Education for What?

• In Event: 18.048 - Education for What? Shaping the Field of Climate Change Education With Children and Young People as Co-Researchers

Abstract

In conclusion, the question of ‘education for what?’ which has troubled environmental education research for decades remains deliberately unanswered. While Jickling’s (1991) seminal article is now some 20 years old, his fundamental argument still applies as it concerns the problematic nature of education for sustainable development, education for sustainability and environmental education initiatives which fail to critically engage their own publics. While these fields developed in response to environmentalist, conservationist and even economic rationalist concerns, climate change education emerges at a time when such humanist ideologies of unmitigated progress and technocentric management are necessarily being called into question. Thus ‘education for’ becomes a moot point, and if climate change education is to progress we must move beyond the discipline boundaries of environmental education, education for sustainable development and education for sustainability (and other sustainability-education modes). We argue that climate change education does not simply slip into one of these disciplines or sub-disciplines, but presents an emerging field of practice and research in its own right which is fundamentally orientated towards the rapidly accelerating material conditions of everyday life.

Rather than thinking education as having to be for an abstract concept posed external to itself and its public (the environment, climate change, sustainability, sustainable development), we propose thinking education as a concrete socio-ecological event which is attuned and responsive to planetary change which exceeds human knowledge. In other words, climate change education is what and how it does, and what it will come to do can never be determined in advance. Climate change education thus offers a unique opportunity to shape an interdisciplinary field in the midst of rapidly accelerating changes at the planetary scale, as well as the micro-political scale of everyday life. In the wor(l)ding of such a field, the terms ‘climate’, ‘change’ and ‘education’ are brought into consequential relation through the actual experiences of research, teaching and learning which are simultaneously attuned and responsive to a changing world. As such, it is absurd to propose an education for climate change, and recent research has also revealed the relative futility of advancing a didactic education about climate change. Rather, the Climate Change and Me project suggests that climate change education can open up an entirely new field of educational experience and inquiry which is profoundly different from human-centered modes of environmental or sustainability educations. For our co-researchers, creativity and the arts are crucial to this new formulation of educational experience and inquiry. For ourselves as educational researchers, we are both invigorated and hopeful that children and young people might be the ones to determine the shape of this new field in the making.

Authors

• Amy N. Cutter-Mackenzie, Southern Cross University

• Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, University of Bath

• David Rousell, Southern Cross University

• Karen Malone, University of Western Sydney

• Robert Barratt, University of Gloucestershire