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.

This chapter explains the role of national and state/territory education authorities in providing guidance for teachers when assessing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in primary science education. It also presents a range of strategies which allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and understandings at various time points (before, during and after) in science learning sequences. While the notion of assessment often relates to teacher judgements of what students do or do not know and how well they know it, a key goal in education is to develop students’ metacognitive abilities so that they can judge their own learning themselves. The focus needs to be on inclusive strategies and resources that improve not prove learning (Skamp & Preston, 2021), while positioning students as knowledge constructors and sharers rather than knowledge consumers. Strategies for identifying students’ learning in the Australian Curriculum: Science will be explored.

Having addressed how the Technologies learning area can support the learning of primary science in Chapter 7, this chapter presents a range of additional examples from English, Mathematics, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Arts, and Health and Physical Education. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, curriculum integration (CI), which is also referred to as interdisciplinary or cross-curricular teaching, should only be used where there is a complementary, and preferably a synergistic fit between targeted science concepts and concepts in other learning areas, so student understanding is enhanced, not diluted or confused. This specification is at the core of the examples presented in this chapter, where the relationship between science and other learning area concepts has been meticulously considered. Another key consideration is the contexts in which the various concepts are presented to students so that real-world connections can be linked to local examples within their life experiences.

In this chapter you are asked to consider how your behaviour and activities as a teacher and role model in primary science classrooms may influence students’ perceptions of themselves as learners of science and therefore their science identities. Research-informed strategies are discussed and analysed for ways to address low levels of science efficacy in both yourself and your students. A range of teaching strategies for engaging students with science concepts and twenty-first century skills are presented, such as using scaffolds to ‘predict, observe, explain’ (POE) and to undertake ‘claim, evidence, reasoning’ (CER) activities; using models; and using the outdoors.

This chapter explores the notion of ‘technologies’ in the Australian Primary Curriculum in the Learning Areas of Design and Technologies, and Digital Technologies, and in the General Capability area of Digital Literacy, and the ways in which they can be used to enhance the learning of science. You will be introduced to contexts that provide opportunities to harness the synergistic relationship between the processes of thinking and working scientifically, and design and production skills, to solve authentic problems or issues. Examples of effective Design Challenges will be presented as ‘hooks’ to gain student interest and to purposefully address required concepts in Science, and Design and Technologies in the Australian Curriculum. Opportunities for including links to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures through a Design and Technologies approach will be included, with links to a range of useful resources.

This chapter presents foundational ideas and discussion around the notion of worldviews, including how they develop, how they are influenced by education and how they impact learning. There is a focus on identifying the features of worldviews that incorporate science perspectives with an emphasis on strategies for nurturing and developing students’ scientific dispositions, such as their ‘science identity’ and ‘science capital’. The contributing role of primary science education through the Australian Curriculum will be examined. As we work through these ideas, you will examine your own worldviews about science and use evidence from the science education research literature to explore current views about the purposes of science education in primary schools.

This chapter presents illustrated examples of successful units of work designed and implemented by experienced teachers for a range of topics and ties together ideas from Chapters 2 (curriculum requirements), 3 (assessment), 4 (lesson sequencing) and 5 (teacher role). These units are considered to be successful because they address required, relevant aspects of the science curriculum; each has been implemented in primary school classrooms with students; those students have been engaged and interested in the related scientific concepts; and all students have demonstrated evidence of learning resulting from the designed experiences.