Abstract
The Hand-Print concept emerged as a proposition for learner-led action learning in the Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Hand-Print CARE as an ethics-led action learning proposition was developed at a Local Culture for Understanding Mathematics and Science (LOCUMS) research group meeting with some educators in Alta, Norway. Here ‘CARE’ emerged as an acronym reflecting an ethic of inclusive respect through Concern for others, being Attentive to needs, showing Respect for each other and being Engaged in learning actions for the common good. Hand-Print CARE was thus activated as a co-engaged mediation process towards ‘Learning to look after others to best care for ourselves and the surroundings we all share’. Conceptual tools towards a Hand-Print CARE rationale were clarified in subsequent ESD workshops in Malaysia and Mexico and the challenge of developing a schema for ESD in school subject disciplines emerged at an ESD training workshop with National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) in Delhi, India.
This article explores the emergence of Hand-Print CARE and the framing of an open-ended schema for mediating better-situated and ethics-led action learning in school subject disciplines. A formative perspective towards more locally situated and co-engaged processes for mediating learning was refined through an ESD Expert-Net collaboration to clarify ESD learning progressions in school subject disciplines. Some start-up materials were developed with partnering NGOs in the small town of Howick in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and in an expanding collaboration involving partners in India, Mexico, Germany and South Africa. Each of us worked to refine Hand-Print CARE learning progressions for ESD processes of action learning in diverse subject discipline and school-in-community settings.
Keywords
In this article, a schema for ethics-led action learning is developed through a critique of instrumental dispositions in education that are not always culturally well situated, informed by empirical data or adequately articulated with questions of sustainable material practices. ESD thus commonly presents as salvation narratives that refer to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and are mediated by institutional intermediaries through ESD processes that stipulate competences for effecting systemic transitions to future sustainability. Reviewing the emergence of professional mediators
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as intermediaries in modern institutional contexts of accelerating change, Rosa et al. (2018) point to how:
Professional agents ‘translate’ systemic requirements into individual aspirations in a process of two-way mediation that seeks to activate and motivate social actors in a specific way and at the same time help them pursue their own aspirations through a particular self-optimising form of subjectivation. (p. 44)
A brief clarification of ‘learning as expansion’ after Engestrom emphasizes the importance of sociocultural (endogenous) starting points for a Hand-Print CARE process to approach learning in co-engaged and deliberative ways around subject discipline knowledge that has been constituted in school curriculum settings. Open-ended, culturally situated, co-engaged processes of depth inquiry and action learning resonate with realist social theory to frame sustainability education as ethics-led, depth inquiry in real-world contexts of reflexive learning (Bhaskar, 2009). These deliberative approaches call for us to better situate and expand conventional teach–task–test learning progressions and to increase the use of visual materials that invite inclusive conversations that are socioculturally situated and inclusive. This can be enriched and expanded with authentic narratives of change and empirical inquiry around local concerns. Cultural, historical and realist deliberations have always characterized much good subject teaching, and expanded ESD progressions are emerging in better-situated modes of inquiry and action learning that are reflected in a Hand-Print CARE schema for diverse school subject disciplines.
A culturally situated and learning actions approach to ESD in school subjects is informed by recent work in the cognitive sciences that foregrounds new insights on human consciousness and another that provides insights into human emotions and predictive agency. The primacy of an ethic of care is noted in narrative research with young children, and a discourse on moral education and caring by Nel Noddings (2010) provides necessary depth foundations for a human kindness rationality to inform the intergenerational agency for learning-led change.
A process image is used to frame a Vygotskian schema for deliberative learning and for planning ethics-led inquiry and action learning in school curriculum and community settings. Here, the SDGs and ESD competences specified by UNESCO are used to open start-up tools for work with photographs, and deliberative depth inquiry is developed around authentic narratives of care that are used to inform local inquiry and change projects in school, home and community contexts.
