Abstract
How we know, is at least as important as what we know: Before educationalists can begin to teach sustainability, we need to explore our own views of the world and how these are formed. The paper explores the ontological assumptions that underpin, usually implicitly, the pedagogical relationship and opens up the question of how people know each other and the world they share. Using understandings based in a phenomenological approach and guided by social constructionism, it suggests that the most appropriate pedagogical method for teaching sustainability is one based on situated learning and reflexive practice. To support its ontological questioning, the paper highlights two alternative culture’s ways of understanding and recording the world: Those of the Inca who inhabited pre-Columbian Peru, which was based on the quipu system of knotted strings, and the complex social and religious system of the songlines of the original people of Australia. As an indication of the sorts of teaching experiences that an emancipatory and relational pedagogy might give rise to, the paper offers examples of two community learning experiences in the exemplar sustainable community of Stroud, Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom where the authors live.
Highlights
How we know, is at least as important as what we know
As suggested by Simon cited by Giroux [1] ̳any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a form of cultural politics, as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth and, above all, value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning‘
Most of the university curriculum, even in environmental science, is still conveyed only at the level of the mind and adheres to a Cartesian linear approach that suggests thatthought and understanding is necessarily understood in terms of cause and effect‘ [6]. This has helped to promote a preferred rational or scientific approach to learning and cognitive development, which Manley suggests negates other forms of understandingwhich were not founded in the thinking brain‘ [6]. These other forms of understanding are highlighted in discussions of mind-body distinctions, subjective-objectiverealities‘, knowledge as a product of programmed learning and knowledge as a process acquired through practice [7]
Summary
How we know, is at least as important as what we know. our approach to teaching needs to begin with a re-exploration of our own approach to knowing our world. This has helped to promote a preferred rational or scientific approach to learning and cognitive development, which Manley suggests negates other forms of understandingwhich were not founded in the thinking brain‘ [6] These other forms of understanding are highlighted in discussions of mind-body distinctions, subjective-objectiverealities‘, knowledge as a product of programmed learning (science, education, theory) and knowledge as a process acquired through practice (experiential learning) [7]. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze provide us with similar yet differing frames of reference to question the dominance of Cartesian dualist thinking so prominent in Western epistemology. We ask how such experiences can be made available to students on more conventional business and management courses in U.K. higher education institutions
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