Teaching and Learning for Change: Education and Sustainability in South Africa
Like many national curricula around the world, South Africa’s curriculum is rich in environment a... more Like many national curricula around the world, South Africa’s curriculum is rich in environment and sustainability content. Despite this, environmental teaching and learning can be challenging for educators. This comes at a time when Sustainable Development Goal 4 via Target 4.7 requires governments to integrate Education for Sustainable Development into national education systems. Teaching and Learning for Change is an exploration of how teachers and teacher educators engage environment and sustainability content knowledge, methods, and assessment practices – an exposition of quality education processes in support of ecological and social justice and sustainability. The chapters evolve from a ten-year research programme led out of the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Global Change and Social Learning Systems working with national partners in the Fundisa for Change programme and the UNESCO Sustainability Starts with Teachers programme. They show the integration of education for sustainable d...
This article examines youth participation the school climate strikes of 2018 and 2019 (also known... more This article examines youth participation the school climate strikes of 2018 and 2019 (also known as #Fridays4Future), through an exploratory study conducted in seven diverse cities. Despite the international nature of the climate strikes, we know little about the factors that influenced youth participation in these protests beyond the global North. This matters because youth of the global South are disproportionately impacted by climate change and there is growing concern that the climate movement is dominated by narratives that marginalize the voices and priorities of Indigenous communities and people of color. In this context, the exploratory research reported here aimed to compare the attitudes of climate protesters (n = 314) and their non-protester peers (n = 1,217), in diverse city samples drawn from a wider study of children and youth aged 12–24 years, living in Christchurch (New Zealand); Dhaka (Bangladesh); Lambeth, London (United Kingdom); Makhanda (South Africa); New Delh...
Background Cities are at the fore of sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century, and m... more Background Cities are at the fore of sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century, and many, particularly in Asia and Africa, are predominantly youthful spaces. Understanding young people’s experiences in urban environments is therefore important as we strive to achieve both the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. Two amenities identified in the urban Sustainable Development Goal 11, transport and public and green space, are specifically recognised as applying to youth. Yet, there is little analysis that explicitly considers how youth experience these amenities across the Global North and South, and no current measures for understanding progress in youth experiences of green space and transport. Results This paper provides a comparative analysis of young people’s experiences with local transport and green space in seven diverse urban communities (Christchurch, New Zealand; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lambeth/London, UK; Makhanda, South Africa; New Delhi, India; Sã...
Intended audience: Primary school science and technology teachers and learners I have been doing ... more Intended audience: Primary school science and technology teachers and learners I have been doing paper-making workshops with children for 20 years where we recycle waste paper to make decorative recycled paper. The problem is that all website videos I have ever been able to find show you how to make paper using an expensive wooden frame. This means that if you show either learners or teachers how to make paper, they will never do so at home because the frame is too difficult to come by. This video shows how to make an effective frame using a plastic container and stretchy mesh that is used to pack lemons in supermarkets. Now, student teachers can all leave my workshops with their own frames that they can use with their learners in their classrooms OR which they can help their own learners to make for themselves. This greatly extends the potential for implementing this activity in poorly resourced classrooms. Also, it combination with the ‘why recycle paper’ video, it is an effective...
Intended audience: Science teachers, mathematics teachersThis video has three potential purposes.... more Intended audience: Science teachers, mathematics teachersThis video has three potential purposes. The first is for a teacher to help resource a primary school classroom. No complex mathematics knowledge is required as a calibrated template is provided below . for those that simply want to make a measuring cylinder. Secondly, the video can be used with younger learners who in primary school are expected to make useful containers from recyclable materials. Thirdly, it can be used in a high school Mathematics classroom, where learners are expected to problem solve using the formula for measuring volume of cylinder.
Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to supp... more Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to support cross-curriculum teaching for third year primary school learners. The video illustrates how you can use a template showing the left side of an insect and plant material from the garden to build a complete insect.It is linked to the school curriculum in the following ways:• Mathematics: Teaching about lines of symmetry• Life Skills: Science: Teaching about insect anatomy (head, thorax, abdomen, wings and legs attached to thorax). ‘Observation’ is another important element of Life Skills supported in this activity
Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to supp... more Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to support cross-curriculum teaching for third year primary school learners. The video uses ‘big numbers’ in mathematics to help learners understand how hard bees work to make honey. The video was inspired by the Mathematical Literacy researcher Terezhina Nunes who has demonstrated the incredible power of children’s mathematical reasoning when not necessarily tied up in formal number representation. You can also extend understanding to help learners to appreciate the importance of biodiversity (bees need flowers at all times of the year) and the importance of bees for pollinating food crops (1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food we eat is from a crop pollinated by bees).The video is linked to the school curriculum in the following ways:• Mathematics: By Grade 3 learners should “Count confidently, verbally in ones, tens, fives, twos, twenties, twenty-fives, fifties and hundreds to 1000”. This activity ...
The video illustrated the strength of various structures as part of the curriculum for Grade 3 Na... more The video illustrated the strength of various structures as part of the curriculum for Grade 3 Natural Sciences
This demonstration video, for use in a primary school technology classroom, shows how strong stru... more This demonstration video, for use in a primary school technology classroom, shows how strong structures can be made using triangular shapes. It then proceeds to challenge learners to make a tower from 20cm straws or other material of similar lengths. The tower needs to be able to hold a tennis ball (or object of a similar size and mass) 30cm above a surface.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13504620701284860, Apr 1, 2007
This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for ... more This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio‐political and socio‐ecological histories in post‐apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case‐based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
The ever-widening scope and range of global change and interconnected systemic risks arising from... more The ever-widening scope and range of global change and interconnected systemic risks arising from people-environment relationships (social-ecological risks) appears to be increasing concern among, and involvement of, citizens in an increasingly diversified number of citizen science projects responding to these risks. We examined the relationship between epistemic cultures in citizen science projects and learning potential related to matters of concern. We then developed a typology of purposes and a citizen science epistemic-cultures heuristic and mapped 56 projects in southern Africa using this framework. The purpose typology represents the range of knowledge-production purposes, ranging from laboratory science to social learning, whereas the epistemic-cultures typology is a relational representation of scientist and citizen participation and their approach to knowledge production. Results showed an iterative relationship between matters of fact and matters of concern across the projects; the nexus of citizens' engagement in knowledge-production activities varied. The knowledge-production purposes informed and shaped the epistemic cultures of all the sampled citizen science projects, which in turn influenced the potential for learning within each project. Through a historical review of 3 phases in a long-term river health-monitoring project, we found that it is possible to evolve the learning curve of citizen science projects. This evolution involved the development of scientific water monitoring tools, the parallel development of pedagogic practices supporting monitoring activities, and situated engagement around matters of concern within social activism leading to learning-led change. We conclude that such evolutionary processes serve to increase potential for learning and are necessary if citizen science is to contribute to wider restructuring of the epistemic culture of science under conditions of expanding social-ecological risk.
Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 2007
In the early 1990s, in response to the emphasis laid on environment and development issues by the... more In the early 1990s, in response to the emphasis laid on environment and development issues by the new South African Constitution, Rhodes University undertook several initiatives such as establishing the first Chair of Environmental Education (EE) in Africa. Another important initiative was the introduction of an open-entry participatory course for environmental educators. Owing to its flexible format and practice-based methodology, the course gained rapid popularity, necessitating the setting up of a Service Centre to help meet the increased demand. The Chair and the Service Centre have been providing a range of short courses in environment and sustainability education to professionals, and are today widely known as the Rhodes University Environmental Education and Sustainability Unit (RUEESU). The Unit offers PhD and Masters level programmes in EE, encourages meaningful research in key thematic areas, and is actively involved in publishing, and policy transformation. It also endeavours to define the role of Universities in enabling sustainability education.
