Topic 5b. Educating for Living with the Earth

Topic 5. Table of contents Transforming education for sustainability Overview [+] a. Sustainability framework for higher education [+] b. Educating for living with the earth. c. Learning for change [+] d. Knowledge for a new paradigm [+] e. Research and teaching for sustainable livelihoods [+] f. Open to society: building sustainability together [+] g. Universities in transition [+]

Perceiving the Earth as a living being, with sensitivity, memory and life and learning how to treat it with respect and not as something external and objective, but as a complex being whom we include and who has its own mechanisms of balance, interaction and self-organization are important aspects of the sustainability paradigm.

The central purpose of higher education institutions ought to be the explicit facilitation of progressive, reflexive, critical, transformative learning that leads to much improved understanding of the need for, and expression of, responsible paradigms for living, and for ‘being’ and for ‘becoming’, both as individuals alone and collectively as communities.

Definitely it implies the need of learning abilities and values such as: a deep understanding of human being and life; sustainable development as a collective social process to be learned and applied; a need for mutual recognition, understanding and respect between cultures for intercultural relationship and support of diversity; the ability to deal with an exponential expansion of technology, without losing the human capacity to put it to common human service; and the need to set aside fear in order to confidently cooperate on peace building and justice in any levels of activity.

In recent years, HEIs has been explicitly linked to training individuals with specialised knowledge, focused on a specific professional practice, to contribute to the growth of the economy, under parameters of increasing competitiveness. As well, research is increasingly oriented to satisfying the demand and necessities of those who can pay for it, principally in the production sector. Then, one of the most important challenges involves a change of paradigm from a system that emphasizes the individual and competitiveness to one that emphasizes the social and collective.

This is a change of model which places most of its attention in the ‘content’ to one which develops itself in a ‘context’ preparing people to apply knowledge instead of just summing knowledge. Being this, an educational model based on the ‘knowing to be’.

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