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Southern African Journal for Environmental Education

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LATEST EDITION: Special Issue on “Education for Sustainability in a Time of Crises”

As the COVID-19 pandemic started to change our lives, SAJEE offered a platform for environmental education scholars to share their thoughts and findings in relation to this and other crises.  A special issue was announced and by August a number of pertinent contributions had been received. The first of these have now been published in the Special Issue on Education for Sustainability in a Time of Crises (Vol.36(2)). More papers are in review for publication in Volume 37 next year.

One of the environmental education community’s first considerations was the disruption in access to school and community education. Efforts to engage with and provide online education became a key focus for educators. Mukute, Francis, De Souza and Burt interviewed educators and learners in six Southern African countries on their related experiences, and in the opening paper of the issue, they report on troubling challenges, but also some silver linings to the dark cloud, among them the emergence of more contextually relevant education, a greater impetus to address inequality, and stronger links between education and sustainable development. Educators’ improvisations in offering blended learning with online tools, are also profiled.

Environmental educators have for some time been giving attention to a range of ‘tools’ (e.g. Taylor, 1992[1]; Durr, 2020[2]). In this issue Nelson Mandela University researchers Calitz, Cullen and Odendaal share their study into an application that gives users feedback on their water and energy consumption and waste production, noting that this has not only heightened student participants’ awareness of their environmental impacts, but also their knowledge of what one can do to reduce these impacts.

Knowledge is certainly important, as demonstrated in the paper by Zerihun. The researcher from Tshwane University of Technology analysed small-scale farmers’ adoption of agroforestry practices, and found access to extension services and knowledge exchange among farmers to be key influences, as were land security and financial resources.

Bramwell-Lalor and colleagues from the University of the West Indies, remind us that knowledge by itself is not enough. With a view to supporting learners’ competence to act, they researched project-based pedagogies, including a case study of an online learning platform, and encourage educators to build project work into their curricula.

Curriculum change needs to be informed by new knowledge and in fast moving fields this is a challenge, as Metelerkamp and Schiffer found in their study into organic farming and food security. Their paper describes another tool, this time for mapping emerging social networks, that can assist curriculum developers to access and share new knowledge into new sustainability practices, as and when it emerges.

While the previous four papers had been submitted to SAJEE before COVID-19 struck, it can be instructive to reflect on their value for education in a time of crises.  For example, Metelerkamp and Schiffen’s focus on food security, and their tool for tracking rapidly developing knowledge exchange, clearly has application in times of great uncertainty.

Re-turning to papers directly addressing the Special Issue focus, two Viewpoint papers both address the aspect of values in relation to crises. Yusuf, in considering COVID-19 as a zoonotic disease, reminds us of the connections between human health and environmental integrity, and propose that a clearer framing of environmental issues as individual health issues, will speak to egoistic values in people, while also opening the possibility of an integrative approach that will ultimately connect to our altruistic sensibilities, too.

In the second Viewpoint  Taylor, Singh and Copsey outline a dilemma: children without access to school, as in India and Southern Africa during the pandemic, are at heightened risk, yet schooling when available is not always of sufficient quality.  They argue that radically different alternatives are needed to address both access and quality, and drawing on six case examples from the two sub-continents, illustrate that such alternatives are already in the making. These authors recommend combining indigenous wisdoms (such as traditional hand washing practices) with modern technology.

In the final paper of this volume, Rhodes University authors Kulundu, McGarry and Lotz-Sisitka take the call for radically different alternatives further, in a Think Piece arising from research into Transgressive Learning in Times of Climate Change as part of the International Science Council’s Transformations to Sustainability Programme. They share their insights from actively seeking, in their practice as activist educators and scholars, departures from norms that no longer serve us well, and perhaps never did, in the process framing the current moment as a crisis in worldview that props up inequality and environmental destruction. As in the other special issue contributions, the point of (multi-facetted) crisis is presented as an opportunity to search with renewed vigour for better ways, starting with examples – present-day and historical – that already exist.

[1] TAYLOR, J. (1992) Giving away the tools of science. In: Our Living World, pp.4-5. South African Nature Foundation, Stellenbosch.

[2] DURR, S.J.  Enabling social learning to stimulate value creation towards a circular economy: The case of Food for Us food redistribution mobile application development process. M.Ed. thesis, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.