[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Dale clic para escuchar” voice=”UK English Female”]

Por Desmond Thompson

One of Nelson Mandela’s most frequently quoted statements is that “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Considering that he continued his studies while spending 27 years behind bars for fighting apartheid, a system that heavily restricted educational opportunities for black South Africans, his quote has been interpreted to refer to both individual empowerment and societal transformation.

Education equips people with knowledge, critical thinking and skills to improve their lives and fight for change. At the same time, education enables society to challenge the status quo, promote social justice and build a more equitable future.

Mandela died over a decade ago, yet the view that education can be a tool to change people to change the world is very much alive.

Zeitgeist

Is it mere coincidence that education for sustainable development (ESD), though not a fully formed concept at the time, started gaining ground at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, shortly after Mandela was released from prison and just before he became president of a democratic South Africa? Or was it an expression of the zeitgeist?

Apartheid was ending and education was seen as critical for building a new, just dispensation in the country. Mandela’s emphasis on education aligned with the global yearning for change.

At the same time, environmental concerns were rising, and the world was looking for solutions. The Rio summit’s key outcome was Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan for sustainable development in the 21st century. Crucially, it identified a key role for education in bringing about the changes that would have to be made over the coming years to realise this vision.

Arising from a decision made at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, the period 2005 to 2014 was declared the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, with the vision of “a world where everybody has the opportunity to benefit from education and learn the values, behaviour and lifestyles required for a sustainable future and for positive societal transformation”.

Sustainable Development Goals

By the time all UN member states adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, ESD was recognised as central to the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contained in the resolution.

SDG 4 deals with “inclusive and equitable quality education” and promoting “lifelong learning opportunities for all”. And its Target 4.7 is to ensure that by 2030 “all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development”.

Taking its cue from the SDG’s target date, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formulated ESD for 2030, the current global framework for ESD.

Empowering

According to UNESCO, ESD gives learners of all ages the knowledge, skills, values and agency to address interconnected global challenges, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of resources and inequality. It empowers learners of all ages to make informed decisions and take action to change society and care for the planet.

It therefore seems quite appropriate that now, when we are facing a “battle for our lives”, in the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, due to climate change, ESD is making headway.

Transformative

ESD supports transformative approaches to education that bring the need to address environmental challenges into focus, while also “revisiting the complex mix of social and economic issues that are intertwined with the cause and impact of these problems”, UNESCO said in its 2020 ESD Roadmap.

Journey of change

Coming a full 30 years after she first started grappling with the “complexities of change in the formal education sector”, this statement nonetheless succinctly summarises Professor Heila Lotz-Sisitka’s motivation for embarking on a journey that would become her lifelong academic passion – sustainability and social justice education, emancipatory agency, and people’s participation in transformative education and learning processes.

She started her professional life as a Grade one teacher. She is now a distinguished research professor at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa, where she also holds a prestigious national Research Chair in Global Change and Social Learning Systems. This forms part of the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) of the country’s Department of Science and Innovation as well as the National Research Foundation.

Her chair is based in the Environmental Learning Research Centre at Rhodes University, which she directs. The current focus of the chair’s research is transformative social learning and green skills learning pathways in areas of biodiversity, the water-food nexus, climate change, social and environmental justice, and just sustainability transitions.

What set her off on her journey of change?

Frogs.

“The life cycle of the frog,” she tells University World News.

“I used to teach it to little kids, and they loved it. But then I realised the frogs were actually a main indicator of biodiversity loss. And suddenly I saw we’re only teaching isolated ‘facts’, we’re not actually helping the kids understand the world.”

Lotz-Sisitka went back to university and did her PhD in education at Stellenbosch University. In her thesis, she flags her “journey of inquiry towards socially critical environmental education”.

Complexities of change

She says her study on the development of environmental education resource materials for junior primary education through teacher participation gave her “insight into some of the complexities of change in the formal education sector”.

This was in the early 1990s, during South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. At the political level, change happened quite quickly, but in education, it was only the start of a long process of transformation that is still ongoing.

Lotz-Sisitka realised “that confronting the challenges and complexities of change in realistic and meaningful ways is possibly one of the most daunting realities facing South Africans as we begin to respond to the many legacies of apartheid ideologies, modernisation, a history of miseducation and poor education, decades of social separation and increasing socio-ecological degradation and risk”.

But confront the challenges and complexities of change she did, focusing on how learning leads to development.

“I am interested in a stronger focus on transformative social learning, green skills learning pathways and the implications of this for the common good,” she says.

