ARTICLE: The development of ecological thinkers – what climate change and sustainability education is and does
This article is a lightly-adapted extract from our recent co-publication - The key contributions of subjects to climate change and nature education.
In 2021, Professor Stephen Sterling argued that education systems take one of four approaches to the climate change and sustainability agenda: (1) no response, (2) accommodation, (3) reform, and (4) transformation. He described each approach as follows:
In the first, current global precarities are absent or barely reflected in policies and practices; in the second, institutional responses centre on campus greening and curriculum accommodation in “obvious” disciplines only. The latter two responses go further. A reformative response reflects intentional re-thinking at a policy level leading to shifts across much of the institution. A transformative approach nurtures a sustainability ethos as the driver of purpose, policy, and practice. (Sterling, 2021)
Sterling is referring here to higher education, but this framework can also be used to evaluate how the sustainability agenda is approached in our early years, primary, and secondary level education settings.
The Department for Education (DfE) in England has, to date, followed an ‘accommodation’ approach. Over the last few decades, the extent to which sustainability is accommodated has fluctuated, but has trended overall towards greater accommodation.
The question therefore is what would it mean to further accommodate the sustainability agenda? What, specifically, could the DfE do in relation to the curriculum?
This was the primary focus on our recently published curriculum policy proposal, the appendix of which this article is adapted from.
The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), building on the work of many others, has recently published ‘A Curriculum for Climate Literacy’ that proposes ways to accommodate climate change in the National Curriculum. Helpfully, their focus extends beyond the “obvious” disciplines.
They suggest ways to deepen students’ knowledge of climate change across all subjects with the goal of developing their climate literacy. RMetS define climate literacy as: “an understanding of climate science as well as the complex social and economic factors which relate to an understanding of the interaction between people and the climate system.”
Such climate literacy is undoubtedly important and foundational. If students in England were to gain it, they would be better able to understand the vast predicament that the climate and nature crisis presents, its causes, impacts, and the mitigative and adaptive responses that are available to them and to society.
To complement climate literacy, and to ensure that understanding can turn into action, students also need to learn the skills required to be inventors, developers, testers, scalers, as well as adopters of appropriate and effective responses and solutions. Crucially, students also need capabilities that enable and motivate them to take care of themselves and the natural world as the crisis develops.
We return here to Stephen Sterling:
The world is increasingly complex, interdependent and unsustainable, yet conversely, the way we perceive, think, and educate tends to be fragmentary and limited, and we tend to live ‘like there’s no tomorrow’. Addressing this mismatch requires developing competencies in systems thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking, but it requires something more fundamental and challenging besides: no less than our becoming ‘conscious agents of cultural evolution’ (Gardner 2001, p. 206) towards a more ecological culture and participative worldview, consistent with and able to address the highly interconnected and endangered world we have created. (Sterling, 2009)
We know that students’ competencies in systems thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking can be nurtured through the national curriculum. Indeed, we know that these are goals for many schools, teachers and students. What we cannot guarantee, however, is that the nurturing of these competencies is enough. If the goal is to ensure our young people are equipped to address the climate and nature crisis, then we need to do more. History is littered with examples of individuals who had well-developed systems, critical and creative thinking skills, but put them to use in the service of goals that turned out to be less than beneficial to society and the planet.
Sterling, therefore, goes further than simply making calls for systems, critical and creative thinking. He does not dismiss them, or the need for them, but he adds ‘ecological thinking’ as a key goal. It would not be revolutionary for the national curriculum to add this as a goal too.
Ecological thinkers do not just understand the relationships, interconnections, and interdependencies that shape the world. They do not just have the critical, creative and imaginative thinking skills to see and comprehend alternative visions of the future, they have something else too.
What sets ecological thinkers apart is that they feel those interconnections and interdependencies too; they relate. It is an emotional relationship to the land, to the oceans, to other people, and other species; it is a relationship over time and space. They come to feel connected rather than separate as beings, and this develops within them a deep sense of care for whoever or whatever they feel newly related to. It is from this place that their motivation to be ‘conscious agents of cultural evolution’ grows.
The National Curriculum needs to evolve so that it begins to develop not just critical, systems, and creative thinkers, but ecological thinkers. We need learners who think not just about the planet, but for and with the planet. In fact, we need learners who think as the planet. None of us are, after all, separate from the planet; we are the planet.
This article was first published on the Global Action Plan Education pages.
To stay in touch with and support our work, please sign up to the Global Action Plan Education monthly newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn.