Transformative processes in environmental education: A case study
- Authors: Fox, Helen E , Palmer, Carolyn G , O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/387323 , vital:68225 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137680"
- Description: This paper presents a case study on the severely degraded Boksburg Lake’s (Gauteng, South Africa) social–ecological system, and on an environmental-education initiative that aimed to support the lake’s transformation with a view to its improved social and ecological well-being. In this case study, three key characteristics of the initiative which appeared to support the transformative process are discussed, namely: 1. Learning was aligned with the local social–ecological context; 2. Human-to-human and human-to-ecological connections were encouraged; and 3. The youth played a key role in initiating and effecting transformation.
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- Date Issued: 2015
Contextualising learning in Advanced Certificate in Education (Environmental Education) courses : synthesising contexts and experiences
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Le Roux, Cheryl , Loubser, Callie , Schudel, Ingrid J , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Shallcross, Tony
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:21224 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/7167 , http://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC32180
- Description: We report on experiences in the Advanced Certificate in Education (Environmental Education) courses of two South African universities, namely, Rhodes University and the University of South Africa. We focus specifically on the whole school approaches which were influenced by a project between these two universities and Manchester Metropolitan University. We illustrate how contextual profiling influenced the perspective or entry point from which the whole school message was approached in the ACE (EE) courses. Through illustrative examples from these two courses, we report on two different approaches to contextual profiling, starting by problematising an approach that relies solely on a priori contextual profiling. We then illustrate how this approach can be complemented by contextual profiling within courses and within context through situated learning processes.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Learning in a Changing World
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Robottom, Ian
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182679 , vital:43853 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122733 "
- Description: The year 2007 is a significant year for environmental education. It marks 30 years since the first internationally agreed principles of environmental education were developed at Tbilisi, commonly known as the Tbilisi Principles. It is also the year in which human beings apparently are finally ‘waking up’ to the fact that human-induced environmental change is causing impacts which are infinitely complex and difficult to resolve. This year, through various highly publicised and politicised events, people have begun to recognise that it is getting hot on planet Earth, and that the associated social, economic and environmental costs are profoundly disturbing. The Stern Review and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change both firmly indicated that human-induced environmental change will threaten human economies and security in ways that are unprecedented in human history. Southern Africa, where this special edition of the EEASA Journal is being produced to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the existence of the Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa, and the hosting of the 4th World Environmental Education Congress, is one of the areas most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. More than 70% of the people in southern Africa live in rural areas, and depend directly on natural resources for their livelihood and food security, making environment (and environmental education processes) a central concern in development discussions in the region. Patterns of global inequality are pronounced in the region, which has some of the poorest countries in the world. Out of its 25-year history, EEASA and its members, along with colleagues around the world, continue to seek ways of educating and empowering people to successfully participate in resolving environmental issues and create more sustainable and socially just living patterns. In drawing attention to our constant need to learn how to improve our understandings of environmental education and learning as the world around us changes, the World Environmental Education Congress organising committee chose to profile the question of ‘Learning in a Changing World’, by making this the theme of the Congress.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Participation, situated culture, and practical reason
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437436 , vital:73378 , ISBN 978-1-4020-6415-9 , https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6416-6_7
- Description: This chapter examines the emergence of participatory education as both a central feature and a terrain of ambivalence within the develop-ing 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 de-velopments reveal similar anomalies, such that participatory education in South Africa has now become an idealised and techniqued logic of practice.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Cultivating a scholarly community of practice
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Ellery, Karen , Olvitt, Lausanne L , Schudel, Ingrid J , O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2010
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/69777 , vital:29579 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC15102
- Description: In the field of Environment and Sustainability Education we are seeking ways of developing our teaching and supervision practices to enable social changes in a rapidly transforming field of practice where global issues of truth, judgement, justice and sustainability define our engagements with the public good. This article explores the process of cultivating a scholarly community of practice as a model of supervision that not only engages scholars in an intellectual community oriented towards socio-ecological transformation, but also extends and enhances dialogue with individuals on the technical and theoretical aspects of their postgraduate studies.
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- Date Issued: 2010
The Makana Regional Centre of expertise: Experiments in social learning
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Wilmot, P Dianne
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182634 , vital:43849 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/097340820900400114"
- Description: 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.
