Living and Learning in the Anthropocene: Pedagogy for the Futureless

• In Event: From Global Warming to Increased Violence and Inequities: Cultural-Historical Thinking for the Anthropocene's Crises

Abstract

Education and school research has during the last years been concerned with envisioning so-called 21thcentury skills, as a response to the realization that a school designed in and for the industrialization era could no longer be an appropriate model for a rapidly transforming society. Interest in promoting life-long learning and creative digital literacies belong to such efforts to prepare the younger generations for a future that, because of the pace and diversity of change, could no longer be anticipated.

With the Anthropocene, however, there comes not just the certainty of an uncertain future, but also the possibility of a not having a future. What is the role of education in general, and of school in particular, in a context of crisis and radical uncertainty? What does it mean to “prepare the younger generations for the future” when the very idea of future is questioned?

In this presentation, I’d like to address these questions by examining the ways in which the idea of the Anthropocene opens for new pedagogical ideas and orientations, and an opportunity to transform the role of school in society. One such basic idea stems from the realization that, if education—to paraphrase Dewey in Democracy and Education—is the institutionalized form of the basic renewal of life by (cultural) transmission, then it is clear school should no longer be aiming to transmit the same culture that has driven us here. In line with CHAT, Marxist psychology premises, schools may be conceived not as institutions for cultural transmission, but for cultural transformation. Rather than aiming at further reforms to better educate the younger generations for a future that no longer can be, schools may become places for adult and younger generations to join and together conceive and work out how to continue living and learning in the Anthropocene.

To provide empirical substance to the discussion, I share ongoing experiences from an international European project designing and testing collaborations in which teachers, students, industry, environmental activists and other civil organizations together design and implement climate action and justice projects to address sustainability challenges in their local communities.

Author

• Alfredo Jornet Gil, University of Oslo