Education With Islands For Hope

In early July 2017, the Rachel Carson Center, together with University of Austin, Texas hosted a two-day workshop addressing the question, Can we educate for hope? It sparked the idea of creating an international syllabus of “Radical Hope”. The objective is to frame and think about how individuals or groups might formally or informally learn about our most pressing environmental issues and how we, collectively and/or individually, might respond to them. This post invites you to consider islands as concentrated reservoirs of poetry, love and right relationships with the non-human world. Positioned alongside politics, statecraft, green energy and climate security, the reservoirs would be complementary resources for creating a transformative infrastructure of hope for education in the Anthropocene.

The organisers of the conference were interested in how hope can:

“1) reframe contemporary discussions, and 2) influence sustainability transformations that can help us think about how to be reactive and responsive in shaping those transformations in ways that are both feasible and hopeful.”

Fundamental questions are:

How do you define radical hope?
How do you see radical hope emerging or playing out in islands?

It was expected that participants in the conference would create specific personal sections of the syllabus based on the driving idea or key questions that motivate them and/or influence their own work.

In general, a syllabus of radical hope sits within four key interwoven strands of environmental education (SEEs):

science-framed education, focussed on the conservation management of biodiversity;
place-based, indigenized and bioregional education;
education for climate change and disaster risk;
education for sustainable economic development.

An important role of a syllabus of radical hope is to deliver a widespread consciousness on the fragility of the environment, which can have a very strong impact on people's quality of life. There are few places in the world where the need for hope about the sustainable use of Earth’s resources is as acute as in islands. Islands should therefore be positioned at the centre of education as socioeconomic models of sustainable development and biological evolution. The need for wide environmental awareness is particularly strong in small island developing states (SIDS). These SIDS are countries that are trying to grow economically. At the same time there is a need to protect their natural resources. In this respect, SIDS must turn to uninhabited islands for the models of conservation management.

The following propositions from David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa highlight what they think is distinctive and hopeful about environmental education with islands for hope.

1 environmental education initiatives on islands are markedly eclectic in their rich blending of practice from within the different SEEs.
2 Environmental education on different islands, especially in the Pacific, is marked by a return to indigenous, community-based learning.
3 There is a distinctive island pedagogy regarding the greater weighting given to relational, socio-affective and action-orientated learning about circular economies.
4 There is a paucity of inter-island cosmopolitan dialogue. Questions are asked about how to ensure islanders, steeped in learning about place, can be brought to connect with the global culture of mass consumerism and its environmental impact.
5 The frequency of cross-curricular, interdisciplinary, even trans-disciplinary framing of environmental education initiatives is identified as bringing a distinctive syllabus and curriculum of hope to island practice.

These propositions reject the inevitably of depleting Earth’s finite natural resources every time we create something, leaving behind waste and toxicity when we dump it or burn it. The hope is that by encouraging a circular way of thinking we design longer-lasting projects, repair and reuse as much as we can, and remanufacture and recycle to save resources, reduce waste, and reduce costs. The article, “The Circular Economy Runs Through Basel,” by Paul Hagen, Russ LaMotte, Dacie Meng, discusses the emergence of the Basel Convention as the key international legal system governing anthropological relationships between culture and ecology. This system is exemplified by the management of toxic waste set out in the Convention’s business plan for 2020-23. With this level of detailed planning and global action it seems to me that the ISLANDS Green Forum can be a virtual classroom for developing island models to bring cultural ecology to the centre of education at all levels. What do colleagues feel about this?

https://www.katche.eu/knowledge-platform/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/WP-…

https://radicalhopesyllabus.org/

https://sites.google.com/view/dream-islands/home

https://corixus.wixsite.com/icol