Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Deschooling Critique

Background/Informational

Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

Sustainability education (SE), Education for Sustainability (EfS), and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are interchangeable terms describing the practice of teaching for sustainability. ESD is the term most used internationally and by the United Nations.[1] Agenda 21 was the first international document that identified education as an essential tool for achieving sustainable development and highlighted areas of action for education.

For UNESCO, education for sustainable development involves:

integrating key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning. This may include, for example, instruction about climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, and poverty reduction and sustainable consumption. It also requires participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behaviours and take action for sustainable development. ESD consequently promotes competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way.[2][3]

The aspiration of sustainable development requires us to resolve common problems and tensions and to recognize new horizons. Economic growth and the creation of wealth have reduced global poverty rates, but vulnerability, inequality, exclusion and violence have increased within and across societies throughout the world. Unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption contribute to global warming, environmental degradation and an upsurge in natural disasters. Moreover, while international human rights frameworks have been strengthened over the past several decades, the implementation and protection of these norms remain a challenge. For example, despite the progressive empowerment of women through greater access to education, they continue to face discrimination in public life and in employment. Violence against women and children, particularly girls, continues to undermine their rights. Again, while technological development contributes to greater interconnectedness and offers new avenues for exchange, cooperation and solidarity, we also see an increase in cultural and religious intolerance, identity-based political mobilization and conflict.[4]

Education must find ways of responding to such challenges, taking into account multiple worldviews and alternative knowledge systems, as well as new frontiers in science and technology such as the advances in neurosciences and the developments in digital technology. Rethinking the purpose of education and the organization of learning has never been more urgent.[4]

Critical Pedagogy

Aliakbari and Faraji 11 – Mohammad Aliakbari, Associate Professor in the English Department of the School of Humanities at Ilam University, Ph.D. in English Language Teaching from Esfahan University, Elham Faraji, M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Ilam University, 2011 (“Basic Principles of Critical Pedagogy,” IPEDR, Volume 17, Available Online at: http://www.ipedr.com/vol17/14-CHHSS%202011-H00057.pdf,, Accessed 6-15-17)

Critical Pedagogy (CP) is an approach to language teaching and learning which, according to Kincheloe (2005), is concerned with transforming relations of power which are oppressive and which lead to the oppression of people. It tries to humanize and empower learners. It is most associated with the Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire using the principals of critical theory of the Frankfurt school as its main source. The prominent members of this critical theory are Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Critical theory is concerned with the idea of a just society in which people have political, economic, and cultural control of their lives.

Thinkers of critical theory believe that these goals are satisfied only through emancipating oppressed people which empowers them and enables them to transform their life conditions. It is actually the starting point for critical pedagogy. The major concern of CP is with criticizing the schooling in capitalist societies. As Gor (2005) puts it, the major goals of CP are awareness raising and rejection of violation and discrimination against people.

CP of Freire like critical theory tries to transform oppressed people and to save them from being objects of education to subjects of their own autonomy and emancipation. In this view, students should act in a way that enables them to transform their societies which is best achieved through emancipatory education. Through problem posing education and questioning the problematic issues in learners’ lives, students learn to think critically and develop a critical consciousness which help them to improve their life conditions and to take necessary actions to build a more just and equitable society. Thus, it can be said that CP challenges any form of domination, oppression and subordination with the goal of emancipating oppressed or marginalized people. As Kessing-Styles (2003) points out, CP is an educational response to inequalities and oppressive power relations which exist in educational institutions. Major authors associated with CP include Paulo Freire, Wolfgang Klafki, Michale Apple, Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux.

Praxis

Aliakbari and Faraji 11 – Mohammad Aliakbari, Elham Faraji, 2011 (“Basic Principles of Critical Pedagogy,” IPEDR, Volume 17, Available Online at: http://www.ipedr.com/vol17/14-CHHSS%202011-H00057.pdf,, Accessed 6-15-17)

The purpose of the educator and the educated, the leader and the followers in a dialogue between equal partners is called praxis (Gur-Ze'ev, 1998). It is defined as “the self-creative activity through which we make the world. The requirements of praxis are theory both relevant to the world and nurtured by actions in it, and an action component in its own theorizing process that grows out of practical and political grounding”( Buker, 1990, cited in Lather, 1991, pp.11-12). In education praxis aims at bridging the gap between theory and transformational action. That is, praxis connects education which is libratory with social transformation (Boyce, 1996). Praxis for Freire is both reflection and action, both interpretation and change. As he puts it, “Critical consciousness is brought about not through intellectual effort alone but through praxis_ through the authentic union of action and reflection” (Freire, 1970, cited in Burbules & Berk, 1999). Boyce (1996) also asserts that learners equipped with praxis are well prepared to participate in collective actions. Praxis is critical reflection and action the purpose of which is to implement a range of educational practices and processes with the goal of creating not only a better learning environment but also a better world (Kessing-Styles, 2003). Admitting the importance and the effects of praxis Sadeghi (2008) maintains that only through dialogical process, the practice of praxis is likely to happen.

Explanation of Illich’s conceptual learning webs/networks.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available.

I believe that no more than four--possibly even three--distinct "channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it. I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web."

What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching.

To give an example: The same level of technology is used in TV and in tape recorders. All Latin-American countries now have introduced TV: in Bolivia the government has financed a TV station, which was built six years ago, and there are no more than seven thousand TV sets for four million citizens. The money now tied up in TV installations throughout Latin America could have provided every fifth adult with a tape recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide an almost unlimited library of prerecorded tapes, with outlets even in remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty tapes.

This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically different from the present network of TV. It would provide opportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present investment in TV, instead, provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with institutionally produced programs which they-or their sponsors--decide are good for or in demand by the people. Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching.

Four Networks

The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, "What should someone learn?" but with the question, "What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?"

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others' consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.

2. Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.