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- Date Issued: 2010
Think Piece on Amanzi for Food. Working with Critical Realism to Inform a Situated Learning Framework for Climate Change Education
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/388136 , vital:68309 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/172215"
- Description: This study is developed as a think piece which deliberates the problem of transformative human agency in a curriculum setting. Using a critical realism perspective and schematic tools it examines the deliberative framing of an Amanzi for Food teaching garden as an education process for mediating the learning of rainwater harvesting. Working with Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Activity and using expansions of his ‘four-planar social being’ schema and its resolution in his ‘social cube’ model, the study contemplates the framing for a curriculum for the mediation of co-engaged social learning in the contexts of practical work in an agricultural college curriculum setting. In this way the research process is developed as an under-labouring review of the emerging curriculum in search of theory to inform pedagogy for mediating situated processes of transformative social learning.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Environment and sustainability education in a changing South Africa: A critical historical analysis of outline schemes for defining and guiding learning interactions
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373634 , vital:66708 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122749"
- Description: This paper examines how, in response to emerging risk, methodological narratives for conservation (CE), environmental (EE) and now sustainability education (ESD) were constituted in diverse settings within a changing South African state. After documenting an awareness creation perspective underpinning early extension and experiential activities, the study examines shaping social processes and changing outline schemes for defining and guiding planned learning interactions (methodology) within the broadening field into the present day. The critical historical analysis developed in the study reflects a well-documented shift from early topdown (intervention/extension) to more participatory approaches (collaborative engagement/stewardship). A situated process-mapping of changing orientations also reveals characterising methodological features across the contours of an increasingly diverse field of conservation, environment and sustainability education.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Navigating non-sense by exemplifying situated life experience and intergenerational heritage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development learning spaces
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Kibuka-Sebitosi, Esther , Tshiningayamwe, Sirkka A N , Palmer, Carl
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/388122 , vital:68308 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/186410"
- Description: This paper uses an activity system perspective to probe the related problems of knowledge abstraction and a lack of relevance as a modern legacy of colonial education practices in Africa. Its purpose is to contemplate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) pedagogy to support learning that might be better situated in and resonate with local African contexts and the emerging sustainability concerns in everyday life. Colonial education trajectories and the recent inclusion of new environmental knowledge in African curriculum and civic learning contexts are examined. This points to how circulating environment and sustainability knowledge is being constituted in disciplinary fields as abstract concepts that are often difficult to relate to local sustainability concerns. Socio-cultural heritage and intergenerational meaning making are explored to uncover better situated ways of navigating much of the abstract ‘non-sense’ confronting African learners in many modern education contexts today. Illustrative examples of historical patterns of exclusion are scoped and two cases of pedagogical innovation are examined to contemplate how to navigate better situated and more relevant learning processes. Enacted in situated and co-engaged ways, ESD practices may enable the socio-cultural capital and environmental realities of local social-ecological contexts to articulate with better situated sustainability propositions for transitioning to more peaceful, just and sustainable futures.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Landscape, memory and learning to change in changing worlds: Contemplating intergenerational learning and traditional knowledge practices within social-ecological landscapes of change
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Sandoval-Rivera, Juan Carlos , Payyappallimana, Unnikrishnan
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/388061 , vital:68304 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/187218"
- Description: The core paper and collection of short papers from Mexico, Africa, India and Sweden that make up this study on social-ecological landscapes developed as a South–South collaboration that was extended to include a case in the North. Our concern was to explore how situated, intergenerational knowledge commonly takes a back seat to the conceptual propositions that the environmental sciences have developed around matters of concern like biodiversity loss. In this way, scientific propositions have become the conceptual capital for informing future sustainability through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). In response to this, a more situated turn has developed to engage both intergenerational practices and the institutional sciences, but the playing fields are seldom level and deliberations are often rife with misunderstandings.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Cholera in KwaZulu-Natal: Probing institutional governmentality and indigenous hand-washing practices
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373574 , vital:66704 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122699"
- Description: The paper reviews education activities in a successful anti-cholera campaign amongst rural communities in eastern southern Africa. It is centred on probing how a modern institutional governmentality was relatively blind to an historical legacy of Nguni hand-washing practices and came to exclude use of simple tests for coliform contamination in rural health education activities. The study examines institutional processes, probing discontinuities between the health education message and the complex social ecology of cholera. In so doing, it uncovers how a post-apartheid institutional rhetoric of participation, empowerment and social transformation is playing out in communicative interventions to instil healthier practices amongst the rural poor. Institutional perspectives such as this are rooted in an institutional legacy of appropriation and control. Despite the current rhetoric of participation, instrumental orientations are being sustained as the radical critique of struggle for freedom and change gives way, through comfortable submission and intellectual conformity, to an instrumental conservatism in many post-apartheid institutional settings today. The study notes and probes a surprising resonance between the ecology of the disease and an intergenerational social capital of indigenous hand-washing practices. The evidence suggests that these patterns of hand-washing practice would have served to contain the disease in earlier times and points to this social capital as a focus for co-engaged action on environment and health concerns. The findings suggest that an opposing of institutional and indigenous knowledge is not a simple matter and that moving beyond a legacy of cultural exclusion and marginalisation remains a challenge as the first decade of post-apartheid democratic governance comes to a close.
