Transforming the ways we create change: experiencing and cultivating transformative sustainability learning
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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The dominant cultural paradigm is reflected in language heavy with static, mechanistic nouns. The perceptions of paradigm disrupt the complex inter-relationality from which diverse life on this world emerges and evolves.
Most learning experiences in the dominant paradigm, even though well-intended, unconsciously perpetuate these static, mechanistic, anthropocentric, and hierarchical beliefs. This thesis is a deep and wide exploration of how else things might be.
A diverse group of educators have been experimenting with ways to bring more relational paradigms into being. The work of these educators can be described as transformative sustainability learning. The intention of transformative sustainability learning is to create the conditions for students to perceive, feel, think, and act in ways within and beyond the dominant paradigm. Helpful in creating these conditions for students are pedagogies born from more relational paradigms, such as transdisciplinary, critical, experiential, systems and complexity theories.
The thesis explores how each of the philosophers who created such relational pedagogies paused to reflect on the long arc of history, and as a result asserted that the dominant paradigm, and its views of reality, brings deleterious effects which seriously impede humanity’s ability to be sustainable, let alone resilient and regenerative. As such, these philosophers created processes to help learners transcend these beliefs.
Even though the pedagogies associated with transformative sustainability learning were born from a more relational perception, with a focus on verbs, process, dynamism, not everyone who uses the term ‘transformative sustainability learning’ works from within these philosophical premises. Not everyone has an awareness of their own worldview or the influence of the dominant paradigm on their educational practices. Thus, these relational and complex pedagogies can be separated from their philosophical foundations and be practised within the beliefs of the dominant paradigm (i.e. static things organised by human superiority). Perhaps this inability to transcend the invisible beliefs of the dominant cultural paradigm explains in part why earlier sustainability pedagogies have not been as broadly impactful as hoped. 𝘐𝘧 𝘴𝘰, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘨𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘨𝘦?
Relational pedagogies share a critique of the separatist perception infusing the dominant paradigm. Helpful in complexifying this perception is one’s own transformative experiences. This inquiry reveals and probes the stories of the philosophers who preceded transformative sustainability learning as well as transformative sustainability scholar-educators who have undergone such transformative experiences. Designing transformative sustainability learning is benefited by having transformative experiences of one’s own.
As consciousness of their worldview and the surrounding paradigms strengthened, these educators developed an expanded set of relational beliefs to inform their learning design. They design experiential learning about content, process and experiences enabling new ways of perceiving and being, which create the condition for a more sustainable, regenerative world.
Weaving the whole together results in a rare, deep and wide exploration of diverse meaning-systems, and the subsequent distillation of threshold concepts for stretching and complexifying both learners’ and teachers’ ways of being towards sustainability.
In short, this is a story about an unusual cohort of worldview-aware educators who are helping others to become worldview-aware. This inquiry offers scholarship into the philosophical premises and processes of transformative sustainability learning, in support of educators and facilitators seeking learning experiences that will support a more sane, more just, ecologically alive world.
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