Education Commons^™

In 2004 I taught a class of 31 eleven and twelve year olds in a south-west Western Australian state primary school which I will call Forestdown. After critique and reflection on my 2004 teaching, in 2005 I taught half a day per week at the same school, this time with ten year olds. I used action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001) to articulate my challenges and to formulate the approach I used to address them. The research context is a prosperous, business-as-usual culture built uupon a foundation of environmental destruction. Even though the children I taught in 2004 performed creditably …

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 …