SOCIAL–ECOLOGICAL NEGLECT IN MODERN WORLD ORDER
In a simplified overview, recent centuries of Western imperial expansion and subsequent 20th-century modernization have served to marginalize most indigenous peoples and expand modern capital economies on an unprecedented, global scale. Despite imperial colonial injustices, many aspects of the modernizing periods of global expansion have enhanced human health, peacefulness and well-being (Pinker, 2018) but within expanding inequalities and a continuing abjection of ethnic minorities. To achieve modern expansion and many of the benefits of modernity, social–ecological landscapes have been modified in ways that people, other living things and natural landscapes are not always being well cared for (O’Donoghue et al., 2019). Today, many of our modern ways of being and doing things in the world are no longer sustainable, and we are creating all sorts of problems for ourselves and other living things. Urban centres and their surrounding landscapes are now the biocultural habitats of people and all manner of animals and plants. Living in these areas together, we need to be more Concerned for others, Attentive to their needs, Respectful of all around us and Engaged in learning actions to change things for the better. The proposed CARE start-up materials and learning activities have developed as a Hand-Print 2 process of deliberative story sharing actions with young children around and ethics of ‘care for others to best look after ourselves and the surroundings we all share’.
THE EMERGENCE OF ESD IN A GLOBALIZING MODERNITY
Education responses to escalating risk in the modern age have successively emerged and proliferated with focus areas that have included conservation, environment and sustainability as well as peace, social justice, global citizenship and a range of global health risks. Many of these have embodied moral elements of expanding care for the common good.
Despite human well-being having generally improved into the modern era, Pinker (2018) points to how the modern media and some intellectual discourses are fostering a false sense of doom and gloom. He is partially correct but his assessment overlooks the positive side of many critical discourses on the exclusions of colonial modernity and empirical data on escalating risk that has recently been driving globalizing imperatives of ESD and Global Citizenship Education.
Unfortunately, modern approaches to education have commonly been initiated as instrumental interventions to create awareness so as to change attitudes and values and in this way to give effect to behaviour change in specified target groups of people. Modern education imperatives have thus primarily developed as instrumental systems of reason.
A SHIFT FROM INTERVENTIONIST TO MORE CO-ENGAGED ACTION LEARNING
Instrumentalist perspectives on education have developed as systems of reason in modern institutional settings that initiate educational interventions designed to give effect to change. The conventional wisdom is that the correct mix of awareness-creating interventions will produce the desired change. Here behavioural measures of impact are commonly specified as indicators of change to verify the effectiveness of an education intervention.
Empirical measures of behaviour change have, however, been extremely elusive, and decades of education research have failed to produce and replicate data demonstrating clear causal links from awareness, to attitudes and values to effect behaviour change. Given this anomalous disjuncture, it is surprising that global environment and sustainability education institutions remain wedded to a logic that education must be enacted to create awareness so as to influence attitudes and values to ultimately effect measurable changes in behaviour.
Alongside these common anomalies in prevailing institutional conventional wisdom, there has been a swing to more participatory approaches to education. ESD is now developing as co-engaged processes of participatory learning-led change. Rosa et al. (2018) probe these as two-way mediation processes across institution (external) and individual (internal) as learning at the nexus of institutional rationality and rational self-interest. The competing dimensions of these interests are not easily reconciled within the oppressive histories of colonial modernization and with starting points for deliberative meaning-making that are situated in life experience and the endogenous capital of a sociocultural setting.
TOWARDS COLLECTIVE DELIBERATION FOR EXPANSIVE SOCIAL LEARNING
These contradictions challenge us to contemplate ESD as deliberative inquiry within local contexts for learning-led change in a modern world. Here deliberative pathways of co-engaged inquiry can enable us to engage emerging concerns and contradictions within the life experiences and knowledge that we have to think about and learn as reflexive individuals in the deliberative company of others. In collective learning ways such as these in modern contexts of risk, learners might recover a communal self-efficacy necessary for reflexive, culturally situated, social–emotional learning with the agency to innovate and effect change. Here learning-led change is contemplated as developing within expansive learning actions that mediate the narratives and practices steering daily life.
