, particularly addressing competence of students' knowledge, skills and attitudes; lack of staff to develop and implement a competence-based curricula; non- aggregation of closely related courses in modules that avoid repetitions and provide time for training of skills and attitudes. There is a/so a need to train students for competency in performing more complex teaming outcomes, such as critical thinking. For this change to happen, lecturers need continuous training in didactics for active teaching, and universities need to provide means for participative learning.

For a long time the Netherlands has provided support to dairy development in the East African countries Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Most of this support has been provided through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the successive development departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The support in most cases was aiming at a propoor approach, with a focus on supporting smallholder farmers.

De kloof tussen duurzaam denken en duurzaam doen overbrug je door op scholen exacte vakken te integreren met natuur- en milieu-educatie en slimme ict-burgerwetenschap, meent de Wageningse onderwijskundige Arjen Wals.

Monitoring en evaluatie van de programma's "leren voor duurzame ontwikkeling" en "natuur- en milieueducatie". Binnen het programma NME heeft het instrument 'arrangementenmodel' een centrale plaats ingenomen. Binnen de arrangementen zijn nieuwe samenwerkingsvormen tussen NME-organisaties en blijvende contacten met nieuwe partners ontstaan, en wordt er meer aangesloten bij de bestuurlijke agenda van gemeenten. Vraagarticulatie en verankering van deze nieuwe manier van werken blijven aandachtspunten voor de toekomst.

Het belang van ‘natuur’ en ‘natuurervaringen’ in de opvoeding en ontwikkeling van kinderen staat eigenlijk nauwelijks ter discussie, hooguit is er onenigheid over de prioriteit ervan. Zonder overdrijven kan gesteld worden dat er in Nederland, maar ook zeker elders in de wereld, al ruim 100 jaar aandacht is voor het leren over, in, met en vóór natuur. Een belangrijke vraag is nu op welke wijze - wanneer de mogelijkheid zich dan toch voordoet op scholen - kinderen het beste in contact kunnen komen met natuur? Welke werkwijzen zijn dan het meest effectief? Verondersteld wordt dat een zogenaamde ‘diepe’ ervaring - waarbij het kind alle zintuigen gebruikend de natuur spelenderwijs en ontdekkend op intieme wijze leert kennen - het meeste effect zal hebben.

Het programma LvDO stond in de periode 2008 tot 2011 voor de uitdaging duurzaamheid te verankeren in dagelijkse praktijken. Het programma continueerde de strategie uit de vorige programmaperiode om top-down aan de beïnvloeding van systemen en bottom-up aan de ondersteuning van netwerken van professionals te werken. Daarnaast richtte het programma zich op kennisontsluiting, voornamelijk in de vorm van kennisontwikkeling en kenniscirculatie. Deze strategie werd gericht op de drie pijlers van het programma: Onderwijs, Rijksoverheid en Decentrale overheden. Vanaf 2008 is het concept ‘arrangement’ geïntroduceerd in de NME-sector. Een arrangement is een coalitie waarin aanbieders, vragende, bestuurlijke en maatschappelijke partijen samenwerken.

Scientists and ‘ordinary’ citizens alike have different thresholds with respect to the amount of un-clarity, conflict and confusion that they can handle. Some see merit in all three factors and embrace them as drivers of deeper thinking and reflection, while others need clarity, confirmation and assurance. In the world of academia but also in the everyday world of politics, terms, concepts and phrases emerge, be it in journals and newspapers, on Facebook or via twitter, that quickly become popular or, to use a more modern word, ‘viral’. Words like ‘hybrid’, ‘sustainability’, ‘green economy’, ‘community of practice’ and ‘carbon neutral’ are just a few that I have been noticing a lot lately, but there are many others. Depending on one’s comfort level with regard to un-clarity, conflict and confusion, such inevitably ill-defined and (therefore?) popular concepts have either an appealing or appalling vagueness. In this report, Romina Rodela is trying to determine the meaning of an emerging form of learning in the context of natural resource management: social learning (a phrase with 9.6 million Google hits as I type this on April 27, 2012). Her work as a Marie Curie Post Doctoral Fellow as a part of the UNESCO Chair in Social Learning and Sustainable Development within the Education & Competence Studies Group of Wageningen University sheds light on the meanings and usages of social learning at various levels (micro, meso and macro) and from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary vantage points. This report represents a much-needed meta-analysis in this emerging field and pulls together key research articles on social learning in natural resource management and related fields, such as environmental management. Readers looking for the definitive definition of social learning will be disappointed as the word ‘definitive’ does not seem to exists in multi-stakeholder communities of reflexive learners; rather, these communities seem to be engaged in processes that are ‘iterative’ and ‘emergent’. The contexts in which social learning and natural resource management are used tend to be ‘in-flux’ or ‘dynamic’, and the learning taking place is rather blended, taking on many forms from experiential to transmissive, from personal to collaborative, from formal to informal, and so on. Still, there are some common threads that seem to characterise what we might call social learning. The importance of creating social cohesion among the various actors as a prerequisite for using the differences that exist among them is one common point, but there are others that the reader will find within the text. I compliment Dr. Rodela for creating some clarity and shedding some much-needed light on the rising phenomenon of social learning and doing so without trying to freeze or fix the concept in ways that would hamper its potential to contribute to more sustainable natural resource management and, ultimately, to the well-being of the planet as a whole.