Intergenerational Education for Adolescents towards Liveable Futures
This volume will provide eco-socially-oriented science and environmental educators with a diverse set of examples of how science and environmental learning for students and their co-learner teachers can be enacted in ways which contribute to their understanding of, commitment to and capabilities towards, living for a more eco-socially just and, therefore, more sustainable world. Science and environmental learning is set within a challenging framework, one that entails critical, transdisciplinary learning and acting, and values all the human and other-than-human beings sharing Earth’s rich, but finite, resources.
The text asserts that ethical contemporary science and environmental education, which practitioners might find within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), will have at centre-stage not merely more factual knowledge, but also the development of learners’ affect and behaviour towards acting for eco-social justice. This will demand that learners more fully appreciate not only the necessity to transition swiftly to living within planetary boundaries, but also the requirements of ethical living—that humans share health and well-being more equally with their own and all other species.
Further, the book proposes that eco-socially responsible science and environmental education must be set within a transdisciplinary and integral framework, one in which curriculum and pedagogy are embedded in everyday practice. In this transition project from unsustainable inequities to eco-social justice, teachers and community leaders need to work with their students/citizens in envisioning preferable futures, and developing shared knowledge, values, dispositions, courage and capabilities to work towards such futures, and in genuine attempts at affecting them.
Dr Kathryn Paige is a Senior Lecturer in Science and Mathematics Education at the University of South Australia. Her research interests include pre-service science and mathematics education, eco justice and place-based education.
Dr David Lloyd is a science and environmental educator with particular interest in futures education and transdisciplinary approaches to learning. He is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow with the School of Education of the University of South Australia.
Richard Smith was a teacher educator for most of his professional life, with special interests in science and social education. He taught in all areas of teacher education undergraduate courses at the University of South Australia for over 26 years.
“Kathy Paige, David Lloyd and Richard Smith have managed to write a superb book which can qualify as the Greta Thunberg equivalent for environmental educators. Greta is rightly famous because she has told the world to stop talking and start acting in a serious way. The three South Australian educators hold up a similar mirror to educators. We have all known for a long time that traditional educational practice is for various reasons totally incapable of rising to the challenges which humankind faces today. However, a solid body of theoretical work and educational practice have grown over the last decades which enable teachers and learners to become communities of change, contributing to the transition to an eco-just future. The authors of this book, based on their long experience as educators, truly go for the core stuff, those things which are often demanded but rarely put into practice: transdisciplinarity, co-creation of real-life change through educational practice, building and imagining a futures perspective, and engaging in learning without losing the overall systemic understanding. That's the kind of reflective practitioner's stuff we need to push our own practice beyond new boundaries. [It is] way more useful than anything I have read for a long time.”
Dr Rolf Jucker
Director, Swiss Foundation for Learning in and with Nature
“This book challenges educators to be brave and include the principles of eco-justice “in their own classrooms and in communities that connect to their local place”. It beautifully weaves together several educational strands, the affective and the cognitive, giving practical activities as well as a broad philosophy. Its coherent approach will really help teachers to make a difference, as we face an ecological crisis that demands a new approach.”
Professor Ian Lowe
Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society; former Head of the School of Science at Griffith University, Australia
"The authors assume a critical stance concerning our idea of knowledge, calling into question the what, why and how of knowledge-building processes. In this respect, they present readers with a critique of school learning as conventionally divided into subject disciplines in order to advance a placebased, transdisciplinary approach to both planning and learning processes. Such an approach is not only learner and learning-centred, but also life-centred."
Laura Colucci-Gray, Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Sustainability, University of Torino, Italy Martin Dodman, School of Education, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Buy This Book
