Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change is an important book that speaks to the need for environmental education to have a voice in broader justice movements as well as to embrace new thinking from environmental justice discourses including through decolonising practices, bridging disciplinary gaps, and attending to the more-than-human. Even while writing this review, global events call to attention a desperate need for change — the US has just pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change while winter wildfires engulf large parts of LA, Australia braces for more fires and floods, and wars (intensely damaging to environments and all life within) continue to rage in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change offers formal and informal educators, activists and researchers a way through this complex terrain. The authors, Mark Fettes and Sean Blenkinsop, argue that much of the current ecological crisis stems from “entrenched beliefs, discourses and behaviours” (p. v) that allow for inequity and injustice and that “the way we’ve been educating our children and young people for the last 150 years or so is directly (co-)responsible for the predicament we are in” (p. 1). Therefore, they argue that education needs to be rethought to avoid reinforcing the same forms of injustice. Although written from the US context, Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change has broad appeal anywhere that Western education practices proliferate which concerns a large swath of the world much of which was forced to adopt Western education through colonial structures (for a Pacific example, see Long and Hayward, Reference Long and Hayward2024).
Although a compact 133 pages and four chapters, this book is an impactful treatise that provides some practical approaches for educators to enact change. The book is intended to be “a generative text, giving a sense of the scope of the educational transformation that the ecological crisis demands and inspiring others to situate their work within this larger landscape” (p. vii). There has been long-standing global attention on eco-social-cultural justice issues such as climate change, community division and growing inequality and in many cases, a genuine desire for change with ecojustice education proposed to enhance environmental education since the early 2000s (see Dentith et al., Reference Dentith, Hash and Baines2022). However, Fettes and Blenkinsop (2023) indicate “how challenging it can be for communities, even when provided with resources and opportunities, to really spread their wings and do things differently” (p. 109). The first chapter outlines some of the important concepts that feed into eco-social-cultural change including transformation, emergence, resurgence, and resilience before giving a background of trends in transformational education design. The authors summarise the key reason for needing change as the current education system that reinforces the same values that have led to environmental destruction:
Our schools and classrooms are human-centered places, swept clean of biodiversity; our curricula are framed around students’ imagined progress toward full integration in an economy where everything, including their labor, is awarded a dollar value that has little or nothing to do with any sense of personal meaning or fulfillment, let alone their responsibility or belonging to particular places and communities or the Earth as a whole (p. 14).
Therefore, the authors argue that educators should position themselves as designers and take cues from the literature on social innovation and transformative design which offers a way “to think in terms of larger systems and communities of participants, including the more-than-human” (p. 16).
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 offer ways for educators to enact eco-social-cultural change culminating in what the authors call the “four Cs” better described as pedagogical stances (critical, community, change and care/Coeur). Chapter 2 is structured around six design prompts that “reflect an underlying organic wholeness such as one might encounter in a healthy, mature ecosystem” (p. 16). These prompts are informed by Afro and Indigenous cosmologies as well as a sense of needing to create a more holistic way of structuring knowledge and are: all my relations, abundant time, mystery/unknowability, embeddedness/integration, ancient futures, and (re)creative dissonance. Each design prompt then comes with a list of strategies, for example, for the prompt “all my relations” which speaks to an Indigenous American concept akin to entanglement, strategies include: placing equity and decolonisation at the centre of education, co-designing with the more-than-human, engaging in self-reflection, and cultivating communities of practice through gratitude, reciprocity and experiment (pp. 33–34). These prompts then feed into chapter 3 which broadens the discussion out to think through the underlying philosophies of education including epistemologies (how knowledge is known, made and shared), ontologies (being and becoming) axiologies (values and ethics), cosmologies (origin stories) and psychologies (the relational context of knowledge). Each of these philosophies come with “reckonings” for educators to grapple with along with questions that can guide educators towards transformational education in practice. For example, in reckoning with individual autonomy, one of the assumptions of Western psychology that underpins Western educational practice, educators might ask themselves questions such as:
Can I recognize and respond to those moments when a student is either turning into or away from relation? Are there any learnings from the diversity of cultural realities that might support this practice I am seeking? And what supports or possibilities might the natural world offer? (p. 84)
Finally, the four pedagogical stances in the final chapter offer readers particular capacities, capabilities and competencies they can enact in their practice. Based on interviews with educators, these stances show how the design principles and underlying philosophies can play out in transformative educational practices. For example, under the critical stance, they found practices of activism, allyship and advocacy; decolonising guidance; anti-oppressive communication and relational skills; mindful inclusion; ongoing learning; and integrated feedback. Although the book finishes here and the authors recognise in chapter three, the limitation of the work as framed through Western conceptions of knowledge, it might have been useful to end with a conclusion or concluding paragraph to give us some indication of where we go from here. It would also have been useful to have some examples (possibly from the interviews or from the authors’ speculative fictions) or a more general discussion on what a transformed education ecosystem looks like. The book hints at this but a vision that places the educational stances back into the bigger context of education would have been useful to help chart a path forward, although perhaps this is for others to take up in future work.
Author Biography
Chantelle Bayes is a postdoctoral research fellow at Southern Cross University working on a project about climate change education. She has a background in creative writing research and the environmental humanities and published the book Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities with Liverpool University Press in 2023.