What is Learning for Sustainability?
This is a huge question here at the Outdoor Team, it is something we have been spent a lot of time considering and, to be honest, grappling with.
With our growing realization we are in climate and nature emergencies, we needed to deepen our understanding. We needed to understand how we felt about LfS and what it meant to us personally:
We kept being faced with the question: What does Learning for Sustainability mean to me and what do I personally feel it is?
We began by looking at what the professional bodies and governing authorities had to say and then to other organisations:
The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) in their introduction to LfS, talk about how it is an approach to life and learning. How it enables learners, educators, schools and the wider community to build a socially just, sustainable and equitable society.
Scottish Government in the ‘Target 2030:A movement for people. planet and prosperity’ talk about building an inspiring movement for change so every 3-18 place of education becomes a Sustainable Learning Setting by 2030 and how ‘more needs to be done to ensure ALL learners receive their entitlement to LfS’.
Education Scotland in their summary of Learning for Sustainability resources talk about: ‘An effective whole school and community approach to LfS weaves together global citizenship, sustainable development education and outdoor learning to create coherent, rewarding and transformative learning experiences.’
Scotland’s Regional Centre of Expertise on Education (RCE) for Sustainable Development describe it as ‘the umbrella term for sustainable development education, outdoor learning, global citizenship and social welfare’. We like this one as it explicitly includes social welfare.
Youth Link talk about how the UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child how LfS should create transformative learning experiences that support young people’s development and understanding of the world around them.
Looking at the UN Sustainability Goals in their boxes in rows we found difficult to conceptualise. When we discovered The ‘wedding cake’ model created by the Stockholm Resilience Centre SDGs it allowed us to grasp the concept by creating three levels; the Biosphere, Society and Economy. Simply, it shows how the Biosphere is the foundations and without this and Society there can be no Economy.
We then fell into a research worm hole, beginning at Moray House at Edinburgh University with Pete Higgins and Beth Christie. They talk about the need for a significant programme of policy, the raising of awareness and in service provision for education professionals. They have an excellent starting definition:
Tim completed the Learning for a Sustainable Future – Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) which took him on a personal and professional journey to explore a sustainable future. He would recommend, as it has had over 13000 participants from 175 countries and the conversations in his cohort were interesting. It is free, fascinating and challenging.
Learning for Sustainability as we discovered a very complex and slippery problem, as outdoor practitioners we often become fixated on the base level, the Biosphere. However we have become increasingly aware during our journey, how Society is an key partner in facing the emergencies we are facing. To explore this we started with the Scottish Government and how they view poverty and social justice:
We want Scotland to be a place where people are healthier, happier and treated with respect, and where opportunities, wealth and power are spread more equally.
The Scottish education system has a needs and rights based system of designed to be inclusive for all young people. It embeds Inclusion, Wellbeing and Equality. Our young people have rights and entitlements supported by a legislative framework and key policy drivers: The Curriculum for Excellence, Getting it Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) and the GTCS Professional Standards.
The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) in their Equality and Diversity – Guide for Teachers talk about how as a teacher, you should strive to promote equality and diversity ensuring that everyone is treated with respect and how individual differences are valued. Inequality against those with protected characteristics; age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation, must be addressed and prevented. They further talk about teachers making a commitment to the professional values of integrity, trust
and respect, and social justice. There are two valuable Professional Learning Modules on Equality and Diversity.
We feel it is important to hear the voice of our young people so the Children’s Parliament offers part of this voice. They highlight young people feel there needs to be a more participatory approach to the curriculum in Scotland. Despite the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) being part of Scottish Law the young people highlighted the gap between the this and the reality.
Scottish children have expressed a lack of involvement in their learning, especially regarding the climate crisis and outdoor education.
The final tier in the wedding cake is Economy. We found to contextualize this a useful start point is Scotland National Performance Framework; the framework sets out a vision for collective wellbeing. These outcome closely link to the US SDGs. The idea behind the eleven indicators is to track how the country is doing in its journey.
In our journey a statement which kept resonating with us came from the Members of Children’s Parliament where they called for;
Adults in school and adults who decide what we learn, need to learn about the climate emergency too.
We are still trying to figure it out, but our feeling, summed up above, was we all need to go on a journey to discover what we feel is our personal position, our values and our views on Learning for Sustainability.
