Earth Charter Conference 2024
“Reimagining Education for Ecological Civilizations”
Our world faces many interconnected challenges including climate disruption, biodiversity loss, increasing poverty, inequalities, and conflicts between and within countries. Education must play a central role in preparing people to make the transformative change needed to create a world that works for all. The UN organized a “Transforming Education Summit,” convened “in response to a global crisis in education – one of equity and inclusion, quality and relevance”. It emphasized that “many education systems are not providing students with the skills, knowledge, values needed to face the current challenges… the world needs to reimagine the education system.” The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4.7) aims for learners to acquire by 2030, the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including education for sustainable lifestyles, global citizenship, climate justice, gender equality, and so on. UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative produced a report titled “Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education.” It highlights the importance of considering education as a holistic process, involving the “heart, hands and mind.” It promotes efforts to rethink content and pedagogy and to support teachers as agents of change.
https://earthcharter.org/events/earth-charter-conference-2024/
CONTRIBUTION
Ecologies of Learning and Practice for an Ecological Civilisation
Norman Jackson
Education systems all over the world are beginning a journey to support the societal and cultural transformations necessary to achieve a more sustainable future, but can this happen without fundamental changes in what learning means in the context of an Ecological Civilisation?
Learning and self-education are essential to developing competence as an organism to interact effectively with our environment, not just in the present, like all organisms do, but mindful of an imagined future. Such an understanding draws attention to the fundamentally ecological nature of our existence. Fundamentally, we are interbeings living within and with an ecological world of relationships, connectivity, interdependencies and transformations. As we interact with our world, we weave together aspects of ourselves and our environment, in an ecology of practice through which we transform ourselves and the world around us.
We have reached a point in human history where the moral purpose of education and individuals’ commitment to learning and self-education throughout their life, need to be broadened beyond themselves as beings to recognise themselves as interbeings. Understanding learning and practice as ecological phenomena, is an important step in the transition to an Ecological Civilisation.
Ecologies of Learning and Practice for an Ecological Civilisation
Norman Jackson
Education systems all over the world are beginning a journey to support the societal and cultural transformations necessary to achieve a more sustainable future, but can this happen without fundamental changes in what learning means in the context of an Ecological Civilisation?
Learning and self-education are essential to developing competence as an organism to interact effectively with our environment, not just in the present, like all organisms do, but mindful of an imagined future. Such an understanding draws attention to the fundamentally ecological nature of our existence. Fundamentally, we are interbeings living within and with an ecological world of relationships, connectivity, interdependencies and transformations. As we interact with our world, we weave together aspects of ourselves and our environment, in an ecology of practice through which we transform ourselves and the world around us.
We have reached a point in human history where the moral purpose of education and individuals’ commitment to learning and self-education throughout their life, need to be broadened beyond themselves as beings to recognise themselves as interbeings. Understanding learning and practice as ecological phenomena, is an important step in the transition to an Ecological Civilisation.
POWER POINT SLIDES LINKS TO RESOURCES
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Invitation to join Lifewide Education's Collaborative Inquiry which begins April 2024
Exploring the Value of The Earth Charter in Everyday Living
Further details can be found HERE. Please email Norman Jackson [email protected] if you would like to participate