Engestrom (2014) explores Vygotskian activity theory towards development work as ‘co-engaged expansive transitions’ noting:
Dialectics as it was conceived of by Hegel and by many of Hegel’s materialist followers is here problematic in two respects. First, dialectics as a method of thought is commonly pictured as a solitary endeavour. Second, dialectics is commonly pictured as a method of thought only. In my analysis, dialectics is the logic of expansion. And expansion is essentially a social and practical process, having to do with collectives of people reconstructing their material practice. (Engestrom, 2014, p. 242)
The emergent learning-led change as co-engaged expansive processes can be diverse, engaging emancipatory concerns to enhance quality of life and advance the prospect of future sustainability.
WORKING FROM WHAT IS KNOWN TO ENGAGE EMANCIPATORY CONCERNS
Co-engaged approaches to education are centred on local culture as emergent foundations for ongoing reflexive learning with understanding. In his work on a sociology of knowledge, Elias (1987) notes that:
The method which people use in acquiring knowledge is functionally interdependent with, and thus inseparable from, the substance of the knowledge they possess, and especially from their basic image of the world. (p. 64)
Here education can be situated and enacted in co-engaged ways as local, cultural processes of learning in the deliberative company of others.
An endogenous, intergenerational vantage point on social learning is reflected in the following graphic of ‘situated intergenerational learning practices’ that involve:
Ontology: recognizing things together in the world Ethical solidarity: assessing value for the common good Shared knowledge and knowledge practices steering our actions
Sandoval Rivera (2017) framed these onto-ethico-epistemic processes for indigenous knowledge research as co-engaged learning processes across intergenerational knowledge and the scientific propositions of modern institutions. They chart out a cultural–historical and locally situated approach to collective learning through deliberative depth inquiry to produce knowledge to steer and enhance daily life and future sustainability.
WELL-BEING AND RATIONALITY EMERGE IN DELIBERATIVE DEPTH INQUIRY
In a philosophical charting of depth rationality and the problem of emancipatory change, Bhaskar notes that:
What constitutes an agent’s wellbeing cannot be stipulated a priori, but must itself be discovered in relation to the agent’s antecedent notion of her wellbeing in the course of the explanatory critique and emancipatory practice such a D-I (Depth Inquiry) presupposes. And what is rational cannot be laid down in advance but must likewise be determined, in relation to our pre-existing ideas of rationality…. (Bhaskar, 2009, p. 136)
Depth inquiry as a process of culturally situated, reflexive learning can come to be determined by participants where cultural–historical knowledge and dispositions are deployed in situated learning experiences developing around the concerns of the day. The attendant shift in education from a priori specification of behavioural outcomes to co-engaged and culturally situated learning makes a strong case for a move away from the colonizing tyranny of overspecified modes of education to more deliberatively mediated processes of learning-led change. Here outcomes are mediated in local, culturally situated deliberations that are best determined by and with participants through the course of depth inquiry within the symbolic capital in local cultures for understanding the phenomenon and concerns at hand. Creating the learning contexts for this form of reflexive inquiry involves an expansion of existing teach–task–test learning progressions in conventional school subject disciplines and more learner-led action learning. Here local concerns and authentic accounts of change might be used to enable participants to deliberate and expand existing perspective towards more sustainable material practices.
OBJECTIVE WORK WITH INNER CONVERSATION FOR RE-MAKING SOCIETY
The learner agency work of Archer (2004) suggests that learning and change in relation to the culturally situated concerns of the day develop around ‘internal conversation’, processes of reflexive deliberation through which we mediate our experiences and concerns around existing dispositions and identity. Here she notes:
the ‘inner conversation’ is a matter of referential reflexivity in which we ponder upon the world and about what our place is, and should be, within it. Social reality enters objectively into our making, but one of the greatest of human powers is that we can subjectively conceive of re-making society and ourselves. To accomplish this entails objective work in the world by the self and with others. (Archer, 2004, p. 315)
Taken together, it is possible to model all of the social theory in this realist and historicized genre as an open-ended process for providing perspective where co-engaged participants contemplate caring pathways to sustainability, as follows:
Working from intergenerational culture, life experiences and what is known to us, sustainable wellbeing is open to discovery during reflexive, depth inquiry as individuals and collectives of people engage their emancipatory concerns during objective work in the world, deliberative meaning-making and internal conversation, to re-make society and ourselves by reconstructing our material practices together.
