Heila Lotz-Sisitka

Working with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Critical Realism to Investigate and Expand Farmer Learning in Southern Africa.

This article uses the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural historical activity theory and critical realism to examine three case studies of the introduction and expansion of sustainable agricultural practices in southern Africa. The article addresses relevant issues in the field of agricultural extension, which lacks a theoretical “bridge” between top-down knowledge transfer and bottom-up participatory approaches to learning. Further, the article considers the learning environments necessary for sustainable agriculture. Such environments provided research participants with encounters with “postnormal” scientific practices that recognise and engage plural ways of knowing. Our research explored why farmers learn and practise sustainable agriculture, how they learn and practise it, the contradictions they are facing, and how these contradictions can be overcome in a context of change-oriented learning.

Changing social imaginaries, multiplicities and ‘one sole world’: reading Scandinavian environmental and sustainability education research papers with Badiou and Taylor at hand

Badiou’s ontological work draws attention to multiplicities – the oneness of ontology, which he explains can only become ontologically differentiated into events or sites through political, artistic or amorous practices that philosophies can think and invent from. He also draws attention to the fusion of events and sites, and he explains that events (such as producing special issues of journals located in particular sites) are reflexive. He also tells us, however, that the reflexive structure of an artistic or scientific event (such as producing a special issue of a journal) is not always immediately evident. In writing this response article I work with this concept – and probe how the production of events (such as a special issue of a journal produced in a specific site) may be reflexive. This is the purpose of the article. This response article therefore probes some of the political, structural and intellectual processes that come to shape scholarship in different sites, and here I draw on the insights into social imaginaries provided by Charles Taylor to develop a perspective on the scholarship that is reflected in this journal. Through this, I seek to open the notion of multiplicities, oneness and the particularities of our social imaginaries as themes for thinking about educational scholarship events produced within and across geo‐physical, socio‐ecological and socio‐economic spaces in different parts of the world.

Learning through cases: adopting a nested approach to case‐study work in the Gold Fields participatory course initiative

This paper argues that there is a need, in southern Africa, to develop in-depth understanding in educational reform initiatives. Through ongoing reflexive development of a professional development programme in environmental education, we have found that case-study methodology, which emphasizes context-dependent knowledge, is significant for learning about environmental and sustainability education in higher education. We draw on the case of the Gold Fields participatory certificate course programme, developed over a 10-year period in southern Africa and describe how use of a nested approach to case-study methodology in the context of this initiative has assisted us to learn from these cases, and grapple with key issues of relevance to our practice. We describe how a nested approach to case-study research has informed theory and practice in environmental education professional development, attesting to the value of context-dependent knowledge. Paradoxically, this approach to research has also resulted in increased tensions associated with the transfer of case learning within the broader institutional frameworks of higher education.

Environmental education research and social change: Southern African perspectives

Environmental issues and risks in southern Africa have, like elsewhere in the world, their roots in the structures and orientations of modern societies. In modernist fashion, we draw on education and research to address socio-ecological concerns. In 1995 Eureta Janse van Rensburg, then Murray & Roberts Chair of Environmental Education at Rhodes University, undertook a study to identify environmental education research priorities, and through her study she provided a description of research in environmental education as a ‘landscape of shifting priorites’ (Janse van Rensburg, 1995). The papers in this journal offer a contemporary ‘snapshot’ of the landscape of environmental education research in southern Africa, illustrating a fresh range of ‘shifting priorities’. In 1995 Janse van Rensburg identified three prevailing orientations to research in environmental education, notably: research for management to restore order to nature and society; research to resolve practitioners’ and communities’ problems; and research for radical reconstruction in the emerging landscape. At the time, she noted that these prevailing orientations to environmental education research were ‘cut from the same modernist cloth’ as the environment crisis. She introduced researchers in southern Africa to reflexive perspectives in and on environmental education research, and identified that such reflexive perspectives ‘showed potential’ as a transitory orientation ‘outside’ modernist assumptions (Janse van Rensburg, 1995, p. 1). A more recent review of environmental education research in southern Africa traced and mapped a range of reflexive and contextually situated methodological explorations (Lotz-Sisitka, 2004; see also Irwin, 1998). This review identified that the intention of many recent environmental education research initiatives in southern Africa lies in exploring processes of social transformation. Many of the papers in this volume show evidence of methodological explorations that provide different possibilities for transformative knowledge creation, reflexivity and critique. The papers all reflect a contextual struggle within changing socio-his-

How Many Declarations Do We Need? Inside the Drafting of the Bonn Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development.

