Introduction

This chapter discusses the importance of historical thinking for futuresoriented policy in education. It proposes that a concept of ‘reparative futures’ can be a generative basis for knowledge and learning, not only in formal educational institutions, but in community organizations, workplaces and in all sites of cultural exchange. The idea of reparative futures signals a commitment to identify and recognize the injustices visited on, and experienced by, individuals and communities in the past. It understands that these past injustices, even when they appear to be distant in time or ‘over’, will continue to endure in people's lives in material and affective ways unless, and until, they are consciously and carefully addressed. Although there are certainly different languages and forms of reparative address, we suggest that critical practices of historical thinking can offer a vital starting point for critiquing and reformulating the interrelations of past, present and future.

The discussions focus specifically on the importance of acknowledging and seeking justice for enduring histories of racial and colonial domination. We argue that UNESCO's present programme on the futures of education needs to be underpinned by a concept of the future that is reparative if it is to challenge rather than reproduce such systems of domination. The historical thinking that we propose for this work involves the creation of educational relationships that are centred on processes of dialogue and exchange and which proceed explicitly from an anti-racist position of fundamental human equality. Such modes of education, and the radical humanism they embrace, are foundational to, and are indeed a necessary precondition for, imagining and realizing futures that are just.

Most attempts to build better futures have proceeded along different lines. In the first part of this chapter, we examine UNESCO's efforts at the end of the Second World War to identify and install through education a new ‘universal’ humanism, one that might dispense with hierarchies of ‘race thinking’. We show, however, how UNESCO's search for a new humanism rested on norms of social evolution that denied the ‘coevalness’ of others and assumed a kind of tutelary power over peoples and territories that needed to ‘catch up’ with the West (Fabian, 1983; Lorenzini, 2019).

Introduction

As the recent report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education argues (see ICFE, 2021, pp 7– 8), anticipating education futures has profound implications for the present:

As this quote suggests, narratives about the future can play an important role in shaping education policy and practice and education has a role in shaping futures for people and for the planet through its contribution to sustainable development (see also Amsler and Facer, 2017; Facer, 2013 and 2021). Narratives about sustainable futures and sustainable development are, however, highly contested. The first aim of this chapter is to contribute towards conceptual understanding of how we may conceive of sustainable futures in and for education. As such, the chapter will introduce some of the ideas developed further by other contributions to this book. The chapter begins by setting out how different discourses around sustainable futures and sustainable development can be conceived in terms of struggles for hegemony between competing interests within the global polity and civil society and in the context of the current organic crisis of global capitalism. The second part of the chapter provides a review of contemporary narratives of sustainable futures that are evident in the literature.

Within contemporary debates about sustainable development, including the sustainable development goals (SDGs), it is possible to identify four key narratives concerning sustainable futures, each with different implications for education.

Introduction

In June 2020, when the statue of Edward Colston was toppled, Bristol became the centre of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK. The international protests had come close to home, and educators in the city felt compelled to respond. Leaders started to look at developing anti-racist policies and shifting the culture of schools beyond Eurocentricity. These policies demanded a review of the curriculum. The showcase of children's work in this chapter sets out to reveal the challenges faced by primary educators in introducing diverse narratives into the curriculum, and highlights the demand for this action by the children themselves. It also demonstrates the critical themes the children identified when they explored the concept of decolonizing the curriculum. Finally, the chapter addresses what one primary school intends to do in order to answer the ‘call to action’ from its children.

Primary and secondary: demands and opportunities

The Black Lives Matter movement really struck a particular chord with the teachers at my school. Our inner-city primary is based in Bristol. The school population is over 60 per cent Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic pupils. It has a three-form entry, ranging from nursery to age 11 and is large enough for 680 pupils. Despite serving a very diverse community, one that echoes the BAME population of the school, our teaching staffing is predominantly white British. Only 14 per cent of the teaching staff is from a BAME group: four teachers from the 29 members of staff. Prior to my tenure as principal, only 5 per cent of the team came from non-white British groups. For us, during that summer of 2020, Bristol felt like the epicentre of the UK movement. Within education, the movement was particularly vibrant. Activities and discussions that had already been taking place in schools, colleges and universities were being revitalized in classrooms and staffrooms across the city.

There were resources flooding in across all education networks: book lists, lesson ideas and suggestions on how to ‘decolonize the curriculum’ were everywhere. Except for the book lists, however, most other resources felt decidedly secondary-school based.

Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures has explored connections between the two necessary processes within its title. Its key argument is that for future-making projects to be sustainable and to address the enormous planetary challenges facing human beings and natural ecosystems, certain approaches need to be in place. Future-making projects must be oriented towards justice. Therefore, they must seek to undo and transform the systemic and structural injustices of the past whose afterlives shape the present and will endure into the future if not confronted and repaired. In other words, they must contribute towards what Swilling (2020) describes as ‘just transitions’ (Chapter 1). The book reflects upon the UNESCO Futures of Education report, with its call for a new social contract for education. It builds from three online seminars hosted by the Bristol Conversations in Education series in 2020, at which many of the chapters presented here were first shared. The questions that guided the seminar series and the report published afterwards (Cortez Ochoa et al, 2021) have also animated this volume.

To conclude the volume, we reflect back on these questions, offering some tentative responses that emerge from its chapters. We hope that these might encourage conversation and build on practice about the necessary relationships between sustainable futures, decolonization and repair.

What is the relationship between sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education?

How are agendas for decolonizing education and sustainable futures connected?

The connection between sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education is at the heart of this book's challenge. It argues that sustainable futures cannot be imagined or achieved without addressing the demands for decolonization. This core argument is developed in different ways across the book, including in Chapter 1, where Leon Tikly examines five narratives of sustainable futures and, crucially, considers the extent to which those narratives respond to the challenges of rights, social justice, environmental and decolonial priorities. Referring to the scholarship of de Sousa Santos (2017), Tikly outlines the need for a ‘pluriversality’ based on a recognition of multiple ways of ‘knowing’ the world that can contribute to social and environmental justice. The processes of validating knowledge systems and the ways in which those knowledge domains are used politically is further explored in Catherine A. Odora Hoppers’ chapter on knowledge production.

Introduction: the past and present

David Orr, in his poignant 1991 piece focusing not on problems in education, but on the problem of education, stated this (p 1):

Elie Wiesel added to this in a speech to the Global Forum, Moscow in 1990, that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects, the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, he said, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel's words: ‘It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience’ (Wiesel, 1990, p. 99).

From a genealogical point of view, Orr has argued that historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary governance alliance between government, business and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Second, Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humour and wholeness.

Introduction

This volume has undertaken an original and highly ambitious examination of the link between sustainable futures and decolonization of education: drawing upon original studies in many contexts to show how dismantling the practices and structures of oppression is essential to a sustainable future. Furthermore, chapters in Part II of the book specifically investigate issues of praxis: ways in which students, teachers and communities can collectively apply concepts and theories of social justice to transform educational institutions. Finally, Part III touches upon the theme of reparation, of how past injustices must be addressed in order to create a sustainable future.

A fitting extension of this inquiry, then, is to consider this work itself as a form of praxis and identify how it might promote a sustainable future, but also reproduce unsustainable practices of the past. This consideration is particularly relevant in relation to climate change, the warming of the Earth's atmosphere as a result of greenhouse gasses (mainly carbon dioxide from fossil fuels), and the destruction of ecosystems that have regulated the Earth's atmosphere in the past. Climate change is a clear threat to the sustainable futures of our planet. It is often described as an existential risk to human societies as we know them, leading many to suggest ‘climate emergency’ as a more appropriate term. It is also part of a larger systemic ecological crisis, comprising the loss of biodiversity that scientists are suggesting constitutes Earth's sixth mass-extinction event (Barnosky et al, 2011).

Climate change is also an issue of social justice: it creates inequalities in the rights of present and future individuals to live healthy and prosperous lives. These inequalities disproportionately affect marginalized groups within and across countries: racialized minorities, Indigenous communities and formerly colonized societies (Perry, 2020). Finally, climate change is also a problem with deep historical roots: it results not just from the unsustainable practices of today but the accumulated emissions of several centuries. These historical emissions were concomitant to the projects of colonization and oppression that characterize industrial society and global capitalism. Therefore, a truly reparative approach to decolonization also requires addressing the climate emergency.

The Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education series and the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE) are pleased to have been involved in the initiation and development of this challenging, co-edited volume from the outset. Initial discussions began when ways of linking CIRE's long-time engagement with diverse ‘ways of knowing’, context-sensitive research and post-colonial theorizing, to UNESCO's ‘Futures of Education’ initiative, were first explored. This inspired a three-part seminar series on the theme of ‘decolonizing education for sustainable futures’ (Cortez Ochoa et al, 2021) a subsequent widening of the debate, the engagement of new writers, and planning for the present book. This was a creative and dialogic process in its own right, and one that, as readers will see, generated contributions from researchers, advocates, policy makers, agency personnel, activists and practitioners. This is, therefore, a cross-cutting volume that bridges the worlds of theory, policy and practice, and one that reflects a diversity of positions while generating a coherent, challenging and inspiring framework for ongoing analysis.

In doing so, the book makes a timely and stimulating multi-disciplinary contribution to contemporary decolonization, sustainability and ‘education futures’ discourses while, from a Comparative and International Education perspective, recognizing that:

Here then, is a book that extends critical scholarship to multiple audiences, disrupting many epistemological and methodological assumptions, opening up debate across constituencies, focusing upon the global challenges of our times and seeking to engage with theorists and stakeholders – at all levels – involved in the formulation, implementation and critique of emergent international agendas.

The chapters that follow elaborate upon these and other related themes in ways that all involved hope will contribute to ongoing debate and to the advancement of both theoretical thinking and transformative educational policies and practices.

Introduction

This chapter explores reparative possibilities in and through education, with a specific focus on reparative pedagogy. It does so by sharing examples I’ve encountered and by documenting many ongoing conversations around the possibilities and challenges of describing, designing and imagining pedagogy as reparative. These include conversations with friends, researchers, educators and activists, many (but not all) of which take place within the Education, Justice and Memory network (EdJAM). EdJAM exists to support and learn more about creative approaches to teaching and learning about past violence and injustice and currently works in 18 countries. Some of the people with whom I’ve been in conversation describe their work using the term ‘reparative pedagogy’. Others do not, but, as this chapter argues, there are features of their pedagogical approaches that align with and enable repair and reparation and therefore allow for the possibility of describing them as reparative.

As discussed in more detail later in the chapter, reparation generally, and in its application to education specifically, is often described as encompassing material, symbolic, epistemic and affective measures to right wrongs of the past. There is growing attention to what Arathi Sriprakash and colleagues (Chapter 10 in this volume, and 2022) call ‘reparative futures in education’ and to education's roles in enabling reparative measures across the domains listed here (see, for example, Ramirez-Barat and Duthie, 2016; Bellino et al, 2017). The material, symbolic, epistemic and affective are all present within pedagogy, and pedagogy could therefore contribute towards these types of reparative measures. This chapter, however, explores the possibilities for understanding reparative pedagogies in their own right, as another form of reparation. One motivation for this is to recognize the ongoing work by educators, artists, activists and students in this area. Reparative pedagogies can, and do, proceed without waiting for formalized programmes of reparation, transitional justice or systemic reforms to the structural injustices that permeate the education systems that they might complement. In not recognizing, describing and seeking to support reparative pedagogies, we risk missing spaces where futures of education are reimagined through pedagogical approaches to acknowledge and reckon with past injustices and their afterlives in the present.

Introduction

In reimagining the futures of education in a context of growing global and local inequalities, it is crucial to expand the borders of our ‘situated imagination’ defined through the particularities of our experiences and surroundings (Yuval-Davis, 2013). Such expansion requires an uncomfortable confrontation with a troubling past, and a recognition of the changing nature of the human and non-human world and our role in its destruction or (re)construction. This reimagining is crucial at a time when the Anthropocene epoch is marred by the rise of right-wing populism in countries across the global North and South dictated by a market-driven ideology of capitalist expansion at the expense of planetary sustainability. Technological advancement and online connectivity that ought to have created a greater possibility of ‘border crossing’ (Giroux, 2005) have instead resulted in greater surveillance and control, with identities digitized for bureaucratic management in the name of security (Saunders, 2016).

The existence of such insular world views can be found in different parts of the world: in the UK's decision to leave the European Union at a time where greater cooperation and coordination is needed to take on the challenges of an environmental and climate emergency, and a refugee crisis; in the USA's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement that brought nations together to ensure a ‘global response’ to the climate emergency (Climate Action Tracker, 2020a); or in the increasing deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil, which increased by more than 80 per cent in 2019, with environmental activists, Indigenous leaders and ‘forest defenders’ being killed by mafias (Human Rights Watch, 2020; Angelo, 2020; Climate Action Tracker, 2020b). These are just a few examples of how the physical and ideological borders of the nation-state are being reinforced to promote selfinterest at the expense of civic, environmental, ecological and human rights.

Simultaneously, in the face of political self-interest that has wreaked human and ecological devastation, a reimagining of the future is already taking place through student-led campaigns and movements, with young people taking charge of their own futures.