Co-Visioning Graduate Education for Planetary Futures With Students, Educators, and Activists

• In Event: Relational Approaches to Prefiguring Learning Futures

Proposal

The growing demand for graduate degrees in the areas of climate and sustainability education is driven in part by the increasing pressure on governments, including by youth activists, to deliver on their commitments to climate change education in the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The call for global commitment to climate education was further advanced at the UN’s 2021 Conference of the Parties, where participant governments publicly pledged to integrate climate and sustainability education into policy and practice.

In this global context, the authors recognize that more of the same kinds of education will not meet this need (Komatsu et al., 2020) and are therefore co-visioning with prospective and current students a graduate program that aims to transform students’ passion for global ecological justice into impactful education professions necessary for shaping learning futures in which both the planet and people can survive and thrive. The program offers an opportunity for education practitioners, policymakers, activists, and community leaders to learn through transdisciplinary coursework and socially embedded fieldwork, towards social and ecological change through education.

With an orientation towards social transformation and pluriversal thinking, central to program design and ongoing iterative design is co-visioning with prospective and current students (Escobar, 2018). Co-visioning processes aim to undermine hierarchical tendencies that dominate many mainstream education systems; ensure the program attends to student voice, experiences, and needs; and enact methods for social and institutional change. In this vein, this presentation (a) describes processes for co-visioning a graduate program in education for planetary futures with students, educators, and activists, (b) describes the findings of these co-visioning processes, including the tensions that arise, and (c) articulates the significance of these findings for graduate education moving forward.

The initial process for co-visioning with prospective students involved two focus groups hosted over Zoom, which brought together a total of 78 current undergraduate students, in-service teachers, and youth activists from Africa (Sierra Leone, South Africa, Somalia, Uganda), Asia (Sri Lanka, India, Philippines, Japan), the Middle East (Palestine), North America (US and Mexico), and Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Ireland). Participants articulated means for ensuring justice in program structure in content; encouraged breaking hierarchical, competitive, and inward-focused education to focus more on communities, local land, and activist spaces; expressed a need for students to connect and mobilize across difference, including through inter-university and inter-local connections; promoted practical applicability and skills development; and expressed a variety of ideas for traditional and non-traditional theses. They also emphasized a need for program developers to ensure ongoing co-visioning and co-design with students, raising practical and ethical considerations about the best means for soliciting in-program student feedback and ensuring student compensation for co-design. Altogether, findings hold significance for graduate education aspiring for pluriversal design in our current period of great unsustainability, particularly regarding the necessary education theories and methods central to both critique and alternative educational expressions, pedagogies and practices that lead towards meaningful action, and methods of integrating community-based and land-based transdisciplinary research within the discrete space of a graduate program.

Authors

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Andrea Weinberg, Arizona State University

• Gustavo E Fischman, Arizona State University

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

• Janna Goebel, Arizona State University