Érudit's RSS Feed

Editorial: Introduction to the Themed Issue of Adult Education and Sustainability

Jennifer Sumner and Emily Dobrich
As humans on a finite planet, we are facing an interconnected set of existential issues: climate change, war, displacement, and widespread precarity. Within this context, sustainability may appear a distant goal that we will never reach. However, the history of adult education shows that adults continue to learn, even in the face of great adversity. Learning sustainability involves a pedagogy of hope that calls on all of us to become both educators and learners, working together toward a more sustainable world.

Worldmaking Toward the Symbiocene Era: Transition Design in Community Sustainability and Climate Education

Elizabeth A. Lange and Shandell Houlden
With the pressing realities of climate change, biodiversity loss, and eco‑anxiety, we reconceive community adult education in the service of sustainable and regenerative futures. We assert that the environmental crisis is, in part, a design crisis, and therefore, using transition design and relationality theory, we approach pedagogy as designing for the transition to the Symbiocene era. In our Canadian comparative case study involving a large urban city and a semi‑rural community, we derived three pedagogy pathways from the first case, which have been adapted and studied in the second case. These pathways were the power of story, connecting individual and community needs, and fostering kinship with the natural world. The interpenetration of these pathways encouraged adult engagement, overcame resistance, and created openness to civic involvement. In this article, we first describe in detail how we developed the pedagogy in relation to the context of each case. We then offer a preliminary analysis of how designing for the identified pathways manifests transition design. We consider such learning to be worldmaking, in that interactive design unleashes self‑organizing energies, fosters an ontological perceptual shift toward communal individuality, and alchemically transforms local stories as constitutive of a new world where we are designing ourselves back into the dance of life.

Relationships as Resistance: Transformative Adult Learning for Sustainability in the Climate/Environmental Justice Movement

Sheena Cameron
At the core of the climate calamity is a clash in beliefs, values, knowledge, and actions affecting relationships between humans and the natural world. Although there is an urgent need for systems change, there is also a need to radically reimagine white settler knowledge systems and relationships that are responsible for the climate crisis. This article aims to move the conversation about sustainability and adult learning toward shifts in white settler paradigms and relationships. By sharing findings about transformative adult learning from a qualitative research study that focuses on collaborations between Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqewiyik, and white settler participants in the climate/environmental justice movement in what is colonially known as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, this article argues that real climate action hinges on confronting the worldviews of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. This article highlights the transformative adult learning that has happened through relationships from these movement struggles, and that has affected how participants have shifted their understanding of and actions toward sustainability for climate/environmental justice.

Integrating Confucianism for a More Holistic Approach to Teaching Sustainability

Mengyuan Guo
This article explores the integration of Confucian principles into adult education for sustainability (EfS) to foster a more holistic understanding of sustainability that bridges Eastern and Western perspectives. Drawing on the philosophical teachings of Confucianism and their relevance to contemporary global challenges, the article highlights how Confucian concepts such as qi (气); the Triad of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity; and the five constant virtues can inform and enhance sustainability education. By examining the intersections of Confucianism, adult education, and sustainability, the article underscores the potential of Confucianism to contribute to a sustainable future through moral self‑cultivation, ecological ethics, and the development of a harmonious relationship with nature. The article also discusses how Confucian teachings can be integrated into the curriculum and pedagogical approaches of EfS, promoting lifelong learning and the development of just and sustainable learning environments globally. Through this exploration, the article aims to offer new insights into the role of traditional wisdom in addressing contemporary sustainability challenges and advancing global EfS.

Wild at Heart: How Informal Learning Experiences Occur at the Local Wild Food Challenge

Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell and Will Low
This case study explores the adult learning experience of participants at a food festival, the Local Wild Food Challenge (LWFC). Food festivals, where participants engage in multisensory experiences within a “foodscape,” have the potential to facilitate different informal adult learning processes. Whether incidental or intentional, the learning experienced at the LWFC also fits instrumental and communicative learning paradigms, which are precursors to transformative learning. Learning about and reflecting on new ways to gather, harvest, and prepare wild foods can in turn build the foundation for critical self-reflection around food self-sufficiency, as well as a subtle shift in frames of reference regarding wild foodscapes that lie beyond mainstream corporate food systems. Thus, the study positions the food festival as an important site for informal adult learning, potentially opening participants up to learning about alternative sustainable ways of living.

Apprendre en marchant : la gestion des déchets comme terrain d’éducation et de recherche. Enquête ethnographique d’un voyage au Québec

Blandine Tchamou
In late April 2024, I joined the Centre for Research in Environmental and Ecocitizenship Education (Centr’ERE) at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) as part of a postdoctoral fellowship with the Université de Corse Pasquale Paoli, in order to pursue my research on adequate waste management. This field note presents a data collection approach based on observation and inquiry, carried out during a journey from Paris to Montreal, with stopovers in Porto and Newark.From a pedagogical perspective, I invite adult learners to experiment with this ethnographic approach to support the development of their waste management practices in response to this socially acute issue, which requires dialogue, reflexivity, and engagement with authentic, contextualized situations.The analysis highlights concrete situations observed during a stay in Quebec and Ontario, including the actors involved, collection systems, sorting quality, and manifestations of littering (diffuse illegal waste) across diverse urban and mobility contexts.

Unsettling Spirit: A Journey Into Decolonization

Shauna Butterwick

Transformative Sustainability Education: Reimagining Our Future

Shauna Butterwick