This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for ... more This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio‐political and socio‐ecological histories in post‐apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case‐based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
Teaching and Learning for Change: Education and Sustainability in South Africa
Like many national curricula around the world, South Africa’s curriculum is rich in environment a... more Like many national curricula around the world, South Africa’s curriculum is rich in environment and sustainability content. Despite this, environmental teaching and learning can be challenging for educators. This comes at a time when Sustainable Development Goal 4 via Target 4.7 requires governments to integrate Education for Sustainable Development into national education systems. Teaching and Learning for Change is an exploration of how teachers and teacher educators engage environment and sustainability content knowledge, methods, and assessment practices – an exposition of quality education processes in support of ecological and social justice and sustainability. The chapters evolve from a ten-year research programme led out of the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Global Change and Social Learning Systems working with national partners in the Fundisa for Change programme and the UNESCO Sustainability Starts with Teachers programme. They show the integration of education for sustainable d...
This article examines youth participation the school climate strikes of 2018 and 2019 (also known... more This article examines youth participation the school climate strikes of 2018 and 2019 (also known as #Fridays4Future), through an exploratory study conducted in seven diverse cities. Despite the international nature of the climate strikes, we know little about the factors that influenced youth participation in these protests beyond the global North. This matters because youth of the global South are disproportionately impacted by climate change and there is growing concern that the climate movement is dominated by narratives that marginalize the voices and priorities of Indigenous communities and people of color. In this context, the exploratory research reported here aimed to compare the attitudes of climate protesters (n = 314) and their non-protester peers (n = 1,217), in diverse city samples drawn from a wider study of children and youth aged 12–24 years, living in Christchurch (New Zealand); Dhaka (Bangladesh); Lambeth, London (United Kingdom); Makhanda (South Africa); New Delh...
Background Cities are at the fore of sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century, and m... more Background Cities are at the fore of sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century, and many, particularly in Asia and Africa, are predominantly youthful spaces. Understanding young people’s experiences in urban environments is therefore important as we strive to achieve both the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. Two amenities identified in the urban Sustainable Development Goal 11, transport and public and green space, are specifically recognised as applying to youth. Yet, there is little analysis that explicitly considers how youth experience these amenities across the Global North and South, and no current measures for understanding progress in youth experiences of green space and transport. Results This paper provides a comparative analysis of young people’s experiences with local transport and green space in seven diverse urban communities (Christchurch, New Zealand; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lambeth/London, UK; Makhanda, South Africa; New Delhi, India; Sã...
Intended audience: Primary school science and technology teachers and learners I have been doing ... more Intended audience: Primary school science and technology teachers and learners I have been doing paper-making workshops with children for 20 years where we recycle waste paper to make decorative recycled paper. The problem is that all website videos I have ever been able to find show you how to make paper using an expensive wooden frame. This means that if you show either learners or teachers how to make paper, they will never do so at home because the frame is too difficult to come by. This video shows how to make an effective frame using a plastic container and stretchy mesh that is used to pack lemons in supermarkets. Now, student teachers can all leave my workshops with their own frames that they can use with their learners in their classrooms OR which they can help their own learners to make for themselves. This greatly extends the potential for implementing this activity in poorly resourced classrooms. Also, it combination with the ‘why recycle paper’ video, it is an effective...
Intended audience: Science teachers, mathematics teachersThis video has three potential purposes.... more Intended audience: Science teachers, mathematics teachersThis video has three potential purposes. The first is for a teacher to help resource a primary school classroom. No complex mathematics knowledge is required as a calibrated template is provided below . for those that simply want to make a measuring cylinder. Secondly, the video can be used with younger learners who in primary school are expected to make useful containers from recyclable materials. Thirdly, it can be used in a high school Mathematics classroom, where learners are expected to problem solve using the formula for measuring volume of cylinder.
Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to supp... more Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to support cross-curriculum teaching for third year primary school learners. The video illustrates how you can use a template showing the left side of an insect and plant material from the garden to build a complete insect.It is linked to the school curriculum in the following ways:• Mathematics: Teaching about lines of symmetry• Life Skills: Science: Teaching about insect anatomy (head, thorax, abdomen, wings and legs attached to thorax). ‘Observation’ is another important element of Life Skills supported in this activity
Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to supp... more Intended audience: Year three primary school teachers and learners This video is designed to support cross-curriculum teaching for third year primary school learners. The video uses ‘big numbers’ in mathematics to help learners understand how hard bees work to make honey. The video was inspired by the Mathematical Literacy researcher Terezhina Nunes who has demonstrated the incredible power of children’s mathematical reasoning when not necessarily tied up in formal number representation. You can also extend understanding to help learners to appreciate the importance of biodiversity (bees need flowers at all times of the year) and the importance of bees for pollinating food crops (1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food we eat is from a crop pollinated by bees).The video is linked to the school curriculum in the following ways:• Mathematics: By Grade 3 learners should “Count confidently, verbally in ones, tens, fives, twos, twenties, twenty-fives, fifties and hundreds to 1000”. This activity ...
The video illustrated the strength of various structures as part of the curriculum for Grade 3 Na... more The video illustrated the strength of various structures as part of the curriculum for Grade 3 Natural Sciences
This demonstration video, for use in a primary school technology classroom, shows how strong stru... more This demonstration video, for use in a primary school technology classroom, shows how strong structures can be made using triangular shapes. It then proceeds to challenge learners to make a tower from 20cm straws or other material of similar lengths. The tower needs to be able to hold a tennis ball (or object of a similar size and mass) 30cm above a surface.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13504620701284860, Apr 1, 2007
This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for ... more This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio‐political and socio‐ecological histories in post‐apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case‐based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
The ever-widening scope and range of global change and interconnected systemic risks arising from... more The ever-widening scope and range of global change and interconnected systemic risks arising from people-environment relationships (social-ecological risks) appears to be increasing concern among, and involvement of, citizens in an increasingly diversified number of citizen science projects responding to these risks. We examined the relationship between epistemic cultures in citizen science projects and learning potential related to matters of concern. We then developed a typology of purposes and a citizen science epistemic-cultures heuristic and mapped 56 projects in southern Africa using this framework. The purpose typology represents the range of knowledge-production purposes, ranging from laboratory science to social learning, whereas the epistemic-cultures typology is a relational representation of scientist and citizen participation and their approach to knowledge production. Results showed an iterative relationship between matters of fact and matters of concern across the projects; the nexus of citizens' engagement in knowledge-production activities varied. The knowledge-production purposes informed and shaped the epistemic cultures of all the sampled citizen science projects, which in turn influenced the potential for learning within each project. Through a historical review of 3 phases in a long-term river health-monitoring project, we found that it is possible to evolve the learning curve of citizen science projects. This evolution involved the development of scientific water monitoring tools, the parallel development of pedagogic practices supporting monitoring activities, and situated engagement around matters of concern within social activism leading to learning-led change. We conclude that such evolutionary processes serve to increase potential for learning and are necessary if citizen science is to contribute to wider restructuring of the epistemic culture of science under conditions of expanding social-ecological risk.
Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 2007
In the early 1990s, in response to the emphasis laid on environment and development issues by the... more In the early 1990s, in response to the emphasis laid on environment and development issues by the new South African Constitution, Rhodes University undertook several initiatives such as establishing the first Chair of Environmental Education (EE) in Africa. Another important initiative was the introduction of an open-entry participatory course for environmental educators. Owing to its flexible format and practice-based methodology, the course gained rapid popularity, necessitating the setting up of a Service Centre to help meet the increased demand. The Chair and the Service Centre have been providing a range of short courses in environment and sustainability education to professionals, and are today widely known as the Rhodes University Environmental Education and Sustainability Unit (RUEESU). The Unit offers PhD and Masters level programmes in EE, encourages meaningful research in key thematic areas, and is actively involved in publishing, and policy transformation. It also endeavours to define the role of Universities in enabling sustainability education.
This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for ... more This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio‐political and socio‐ecological histories in post‐apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case‐based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
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