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 …

As I begin to write this paper it is a still, windless autumn day in the tuart woodland in the south-west of Western

Australia. Rain is falling gently and in the bushes and trees there is a musical ensemble of rufous whistlers,

pee-wits, wrens, robins and wagtails. Occasional old jarrah trees spread their grey pin-striped trunks and

branches to display their brown, well-worn possum tracks, revealing use by the brush-tails in the safety of

night. The comparatively youthful peppermint and huge old tuart trees host the endangered ringtail possums that

come out in the dark, when the quenda scurries about …

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 …