Intersecting Ecosystems: An exploratory case study of the environment and education

• In Event: Critical encounters with environmentalism

Proposal

Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is SDG 4: Quality Education, which targets the promotion of sustainable development through education for sustainable development (Goal 4, 2015). However, the prevailing beacon of success, Western modernity and growth associated with it, is in direct tension with a sustainable planet. The education for economic growth model, which is promoted by international development agencies such as the World Bank (see Hanushek & Woessmann, 2015 and Ludger, 2015), places a strain on human and natural resources. The current framing of quality education displaces environmental education in favor of education for economic prosperity. A myopic focus on education for economic development means a generation of global citizens is trained to ignore other ways of knowing and being (e.g., many indigenous communities have managed to survive for centuries by adapting to changing climate conditions and creating sustainable livelihood systems).

This exploratory case study addresses the lack of attention given to environmental and sustainability education by studying qualitatively the intersecting networks and ecosystems of a coffee producing community in Brazil. Data collection took place over a three-month period and explored how humans and nature interact and how these relationships promote and/or hinder the exchange of knowledge(s) in the education sphere (including formal and non-formal education) in the context of sustainability of our planet. A secondary goal was to explore non-Western ways of knowing and being as these may provide innovative solutions to some of the socio-environmental challenges we face.

Modern education is both produced by trees (in environmental knowledge) and on trees (in the form of printed books). It is fitting, then, that in the ecosystem of modern education, books are the producers of knowledge, and students are the primary consumers. Yet, long before books were printed on paper, knowledge was shared orally and informally. Formal and non-formal education, in this way, could be bridges between the social- and natural science-based solutions the planet needs and the individuals and species that need them. Because SDG 4 pushes out education beyond literacy and numeracy, allowing for the exploration of generational knowledge and community voices could grant access to socio-environmental solutions beyond our scope of vision. Along the same lines, reimagining both living and non-living entities as educational actors (Latour, 1996) may also highlight voices that are traditionally excluded from the conversation of the science-based solutions to sustainable development.

In response, this exploratory case study looks at the intersecting networks among third, fourth, and fifth generation coffee producers where the individuals, institutions, and ecosystems are entangled like the roots of a tree. Local community members, educators, researchers, and generations of coffee producers intersect within biodiverse ecosystems. In order to better understand these complex actor-networks, this study employs Latour’s (1996) theoretical framing of actor-networks which extends the word “actor” to what is beyond the human actant in order to include non-human actors. Latour’s (1996) actor-network theory allows for nature, herself, to enter the conversation as a non-human actor. Therefore, the following research questions guided this inquiry:

(1) How do humans and nature interact? How are humans acting upon and with nature in Southeastern Brazil?
(2) How does nature appear as an actor in this region?
(3) How do the intersections between ecosystems and networks in the region relate to the exchange of knowledge(s) and connect to both formal and non-formal education?

The process of coffee farming provided a focused way to explore the interconnected webs of diverse ecosystems in order to explore how knowledge travels across actor-networks, between humans and non-humans, between the animate and inanimate, across generations of coffee producers, and into formal school curriculum.

Methods

Data collection for this exploratory case study took place in rural, Southeastern Brazil from June to September of 2018.

Participants. The participants (n=27) included coffee producers, middle and high school teachers, and local community members. The study site population was made up of approximately 6,000 individuals. Data collection occurred within a farming community of about 500 people and in the local state school that served 250 middle and high school students from the surrounding areas.

Procedures. I used snowball sampling to leverage network relationships with local teachers and coffee producers in the region. My ethnographic observations were recorded in a series of 61 field note entries. Over the course of the three month period, I logged a total of 111.5 hours of school observations and 139.5 hours of farm and community observations. Additionally, I conducted 9 interviews (n=19) with coffee producers and community members and 6 interviews (n=8) with school teachers and administrators. Finally, as an ethnographic observer, my own embeddedness in the community generated data that will allow for the exploration of what knowledges emerge not just about relationships but also through my own relationships with nature and the community.

Findings and Conclusions

This research calls on educators and policymakers to expand the definition of quality education to include nature and environmental education as fundamental. In short, the yardstick to measure quality education is broken. A metric that does not measure progress toward education for sustainability does not tell the whole story of what it means to offer quality education. Broadly speaking, this research illustrated the participants’ wealth of knowledge within and beyond formal schooling. Their interactions with their natural ecosystems and their formal education provide abundant opportunities to better situate the conversation both about what constitutes quality education and how to view sustainable development. For some of the participants, development is the maintenance and protection of the land that they inherited in order to pass it on for generations. Through informal education, they share centuries of knowledge in the plants and years of lessons from working on the land together with their children and grandchildren. A more detailed discussion of the findings will be presented in the final paper. The next steps in this research project will focus on contributing innovative ways to approach and expand the definition of quality education for sustainable development.

Author

• Janna Goebel, Arizona State University