An open-ended model of process such as this can be useful for contemplating the important dimensions of co-engaged processes of deliberative learning and expanding care.
Pinker (2018), discussing reason and the need for student engagement in learning transactions, notes that ‘people understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss them with others and to use them to solve problems’ (p. 378).
He also tracks advances in evolutionary psychology that are beginning to shed light on some of the intellectual, moral and aesthetic dimensions of the human condition. Emerging insights into the cognitive sciences also bring clarified perspectives on consciousness and the emotions as useful theory to inform the possibility of reflexive human learning for emancipatory change in conditions of risk.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS A ‘GLOBAL WORKSPACE’
Recent cognitive science work on human emotions and consciousness is providing useful insights for informing the caring processes of action learning.
Dehaene and Changeux (2011) propose that human consciousness functions as a ‘workspace’ or ‘blackboard’. Working to explain conscious activity using neuroimaging, they developed a Global Neuronal Workspace hypothesis (see Figure 1 for the simplified diagram that we worked with). This points to how perception, memory, evaluation and attention interplay within a global workspace along with motor systems. Reporting this work, Pinker (2018) points to how one finds the common ‘modules’ of:
Perception (what we see and)
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Memory (what we remember) Motivation (framing a purpose and) Language (expressing our ideas in words) Understanding (enabling a conceptual grasp of things within) Planned action (an emerging agency towards planning what to do)
He goes on to note how the hypothesis suggests that all of these attributes access the common pool of the ‘global workspace’ (the contents of cultural consciousness), to allow us to:
describe, grasp or approach what we see (recognize concerns) respond to what other people say and do and (assess value) remember and plan depending on what we want and what we know (act) (Pinker, 2018, p. 426, our brackets)
The differentiation of conscious neural activity is beginning to uncover how human capacities to describe, grasp, respond to others and to remember and plan together could enable an agency for achieving positive intentions based on what we can come to know, feel and reason about together.
THE EMOTIONS IN PREDICTIVE CYCLES OF CARE AND WELL-BEING
Resonating with this perspective on consciousness, recent work on human emotions by Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) points to how events in the world are anchored in predictive processes and dispositions that are constituted in the intergenerational passage of our daily lives. She describes a prediction loop in human cognitive function (see Figure 3) that allows us to uncover how:
through continual prediction (in the mediating company of others), you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode. And marvelously, your brain does not just predict the future. It can imagine the future at will. (p. 66, my brackets)
The concept of a prediction loop is helpful to model how:
Your brain issues a storm of predictions, simulates their consequences as if they were present, and checks and corrects those predictions against actual sensory input. (p. 153)
The insights emerging from the cognitive sciences dimension how conscious human functioning and predictive emotional dispositions are useful for contemplating ethics-led processes of learning and change.
CLARIFYING AN ETHIC OF CARE IN EDUCATION PRACTICES
Nel Noddings (2010), with some qualifying remarks, is persuaded that feelings of empathy are both cognitive and emotional. For the mediating of empathy in educational settings, she identifies four components—modelling, dialogue, practice and confirmation—to suggest that ‘they are all activated within, and depend for their success on, the establishment of caring relations’ (Noddings, 2010, p. 147).
Shaari and Hamzah (2018) similarly highlight the centrality of caring thinking in education and relates this to cultural dispositions in Malaysia.
In the emerging rationale and learning sequences for Hand-Print CARE, dialogical modelling informs caring practices that are affirmed in mediated deliberation. Here the emerging intergenerational image of learning-led change with the young is of purposeful, social–emotional learning actions. In a sociocultural setting, these come to be ethics-led and centred on co-engaged depth inquiry in relation to everyday material practices and the common good: endogenous action learning.
