What Did You Learn in School Today? Reimagining Education for the Living Planet
How education can become a powerful tool to address the ongoing climate crisis
“What did you learn in school today?” is a question often directed at young people. How many of us, however, have ever heard an answer along the lines of “I learned how to live respectfully and responsibly on the Earth”?
Diverse actors, including UN bodies, education ministries, the EU, environmental organizations, and youth groups continue to place high expectations on educational systems to address the critical challenges of our time. This includes learning how we might learn to live with climate change, contend with biodiversity loss, and challenge capitalist logics that turn Earth beings (humans, animals, insects, rivers, mountains) and the Earth itself into resources for exploitation. However, many educators feel underprepared to take on this responsibility.
These multispecies justice-oriented pedagogies acknowledge the deep interdependencies between us, diverse Earth beings, and the ecosystems we all share.
And yet the need for an educational response to the escalating planetary crisis is urgent. In their 2021 report Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract For Education, the International Commission on the Futures of Education highlights the need for educational transformations that rebalance “our relationships with the living planet.” This call echoes those of the More-Than-Human-Life (MOTH) Project Director César Rodríguez-Garavito, who asks what kind of institutions could we have if we included in the realm of care and concern the breathing Earth? What could educational institutions look like if they took seriously the flourishing of all the Earth beings with whom we share our communities?
Challenging hierarchical anthropocentrism in education
Education researchers, including Helena Pedersen, question what holds education back from acting as an agent of change in times of planetary crisis. A significant roadblock is the hierarchical anthropocentrism deeply rooted in many education systems. Such a worldview justifies and absolves the exploitation of animals and other natural entities deemed to be of lesser value than humans. Formal schooling often rationalizes the use of, and violence against, animals by representing them as mere symbols, objects, or resources. Sustainable flourishing futures are only possible when we acknowledge and challenge present and past exploitative relations, including those condoned by hierarchical anthropocentrism.
Fortunately, educators around the world have been doing just this through education research, humane education, ecojustice education, common worlds pedagogies, and critical animal pedagogies and by drawing on Indigenous and local knowledges. These multispecies justice-oriented pedagogies acknowledge the deep interdependencies between us, diverse Earth beings, and the ecosystems we all share. They can guide educational transformations toward multispecies flourishing and help integrate multispecies perspectives across different educational spaces.
Teacher education through a multispecies justice lens
The AniMate Research Collective at the University of Oulu in Finland explores ways to account for more-than-human interests in and beyond education. Through various research projects (for example, MUST: Enabling Multispecies Transitions Across Cities and Regions) and collaborations and by developing educational materials and courses in teacher education, AniMate has established a firm foundation for the continued development of multispecies justice-oriented education.
One of the courses I have coordinated with my colleague, Dr. Anna Vladimirova, since 2019 is an introductory class on environmental education. Our material ranges from foundational concepts to cutting-edge developments in the field, with a particular emphasis on challenging human-centered approaches. Through various pedagogical methods, students engage with complex topics by considering animals, nature, and ecosystems as legitimate stakeholders in sustainability and climate justice debates.
Photo-elicitation and arts-based approaches are used to explore Earth emotions (including the anxiety, sadness, rage, grief, or solastalgia one might feel when living through, or witnessing the effects of, the climate crisis) and different ethical questions about how we relate to the more-than-human world. Students also create their own lesson plans, teaching materials, or case studies on a topic of their choice, using poetry, photo collages, and paintings to navigate Earth emotions. One example is a card game exploring the production cycles of cocoa and milk, creating a hands-on learning experience that brings an ecological and systems-thinking lens to complex issues of Earthly flourishing and all those involved and affected by them.
Students in the Introduction to Environmental Education course explore multispecies climate justice, rights of nature, or fundamental rights for animals through talks on ecocide, animal protection, or a short film on climate justice by the collective just wondering…. We then ask the students to reflect on the ideas presented—the feasibility, promises, and challenges of the propositions—and consider how and why ecosystems, nature and animals, and the Earth itself can become stakeholders in our communities and our debates over sustainability and climate change policy. For example, one student reflected on the possibility of establishing legal rights for nature and animals:
Compare the earth to an ancient library, then every tree, river, and living creature shall be compared to volumes of unsaid stories and wisdom, slowly burning from the flames of neglect and exploitation.
This picture justifies such a great sense of loss and the need for urgency, in essence needing our legal and moral frameworks to stretch sufficiently to ensure that this compendium of life on the world is taken care of.
The lessons we can learn from the breathing Earth are only limited by whether we’re ready to listen and how we choose to respond.
Students also reflect on the larger implications of more-than-human rights and potential impacts on educational practice. Education, including teacher education, can become an agent of change in cultivating a more peaceable and flourishing coexistence—in many instances it already is.
How did you learn to live with the living planet today?
How would you answer if someone asked what you learned in school today? First, we might want to expand our idea of where learning happens. We are learning about and with the more-than-human world all the time—and well beyond the classroom walls. UNESCO is one of many actors invested in broadening our understanding of where learning happens by moving beyond “human-centered spaces and institutions.” We can do this by building a healthy educational ecosystem that includes “the biosphere—its lands, waters, life, minerals, atmospheres, systems, and interactions”—all of which are important learning spaces and our first educators. Seen through this lens, we are all learners and educators and the lessons we need most urgently are those that teach us how to live as part of, rather than separate from or superior to, other Earth beings and the ecosystems that sustain us all. The lessons we can learn from the breathing Earth are only limited by whether we’re ready to listen and how we choose to respond.
