TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning to survive amidst nested crises
T2 - Can the coronavirus pandemic help US change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis?
AU - Kaukko, Mervi
AU - Kemmis, Stephen
AU - Heikkinen, Hannu L.T.
AU - Kiilakoski, Tomi
AU - Haswell, Nick
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Include bibliographical references
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper discusses how education can help to form a new generation of children, young people, and adults equipped for the new post-Corona world, and equipped to respond appropriately to the eco-crisis. This requires significant changes to existing arrangements of education systems. What is needed is new practice architectures–new conditions of possibility–under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth.
AB - The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper discusses how education can help to form a new generation of children, young people, and adults equipped for the new post-Corona world, and equipped to respond appropriately to the eco-crisis. This requires significant changes to existing arrangements of education systems. What is needed is new practice architectures–new conditions of possibility–under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth.
KW - COVID-19
KW - Ecological crisis
KW - practice architectures
KW - social learning
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U2 - 10.1080/13504622.2021.1962809
DO - 10.1080/13504622.2021.1962809
M3 - Comment/debate
AN - SCOPUS:85112210015
VL - 27
SP - 1559
EP - 1573
JO - Environmental Education Research
JF - Environmental Education Research
SN - 1350-4622
IS - 11
ER -