CARING DISPOSITIONS AS A CATALYST IN ENDOGENOUS ACTION LEARNING
ESD-CARE is explored within this expanding rationale for education as situated sociocultural processes of learning to care for others, ourselves and our surroundings. A Handprints approach to deliberative learning actions was inspired by a 10-year-old girl, Srija, from a school in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, who was involved in a project taking action for sustainability to bring about positive change in her surroundings. In a formative Eco-Schools study in the Grahamstown area, our research team was struck by how the children interviewed about their concerns had surprisingly strong dispositions to care for others and to be looked after well. It is somewhat obvious that caring dispositions are found in most homes, are exemplified in most schools and are extended to communities and the wider world around us. These caring dispositions and a sense of the common good were deeply embodied in the young children living in challenging circumstances.
Expanding relations of care appear to be dialogically modelled in caring practices where (see Figure 4 below) from a Local Culture for Understanding Mathematics and Science (LOCUMS) workshop Sami indigenous peoples in Norway, these are developed and affirmed in school, family and community contexts of learning-led change.
This insight informs the concept of CARE as participants deliberate the perspectives and to develop empathy and agency as they are:
Learning to look after others to best care for ourselves and our surroundings through being:
ESD-CARE is centred on learning to recognize concerns, assess value and act towards looking after others to best care for ourselves and our surroundings.
A CULTURAL–HISTORICAL IMAGE OF DELIBERATIVE ACTION LEARNING
Hand-Print CARE as a learning journey of expansive ethical deliberation in co-engaged action learning is reflected in the process image 4 (Figure 4) below.
The image illustrates how we use the language and knowledge that has come to us through our intergenerational cultural histories and real-world experiences to make sense of things both individually and together. In this way, we can tune-in to something new to us, using what we know in action learning in the company of others as we think, take action, touch or talk about what is of notable interest to or might concern us.
In this way, local culture is necessary for the consciousness to frame what is known and to use the conceptual knowledge in the school curriculum for understanding things. Teachers working in subject disciplines can thus plan a learning journey in co-engaged work with students so as to explore real-world matters of concern. Learning can be activated within the diversity of shared traditions of understanding, in work with photographs or through story sharing as well as with factual knowledge related to our everyday lives.
ACTION LEARNING FOR ESD IN CURRICULUM SETTINGS
O’Donoghue et al. (2018) propose that ESD learning environments should be framed as deliberative inquiry around ‘nexus matters of concern’, namely, concerns in and around the everyday lives of the learners. In this way, the ‘Tune-in’ starting points will always be things that the learners will recognize, relate with, have some experience of and often have opinions about.
‘Tune-in’ activities will thus have the cognitive, social–emotional and life-experience dimensions of school learning that teachers can plan around. In learning activities with authentic materials, we always try to build learning progressions around what learners first recognize and may have experience of or value dispositions towards. Learning is then commonly a collaborative and expansive process along open-ended learning pathways of learner-led meaning-making as learning actions towards doing what is best for the common good; in this case, ‘learning to look after others to best look after ourselves’. To expand circular reasoning within prevailing dispositions, we have the mediating hand of teachers and peers in conversation as well as authentic narratives that provide data and evidence from the struggles of others.
The action learning graphic (Figure 5) is useful to remind us as teachers that to work with learners through purposeful learning progressions that start with Tune-in activities and commonly include a rich mix of talk, touch, think and action taking to provide a learning environment that is inclusive of all learning styles and sociocultural perspectives.
ESD IN SUBJECT DISCIPLINE TASK SEQUENCES
Combining the Vygotskian process image of intergenerational learning in a real world and the simple 5Ts of active learning in a conventional classroom subject disciplines points to how good teachers have always expanded conventional ‘teach–task–test’ classroom routines (Figures 7 and 8) into more situated learning progressions to develop learner agency and competences. This classroom reality allowed us to contemplate ESD-CARE work, as a Tune-in process of deliberative learning with pictures coupled with an authentic story to develop a ‘concern’ and be sensitized to being more ‘attentive’ to the needs of others in ways that might give rise to a new disposition of ‘respect’ within ‘engaged’ illustrate actions towards what is best for the common good.