“I am also interested in participation in education in a social-ecological system context. I believe that such research is needed if societies are to adequately respond to the ever-burgeoning risks and injustices associated with environmental degradation and ongoing degradation of the commons.”

Mainstreaming ESD in Africa

Among other things, SDG Indicator 4.7.1 is about the “extent to which … education for sustainable development … [is] mainstreamed at all levels”. Lotz-Sisitka has been involved in a major continental initiative in this regard, the Mainstreaming Environment and Sustainability in African Universities Partnership (MESA).

Supported by the United Nations Environment Programme since 2004 – that’s a decade before the indicator was set – it aims to strengthen capacity development and environmental innovation through practical education, training and networking in African universities by means of ESD initiatives.

“We did a scoping review right at the beginning and found that at most universities, sustainability concerns were very narrowly constrained or left mainly to science and geography.

“So, we worked with academics from a range of disciplines – from law, education and the natural sciences to sociology, development studies and economics – to think about how they would integrate sustainability into their disciplines.”

This led to the development of the Africa Environmental Education and Training Action Plan 2015-2024, and paved the way for the establishment of the Global Universities Partnership on Environment for Sustainability (GUPES), which now has 500 partner universities, including the 90 from the MESA network.

Southern Africa

“We then took some of that work forward with SARUA [the Southern African Regional Universities Association], which led to the development of a knowledge co-production framework, and later an inter-institutional regional masters degree curriculum in climate change and sustainable development,” Lotz-Sisitka said.

University World News reported previously that the curriculum, which represented a regional open access first when it was launched in 2016, was developed by a collective of seven Southern African universities from five countries.

It follows a transdisciplinary approach to allow for different academic pathways and has been designed to allow individual universities to adapt the curriculum to their own needs and context.

The curriculum consists of seven elective modules and five compulsory modules including a mini-dissertation, with material available in three languages of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) – English, French and Portuguese.

The initiative has since been taken forward by SARUA and an expanding network of higher education institutions working on climate change.

Cultural diversity

Promoting appreciation of ‘cultural diversity’ is part of what ESD is aimed at, as set out in SDG Target 4.7. Lotz-Sisitka says there are two ways of thinking about this notion, with interaction between them.

“There’s the popular understanding, which just means people come from different backgrounds, histories, religions, etc, and we need to be inclusive of everyone, with no discrimination.

“Then there’s the notion of culture as the foundation of transformative education, which is about how we learn best. The culture we come from, the socio-cultural landscape we are part of, the language we speak are what we know best. So, it’s the best starting point for learning.

“But we can’t get stuck in there because education should always be expansive, broadening the mind, expanding your horizons. And that brings us back to the first understanding of diversity and the need to be inclusive.”

Sustainability Starts with Teachers

Lotz-Sisitka honed this approach through her leadership role in another regional initiative, the Sustainability Starts with Teachers (SST) programme, involving more than 100 teacher education institutions in 11 SADC countries.

The initiative developed from collaboration between Rhodes University, UNESCO’s Regional Office for Southern Africa (ROSA) and the organisation’s Global Action Programme on ESD, and has since grown into an international flagship programme.

The programme follows a transformative learning model through Change Projects, which focus on improving teaching practice and assessment, community engagement, science and technology innovations for sustainability, whole-institution sustainability initiatives, and integrating culture and indigenous knowledge into the curriculum.

One world

“Once you start working in different countries, you realise just how rich our continent is in terms of cultural diversity. People from different groups learn from each other, and that’s positive.

“The more we get to know each other, the more we see we are part of the same world, even though we all bring our unique contributions into the collective. That’s what my work in ESD has taught me.

“We should be careful of politicians’ tropes. Even where there is competition over scarce resources, you find the highest levels of generosity.

“The most important thing is not to give up on our shared humanity. The more people understand that we need to work together to resolve things, the better. And for that you need to have empathy with others.”

‘Good’ education

Lotz-Sisitka is happy with the progress that has been made in the journey to ESD – both her own and the world’s – and is convinced it is bearing fruit.

“SDG 4 allows us to say that if ESD is not in an education system, it can’t be considered quality or ‘good’ education because it won’t be relevant to the issues of today and tomorrow.

“That gives us more freedom to be intentionally transformative in our approach. You can practise education differently, which should result in a more sustainable, just society.”

Mandela would be pleased with this. After all, when he was chair of SADC in the early period of his presidency, he launched the SADC Regional Environmental Education Programme, which has led to much of the work on ESD in Southern Africa, including the ESD Regional Strategic Framework, launched in 2022.

Source

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240329071016801