Fumiyo Kagawa

Emergency education: a critical review of the field

Emergency education, (that is, education in emergency situations) came to the fore in the 1990s. Defining this new field is not free from contestation. This article describes the trajectory and characteristics of the field and issues arising, focusing on different international discourses as well as contents of teaching and learning, and pedagogy. A key issue addressed is the underpinning concept of development in discussions of emergency education. This article is critical of the narrow focus on economic development and suggests that emergency education needs to address comprehensive development towards quality of life for all. It also suggests that participation is key to sustainable initiatives.

Runaway Climate Change as Challenge to the ‘Closing Circle’ of Education for Sustainable Development

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is the latest and thickest manifestation of the ‘closing circle’ of policy-driven environmental education. Characterised by definitional haziness, a tendency to blur rather than lay bare inconsistencies and incompatibilities, and a cozy but ill-considered association with the globalisation agenda, the field has allowed the neoliberal marketplace worldview into the circle so that mainstream education for sustainable development tacitly embraces economic growth and an instrumentalist and managerial view of nature that goes hand in glove with an emphasis on the technical and the tangible rather than the axiological and intangible. Runaway climate change is imminent but there is widespread climate change denial, including within mainstream ESD. A transformative educational agenda in response to climate change is offered here. Recent calls for the integration of climate change education (CCE) within mainstream education for sustainable development should be resisted unless the field breaks free of the ‘closing circle’.

Ready for the Storm: Education for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation1

Incidences of disaster and climate change impacts are rising globally. Disaster risk reduction and climate change education are two educational responses to present and anticipated increases in the severity and frequency of hazards. They share significant complementarities and potential synergies, the latter as yet largely unexploited. Three dimensions of climate change education—understanding and attentiveness, mitigation and adaptation— are identified and explored as corresponding to key elements in disaster risk reduction education. While international bodies advocate the alignment of the two focuses, we are still only on the threshold of their alignment in practice within curriculum. Both focuses also align in their embrace of an interactive, experiential and participatory pedagogy. An educational contribution to a sustainable future must necessarily address disaster risk reduction and climate change.

Striking a Faustian Bargain? Development Education, Education for Sustainable Development and the Economic Growth Agenda

Faustus is writ large in European mythology. A sixteenth-century German astronomer, he is reputed to have sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. In modern English parlance, to ‘strike a Faustian bargain’ is to be willing to make questionable sacrifices for knowledge or power or influence, closing one’s eyes to the consequences.

Teetering on the Brink: Subversive and Restorative Learning in Times of Climate Turmoil and Disaster

Unchecked climate change poses a self-inflicted existential risk to humanity as it exacerbates the multiple-crisis syndrome facing global society. In international policy, education for sustainable development is widely flagged as transformative. To realize that transformative potential, sustainability educators are exploring the nexus between their field and that of transformative learning. They particularly call for a stretching of epistemology so that unsustainable practices are challenged, taken-for-granted thinking and assumptions disrupted, root causes of global dysfunction interrogated, values subjected to critical scrutiny, change potential of socio-affective learning unleashed, and paradigm shift thus catalyzed. The problem is the overall lack of consensus about what needs sustaining and what needs transforming. Seeking to address that problem, we call for subversive learning interrogating four key climate change drivers: economic growth, consumerism, denial, and climate injustice. We also call for restorative learning in three important areas: restoring nature intimacy, confronting despair, and reclaiming the good life.