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Contribution to Book
A participatory approach to learning sustainability
Innovation, education and communication for sustainable development (2006)
Abstract
I contend that for progress towards a sustainable future, we need an understanding of sustainability as having a core of reconnective learning as an inbuilt ‘driver’. Many writers such as Sterling (2001: 19) call for the elaboration of a new, lived paradigm of sustainable education and learning sustainability. In this chapter, I use notions of primary and secondary meaning and Heron’s (1996) and Reason’s (2004) framework of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowledge to propose a transformative, reconnective process for learning sustainability. I articulate a holistic, relational ontology and a participatory epistemology as the basis of the participatory approach. The resulting conception of learning sustainability is community based and can be used to facilitate deep reconnection with nature and each other. It involves ways of seeing and perceiving that are participative, transformative and creative. The learning engages in an experience and reflects artistically, creatively and then critically on the experience to develop propositional or conceptual knowledge about it. The outcome of the learning process is that practical knowing develops. However, this is a rudimentary form of practical knowing which requires several more cycles in order for a higher order of practical knowledge, and therefore greater wisdom, to develop. As a way of learning this process engages the learner fully in their experience and in their own lives.
Keywords
  • learning sustainability,
  • environmental education,
  • transformative change
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 1, 2006
Editor
Filho, Walter Leal
Publisher
Peter Lang
Series
Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability
ISBN
1434-3819
Citation Information
Wooltorton, Sandra (2006). A participatory approach to learning sustainability, in Leal Filho, W. (Ed.) Innovation, education and communication for sustainable development. ISSN: 1434-3819. New York: Peter Lang.