[PeDAGoG] Sharing our work: on limits to 'technological solutions' and on a transdisciplinary, justice-centred climate pedagogy

Sat Mar 6 21:04:57 CET 2021

Dear Friends, 

I would like to share with the group two recent papers of relevance to climate education: 

1) Chirag Dhara, a climate physicist at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, and I (physics professor and educator at Framingham State University in the US) have co-authored a paper called “ The Elephant in the Room: Why Transformative Education Must Address the Problem of Endless Exponential Economic Growth ”, arXiv:2101.07467 [econ.GN]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07467 . It is a chapter in the forthcoming volume published by UNESCO, Charting an SDG 4.7 roadmap for radical, transformative change in the midst of climate breakdown. In this paper we develop several theoretical arguments that impose strong physical, mathematical, logical, pragmatic and behavioural constraints that collectively place strong limits on ‘technological solutions’ for sustainability, and therefore, the fundamental conflict between the growth agenda of SDG 8 with the others. Given the imperative for these ideas be disseminated as widely as possible, we suggest interventions in the educational system where these arguments can be introduced and explored. 

2) In the same forthcoming volume I have a chapter on a transdisciplinary, justice-centred approach to climate pedagogy, describing my experiments in an undergraduate physics course for non-science majors at a small, public, mostly working class US university. However that is not yet on a preprint server so I am attaching a link to a more detailed paper on the same approach that is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00281 . There are a couple of versions with somewhat different titles but the substance is the same. Toward an Effective Pedagogy of Climate Change: Lessons from a Physics Classroom . This work is an attempt to transcend (to the extent that I've been able to) the constraints of the neoliberal academic institution through a holistic, justice-centered framing. It is very much a work in progress, but has shown promise (and I'm currently working on how experiences of communities at the forefront of climatic and other impacts might inform this approach). Because I talk about transdisciplinarity and justice as well as climate science essentials, I hope it will be of interest and relevance to those teaching outside the sciences as well. Naturally, other educational contexts will give rise to other framings, but I am hoping that the emphasis on transdisciplinarity and justice will continue the important conversation in this direction. 
The Abstracts of the two papers are below. I hope you will find both these works interesting. My colleague and I welcome your comments and suggestions. 
Best, 
Vandana 

———— 
The Elephant in the Room: Why Transformative Education Must Address the Problem of Endless Exponential Economic Growth 
Chirag Dhara and Vandana Singh 
Abstract: 
———— 
A transformative approach to addressing complex social-environmental problems warrants reexamining our most fundamental assumptions about sustainability and progress, including the entrenched imperative for limitless economic growth. Our global resource footprint has grown in lock-step with GDP since the industrial revolution, spawning the climate and ecological crises. Faith that technology will eventually decouple resource use from GDP growth is pervasive, despite there being practically no empirical evidence of decoupling in any country. We argue that complete long-term decoupling is, in fact, well-nigh impossible for fundamental physical, mathematical, logical, pragmatic and behavioural reasons. We suggest that a crucial first step toward a transformative education is to acknowledge this incompatibility, and provide examples of where and how our arguments may be incorporated in education. More broadly, we propose that foregrounding SDG 12 with a functional definition of sustainability, and educating and upskilling students to this end, must be a necessary minimum goal of any transformative approach to sustainability education. Our aim is to provide a conceptual scaffolding around which learning frameworks may be developed to make room for diverse alternative paths to truly sustainable social-ecological cultures. 

Toward an Effective Pedagogy of Climate Change: Lessons from a Physics Classroom 
Vandana Singh 
Abstract 
A major roadblock to effective climate education is the lack of radical visions (Kwauk, 2020) for engaging with climate change and related social-environmental crises in the classroom. Key aspects of the climate system: its inherent complexity and transdisciplinarity, the entanglement of social and natural systems, and the fact that it spans large scales of space and time - all present serious challenges to our modern, compartmentalized formal education systems. I present an argument for a justice-centered, inter-to-transdisciplinary conceptualization of climate change at the nexus of science, society and justice, which is designed to engage with the very features of the climate system that make it challenging. Based on pedagogical experiments in an undergraduate physics classroom for non-science majors, I identify five general barriers to teaching climate change, and formulate four dimensions of an effective climate pedagogy: the scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the onto-epistemological, and the psychosocial action dimensions. Within the context of a collaborative classroom culture informed by transformational learning, I describe the use of a meta-conceptual framework that, along with the issue of climate justice, seeks to realize all four dimensions of an effective climate pedagogy. This broad holistic framework is potentially adaptable to contexts and disciplines beyond undergraduate physics. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/gta-pedagog/attachments/20210306/364a34b9/attachment.html>