Pedagogies for Eco-Literacy: Insights from NORRAG Special Issue #09 – Foundational Learning: Debates and Praxes

• In Event: Does Education Matter for Climate Action? Assessing the Evidence and Harnessing Youth Potential for Impact

Proposal

NORRAG Special Issue 09, “Foundational Learning: Debates and Praxes” explores the redoubled emphasis on foundational learning that emerge at the midway point to SDG2030.

The special issue addresses how we think about foundational learning in ways that really make sense for 2023 and the world to come, what does human security entail in a world so seemingly fragile and full of perils. Five contributions to NSI-#09 grapple with what the climate and environmental crises mean for foundational learning and pedagogy:

Radhika Iyengar – Earth Institute, Columbia University: Learning to be a conscious person: Bridging the gap between foundational learning, climate change and SDG 4.7.; in which the author gives her story on how she came to realize that skills that enable one to become an active and engaged citizen and learn to live within the planet's natural boundaries are in themselves foundational.

Christina T. Kwauk – Independent Researcher: Foundational learning in the climate crises, explores the foundational pedagogy inherent in building consciousness and the competencies to understand what led us to this point of severe climate crisis, what it will take to lead us out, and to act on this knowledge in empowering and transformative ways.

Adam Roberti – Executive Director, Xavier Cortada Foundation: Foundational learning and socially engaged art in an era of overlapping environmental crises, presents two cases on how socially-engaged art in Miami both raised public awareness and developed foundational learning through active social engagement.

Renata Montechiare – Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences – Flacso, Brasil: The Maria Venâncio Indigenous School of the Tremembé of Almofala; Intercultural basic education and the fight for indigenous land, paper describes how the struggle for indigenous land rights, traditional skills for sustainable stewardship of the coast and forest are fundamental for indigenous pedagogies.

Deborah Bailey – Teacher: Mental landscapes and foundational learning outdoors: The experience of a Zürich Waldkindergarten, describes her work in a forest kindergarten in which children are outdoors every day of the year, which demonstrates David Orr’s ideas about the importance of “outdoor learning” in developing the landscape of young minds.

Thus, each of the papers speak to protest, whether in the literal “placard” sense, around legal struggles for just policy, or in their quiet assertions of alternative pedagogies. Ideas about what is foundational in education have always resided in contested terrain; if anything, these debates are sharper in this historical moment for human societies, our biodiversity and our planet. On the surface, the current debate tends to polarize around those who believe foundational learning should involve only literacy and numeracy and those who believe it must involve other foundational skills as well. In reality, the debate is as complex as it is crucial: it reflects financing decisions and constraints, policy priorities and planning within education systems; it embraces many encompassing questions about the purposes of education and the nature of the social compacts we construct to deliver equity and quality in education; it is fundamentally about pedagogy and how pedagogy is understood in the world we live in now.

Author

• Hugh McLean, NORRAG