The graphic in Figure 6 illustrates how working with the Vygotskian task sequencing schema of Edwards (2014), it was possible to contemplate how questions arising in start-up work with pictures and authentic story (quadrant 1) could be mediated so that emerging questions could be taken into local depth inquiry (quadrant 2). Here, ESD is approached as an expansion of conventional instructional pedagogy as reflected in Figure 8. This presents learning as a process involving both knowledge acquisition and participatory co-engagement with local matters of concern.
It is at this stage that empathy and concern arise for the learner to undertake mediated conversations into the deliberative modelling and design of more just and sustainable solutions to emerging concerns (quadrant 3). Finally, with emerging compassion and purpose, participants can explore and report on change challenges that they might undertake to resolve the matters of concern at the nexus of local concerns and their change challenges (quadrant 4). In participatory processes of ESD in conventional subject disciplines, there is room for an expansion of pedagogic practices to develop learning progressions that involve the acquisition of situated knowledge that lifts into participant deliberation and into reflexive learning that involves the design and modelling of sustainable solutions that are practically explored in small-scale change challenges in everyday life. A useful mediating tool here is the SDGs.
WORKING WITH THE SDGS FOR DEPTH INQUIRY IN SUBJECT DISCIPLINES
The SDGs can be read as tools for humans to take greater care of self, each other, other living things and our surroundings. In an unprecedented show of global solidarity, all of the governments of the world have signed up to work on the 18 focus areas of global concern and to work towards implementing the targets specified in the SDGs.
To work with the SDG in a local action-learning programme, we have developed a deliberative coding activity with an SDG wheel (Figure 9). The figure allows participants to deliberate concerns in a local context of risk. The stars on the spokes of the wheel highlight the key concerns that relate to a particular context and issues of sustainability. Working with the SDG wheel in this way, participants can explore the often hidden complexities and concerns involved in a local sustainability issue. The SDG wheel mapping activity can be a useful start-up process to contextualize a local concern and to open up deliberative learning.
ESD COMPETENCES THROUGH SYSTEMIC MODELLING AND REFLEXIVE MODES OF ACTION
Learning to care for others involves not only the acquisition of new knowledge to steer our day-to-day activities but development of a competence necessary to foster and sustain change. Competence in ESD refers to the knowledge, dispositions and a capacity to act together in ways that enable participants to ‘recognize’ concerns, ‘assess’ value and ‘act’ on emerging matters of concern (Schreiber & Siege, 2016, p. 91). UNESCO (2017, p. 10) maps out eight categories of ESD competence for activating the necessary reflexivity and trajectories of change (reflexive narratives) for expanding care and transitioning actions to sustainable development, namely:
Systems thinking Anticipation Normativity Strategic Collaboration Critical thinking Self-awareness Problem-solving.
We now have a better sense of how the modern human condition has been developing to include evaluative competence in critical systems modelling (a, f and h) and reflexive modes of action (b, c, d, e and g). These interacting dimensions of ESD competence enable us to understand how changing environments can directly affect our well-being. With this is emerging new knowledge and a better grasp of how we need to expand patterns of care to include all other living things and the life-giving social–ecological processes in our surroundings. We thus need to develop competences to recognize concerns, assess value and act together if we are to look after everything in our surroundings so as to better care for our own health and the well-being of all others who share our surroundings.
The intention of Handprint-CARE is to create school subject discipline contexts of co-engaged learning where participants describe and grasp things towards responsive care through which they might relate, remember and plan together in ways that give rise to empathy for others and more informed caring actions. The idea is to enable participants to start conversations that make meaning of sensory and narrative input with concern for others so as to deliberate and picture (simulate) better ways of looking after others to best care for ourselves in our neighbourhoods and in our schools. For this to become possible, learners (parents, teachers and children) will have to question and deliberate many current practices and dispositions as they use their cultural histories and life experiences with knowledge acquired in subject disciplines to recognize concerns, assess value and engage in better actions in the world around them.
