ESD as an evaluative game-changer

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Evaluation and education for sustainable development (ESD)

Proposal

The paper opens with a critique of instrumental perspectives on education and evaluation that emerged with the bureaucratisation of modern social life. This commonly reduces evaluation to the measuring of behavioural outcomes. It notes how bureaucratic system of reason has persisted despite the shift to ESD as co-engaged evaluative processes for enabling participants to enact learning-led transitions to sustainable wellbeing. It examines evaluation as nested assessments in ESD as situated processes of deliberative, learning-led change. In this way the study scopes the evaluation landscape implicit in ESD and, in doing so, reframes the SDGs as evaluation tools for enabling more purposeful contextual work by co-engaged partners. Here Environment and sustainability education is approached as situated depth-inquiry where participants are engaged in evaluative actions that play out in reasoned change that can, in turn, be evaluated for the coherence of learning actions and their outcomes.

The study thus points to a need to contemplate four evaluative dimensions of ESD, namely:
• ESD as evaluative action learning (Deliberative critical processes of reflexive, depth inquiry)
• evaluation for ESD (Contextual histories and the SDGs)
• evaluation in ESD (Tools for participant assessment of value creation)
• evaluation of ESD (The assessment of outcomes, impacts and scaling of change).

An expanded and integrated conception of evaluation and ESD is centred on the modern human condition where reflexive agency for positive, depth enquiry has emerged as necessary social processes to foster change. To develop this wider perspective, the narrative scopes four start-up tools for assessment work in local change projects, namely:
1. contemplating the purposes of evaluation work in ESD as reflexive processes of evaluative learning and change
2. working with contextual histories and the SDGs as an initiating evaluation tool for ESD
3. ESD as an inclusive process where the rational contours of sustainable futures are differentiated by participants in the course of depth inquiry, and
4. Where the outcomes of learning-led change remain open to review for the scope of the change (impact / scale) but where these are not only ascribed to the process but to the reflexive agency of the participants producing both more enlightened learning and emancipatory change.

The central concern of the study is to question the narrow, instrumental scope of current systems of reason informing evaluation practices and to open up the possibility of better situated evaluation work that is more orientated towards ESD as deliberative processes of evaluative reflexivity. These reflexive historical processes of becoming critically active in the re-making of society and ourselves are contemplated as co-engaged evaluation in our changing worlds.

Authors

• JOON DEEPIKA, ESD Expert Net and UNESCO MGIEP

• Jennifer Krah, ESD Expert Net and WWF

• Eureta Rosenberg, Rhodes University Environmental Learning Research Centre, South Africa