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Stephen Sterling is a pioneer in sustainability education. This collection of his essential writings is freshly curated by the author and offers a new overview and chapter by chapter introductions that link together his thinking. Sterling’s work offers a compelling and stimulating perspective on the critical issue of how learning and education can make a decisive difference to securing the future in an increasingly uncertain and threatened world. Together these essays provide a critical perspective on the historical context of the role of education and learning with respect to the possibility of securing the future against current negative trajectories. They offer a commentary on current debates on rethinking education in the light of multiple global crises and lay out the key elements of educational thinking and practice based on ecological and relational principles that offer a way forward. These essays inform the growing and urgent debate on the role and nature of education appropriate for these unprecedented times and are essential reading for educationalists and sustainability advocates.
Education is at a watershed: either we drift along with today’s mechanistic, maladapted status quo, tweaking the curriculum here and there as we head towards an ecological abyss, or we work with active agents of change to transform the entire educational system. Stephen Sterling has been at the heart of this debate for 50 years, and has become the go-to philosopher and thought leader for everyone who cares about the future of education and of life on Earth.
Foreword by David W. Orr
Introduction
Part I: The view from here
1. Choosing the future
2. Probable or preferable futures: the responsibility of education
3. Setting out the stall: propositions and key ideas
Part II – Platform pieces
4. Planetary primacy and the necessity of positive dis-illusion (2019)
5. Educating for the future we want (2021)
Part III – Re- thinking education
6. Assuming the future: repurposing education in a volatile age (2017)
7. Sustainable education (2009)
8. Learning for resilience, or the resilient learner? Towards a necessary reconciliation in a paradigm of sustainable education (2010)
Part IV – Re- thinking our thinking
9. Transformative learning and sustainability: sketching the conceptual ground (2011)
10. At variance with reality: how to re-think our thinking (2014)
11. Why “the environment” can be a misleading myth (2020)
12. Towards ecological intelligence: viewing the world relationally (2009)
13. Let’s face the music and dance? (2012)
Part V – Change-ability
14. Vision and practice
15. Afterword: the call of participation