insights

During the last year, ten experienced sustainability practitioners and educators I know engaged in a reflective process on the teaching of sustainability. The results were presented at the Integral Education and Ecology Seminar at Mt Madonna on August 6 2010. To quote from the abstract of this event:

“Ten sustainability educators, in ten global locations, involved in ten different integral sustainability education programs, engaged in a reflective practice to see what they might together have learned at a Learning III level about sustainability pedagogy. Calling this the 10×10 Inquiry, this guided process of inquiry collected over 100 Learning III perspectives (i.e. learnings from unlearnings about the process of teaching in sustainability education) from practitioners with over 100 years collective experience.”

The nine meta-themes (which contain a richness of content) were:

1. Design of Container, 2. Individuality of Learning, 3. Integration of Dependencies, 4. Extent of Experiencing, 5. Openness to Unknowing, 6. Connection to Others, 7. Community of Caring, 8. Stage of Development, and 9. Presence of Presenter.

The meta-themes and sub-theme content are available on that great virtual wiki mapping tool, debategraph: 10×10 Map

A presentation on the results of this wider inquiry and follow-up to the next level of learning (Learning IV) was given to the Faculty of Sustainability, Environmental and Life Sciences at Murdoch University last week. Details of that are available here: (link).

The question which comes up is when will be ready to combine the best of our expertise in education and our experience in sustainability for the benefit of creating changed engaged, and informed change agents?

Perhaps this represents a major step towards discovering the simplicity of that path.