Education Commons^™

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 …