The Bonn Declaration, approved by the 900 participants at the UNESCO World Conference on Sustainable Development, differs from other conference declarations in that it is the first declaration to deal exclusively with education for sustainable development. It received input from official State representatives and, perhaps because of that, it is somewhat less provocative than some nongovernmental or university-sponsored declarations. Also, it actually sets out, with some authority, an agenda for UNESCO, the manager of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Though some may question the usefulness of conference declarations, history shows that such declarations do have at least some guiding power in that they provide common starting points for deliberation on possible changes at national and international levels.

Why ontology matters to reviewing environmental education research

This paper responds to a keynote paper presented by William Scott at the 2007 World Environmental Education Congress held in Durban, South Africa. The keynote address reviewed 30 years of environmental education research. In this response to William Scotts paper I contemplate the way in which environmental education research may enable reflexivity in modernity and develop knowledge that can serve as cultural mediator between individual and society. Through emphasizing ontology, I consider the reality of global knowledge production in relation to the way in which ontology may influence the reasons how and why we come to do particular forms of research, providing an ontological reference for the ever‐expanding pluralism that characterizes the field of environmental education research. The paper comments on various aspects of the Scott paper, but presents an argument for not only valuing pluralism, methodological experimentation and ‘reaching out’, but for embracing the cosmopolitan implications of wider ontological referents of environmental concerns in environmental education research. The paper argues that research in environmental education ought to become ontologically defensible at both local and global scales.

Participation, Situated Culture, and Practical Reason

This chapter examines the emergence of participatory education as both a central feature and a terrain of ambivalence within the developing landscape of environmental education in South Africa. From its roots in nature experience activities through to more socially critical forms of environmental education, participatory imperatives in this area have yet to address sufficiently the conceptual and practical challenges inherent in pedagogies of participation. We argue that more recent developments reveal similar anomalies, such that participatory education in South Africa has now become an idealised and techniqued logic of practice.

When does a nation-level analysis make sense? ESD and educational governance in Brazil, South Africa, and the USA

International policy analysis tends to simplify the nation state, portraying countries as coherent units that can be described by one statistic or placed into one category. As scholars from Brazil, South Africa, and the USA, we find the nation-centric research perspective particularly challenging. In each of our home countries, the effective influence of the national government on education is quite limited, particularly in fringe and emerging areas of education such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change Education (CCE). This essay explores how nation-level comparisons are and are not useful for international research on ESD and CCE. We consider several layers of decentralized governance, but ultimately come to the conclusion that ESD governance in our respective countries is polycentric rather than decentralized. We discuss the implications of this idea for cross-national policy research on ESD and CCE.

The Unit-Based Sustainability Assessment Tool and its use in the UNEP Mainstreaming Environment and Sustainability in African Universities Partnership

This paper reports on the development and use of a Unit-based Sustainability Assessment Tool (USAT) for establishing the status of Education for Sustainable Development initiatives and sustainable development practices in universities. The tool was developed for use in the Swedish/Africa International Training Programme (ITP) on ‘Education for Sustainable Development in Higher Education’ and complements the UNEP Mainstreaming Environment and Sustainability into African Universities (MESA) ‘Education for Sustainable Development Innovations Programmes for Universities in Africa’ materials. The USAT facilitates a quick assessment of the level of integration of sustainability issues in university functions and operations, both to benchmark sustainability initiatives and identify new areas for action or improvement. It is based on a unit-based framework which allows for sustainability assessments to be done per division, unit, department, or faculty within universities. Collectively, the unit-based assessments provide for development of an institution wide picture of university sustainability. The USAT has been widely used, in different ways, in African universities which are participating in the MESA Universities Partnership, and it has been found that it provides a useful reflexive learning tool for furthering sustainability objectives. This chapter discusses the context in which the USAT was developed, its development and pilot use at Rhodes University and the design features of the tool. The chapter also showcases use of the USAT in a whole university assessment at the University of Swaziland to illustrate how data from the assessment can be analyzed and presented and what the tool enables reviewers to perceive from the results. It further illuminates how the tool is being employed in identifying actions for change (called change projects) in the MESA Universities Partnership. Use of the USAT across a range of African universities suggests that its value lies in showing the level of integration of sustainability, and in facilitating change oriented learning and practice.

The Makana Regional Centre of Expertise: Experiments in Social Learning.

This article deliberates the possibilities for Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs) to become ‘experiments’ in social learning. The purpose of the article is to advance the broader research agenda of RCEs through reflection on the empirical research agenda of one RCE, Makana RCE in South Africa. As such it opens questions on how we might see RCE’s as morphogenic social learning processes (i.e., processes of social change). It provides an oversight of the key issues, educational foci and developing areas of engagement in the Makana RCE. These provide an overview of the ‘starting points’ for social learning in the Makana RCE. A model of social learning is also provided which seeks to engage the ecocultural nature of sustainability practices in the Makana RCE.