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Beyond Sustainability, Towards Regeneration: What is the Education of Our Times?

Tue, April 16, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview A

Proposal

The CIES community works very hard to develop minds, conduct research, and/or make programmatic contributions to improve schooling (especially for the most disadvantaged) across the globe. Yet many hold deep, often unspoken, questions about the actual viability of schooling to make good on the promise of education (for all children, especially disadvantaged, beyond the basics, and into an uncertain future). While most people believe that schooling is foundational, a linchpin for so much in life, many in the CIES community do not have an adequate answer to what is truly needed to implement and sustain quality, equitable schooling and learning for ALL. Moreover, we do not know what education looks like that honestly responds to our current global situation and prepares for a highly uncertain future.

When do we have the space, time, capacity, and/or perhaps willingness to ask ourselves deeper, harder questions? Questions such as: will our current system, our current ways of thinking and acting, actually deliver sustainable, quality education for ALL? How do we know what is relevant to learn, where learning takes place given the rapidly, dramatically changing contexts? Are we preparing students to survive (let alone thrive) in our current global situation of increasing, unprecedented (political, environmental, economic, social) changes? To consider just a few of these global challenges—dramatic income inequality; deeply polarized political and religious views; climate-related catastrophes; eminent threat of massive climate collapse; growing financial instability among disadvantaged; huge youth bulge in many low income countries—raises additional questions. Why is it that the fundamentals of schooling remain relatively the same? If we as a community considered our response, how might we redesign schooling? What changes are urgently needed in schools, in education systems, and perhaps most importantly within ourselves to respond? What do we need to acknowledge about how schooling and global development operates- in current and historical geo-politics- to respond to growing systemic threats and our vision of schooling? Are we willing to thoughtfully consider that education systems, and we ourselves, have participated in and perpetuate (and/or been hurt by) racism and the colonial imprint of schooling, global development, or our ways of generating knowledge?

We propose a roundtable discussion to reflect on the questions above and consider: what is “the education of our times”? What shifts are needed personally, collectively, culturally, institutionally for us to explore these questions deeper and more honestly? (Or stated differently, what are the foundational questions that we might be afraid to ask and act on in the face of mounting crisis?) In our discussion, we go beyond education and sustainability- as this suggests we want to sustain current system. Instead, we take a sober approach-acknowledging gaps and failures- and to look at what regenerative systems and approaches offer. We will discuss: 1) what changes we need to make to ask and better answer what is the education for our times; 2) the current research and practice around education in regenerative systems; 3) what would be the impact on our scholarship, professions, and lives.

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