In this way, learning activities in relation to real concerns will be documented and developed to challenge participants, young and old, to predict, simulate, compare and resolve concerns in ways that are best for others and for ourselves. In this way, they will also model, dialogue, practise and confirm better ways of being and doing things together.
The proposed school-in-community programme will invite families and children at school to become involved in exciting streams of learning experiences in the real-world contexts that we all share. As we recognize and come to care about the concerns of others, we will have to work from what we know and feel, to deliberate what is best so as to refine ‘steering stories’ 5 that will enable us to work for the common good in the world around us.
ESD AS DIVERSE LEARNING PATHWAYS OPENING UP IN SCHOOL SUBJECT DISCIPLINES
The proposed ESD-CARE initiative is being framed as a locally constituted education process for shaping a more caring and sustainable community in modest ways. The materials are being co-developed with participating teachers and NGO partners around photographs of local concerns and authentic stories of better care and more fulfilling ways of being and doing things together. The start-up images, stories and activities are being developed to support participants to engage local concerns with knowledge acquired in diverse disciplinary fields.
Learning through developing the competence to better CARE for self, others and surroundings will be supported in curriculum and in the public education initiatives of local service organization partners. The emerging materials are being developed as a Hand-Print CARE suite of possibilities for start-up work in a Fundisa for Change teacher professional development programme. This is being initiated for teachers in diverse subject disciplines to develop the competence to resolve local contradictions that the disciplinary knowledge illuminates.
Situated learning such as this can play out in ‘expanded learning progressions’ involving deliberative action learning where participants recognize concerns, come to assess value and explore actions towards learning to care for things better together.
Working with local photographs, start-up stories and the SDGs will give more scope to teachers of school subject disciplines to engage learners in local inquiry towards enhancing local patterns of ‘care for’ others and ‘caring about’ local sustainability concerns towards reimagining better ways of being together in a more caring world.
SOME FORMATIVE PERSPECTIVES FOR ESD IN SCHOOL SUBJECT DISCIPLINES
In school subject disciplines, ESD has emerged with the inclusion of new environmental knowledge, increasing problem-solving topics and a concern to shape more sustainability material practices. This has produced an expansion of conventional teach–task–test learning sequences and an emphasis on co-engaged action learning that develops higher-order systems thinking and action competence.
The main shift notable here is an expansion from instructional intervention into two-way processes of more culturally situated mediation that engage new environmental knowledge and change towards more sustainability material practices. Coupled with this is an increasing use of visual materials and systemic graphics along with authentic narratives (story) to activate and mediate deliberative learning. These should be a positive, hopeful and process centred in ways that enable learners to become concerned, attentive, respectful and engaged in what is best for the common good of humanity and the living world that we share with others.
We have identified five main focus areas and associated questions for our ongoing work on ESD in school subject disciplines:
ESD processes (How is learning-led change best developed in collectives?) Action learning (What recent insights on learning are informing us?) Learning task sequencing (How do we need to expand existing lesson progressions?) Ethics in learning (How is ethics-led learning best mediated?) Change projects (What is needed to mediate project work?)
Opening learning progressions with photographs and emergent stories of local concerns are intended to enable participants to start learning conversations where participants learn to ‘recognize’ shared concerns so as to deliberate these and come up with leading questions for depth inquiry so as to ‘assess value’ and to decide how to best ‘act’ to resolve matters of concern. Situated deliberation allows participants to work from and expand their local cultural understanding from within together (endogeny). Concerns are initiated by participants who begin to open their learning in conversation around pictures and stories that allow them to relate with and engage matters concern so as to better care for each other and the surroundings we all share. Deliberative learning might enable them to reassess value as they learn to act for the best together. Here in the mediating company of a teacher and each other, pupils can critically expand local and disciplinary knowledge around what is known and what participants come to value in debate and decision-making for the common good. In this way, learning through existing disciplinary subject fields enables participants to come to know, value and act on many of their concerns in positive ways together.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.