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- Date Issued: 2005
Emerging patterns of abstraction in environmental education: A review of materials, methods and professional development perspectives
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Russo, Vladimir
- Date: 2004
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373610 , vital:66707 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462042000258170"
- Description: The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field. And it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thoughts are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions and exclusions he unwittingly performs. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99).
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- Date Issued: 2004
Exploring learning interactions arising in school-incommunity contexts of socio-ecological risk
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Asafo-Adjei, Robert , Kota, Lutho , Hanisi, Nosipho
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437501 , vital:73389 , ISBN 978-90-8686-031-9 , https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/68793?rskey=Y3i6Wfandresult=1
- Description: Today, few educators would dispute that learning arises in diverse so-cio-cultural contexts of meaning-making interaction. As such, learning can strengthen social relationships across school and community and has the potential to develop as reflexive praxis in response to environ-ment and health risks in a local context. These processes of ‘social learning’have recently appeared as a new ‘category’for thinking about human meaning-making interactions. It is difficult to conceive of any human learning interactions that are not social processes of engaged meaning making either by learners as social agents in context or from the point of view of what is learned relating to social life in a world of in-terdependent living-things. Given the complexity of contemporary sus-tainability questions and an arising ambivalence in modernist notions of knowledge transfer, we note how educators are usefully using this somewhat ambivalent category for probing socio-cultural perspectives on how we see and approach learning interactions for environment and sustainability education. In foregrounding a critical perspective, we sig-nal a cautious approach to a popularising of the term ‘social learning’as a ‘renaming’that provides a more coherent perspective for research and reflection on social processes of meaning making and change.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Situated environmental learning in Southern Africa at the start of the UN decade of education for sustainable development
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/183059 , vital:43908 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0814062600001737"
- Description: Within the globalising trajectory of modernism, conservation, then environmental (EE) and now sustainability education (ESD) have each emerged as developing responses to risk produced by and in the modern state. Through adopting a long term process perspective, this paper narrates the emergence of situated learning perspectives and a developing re-orientation of EE at the start of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD). We identified the need to examine ESD practice in responses to recent ESD consultations in 14 southern African countries, where a rhetorical marking was noted in discussions on ESD practices, particularly with regard to changing teaching and learning processes. The paper narrates how an interplay of review, research and practical engagement activities have all contributed to an extended critical review of learning interactions in environmental education in an attempt to provide useful perspective for educational activities within the UNDESD. We found that EE and ESD initiatives only acquired more substantive meaning and coherent orientation when examined within ongoing inquiries into situated learning, agency and risk reduction in contexts of poverty, vulnerability and risk, the key concern to us in this paper and the primary focus of the WEHAB (Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity) sustainable development agenda in the region.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Some insights on the gap
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182720 , vital:43856 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145410"
- Description: In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.
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- Date Issued: 2002
Towards a better grasp of what matters in view of ‘the posts’
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182693 , vital:43854 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620500169593"
- Description: This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.
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- Date Issued: 2005
Situated learning in relation to human conduct and social-ecological change
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437513 , vital:73390 , ISBN 978-3-319-45989 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45989-9_2
- Description: This chapter traces how education has developed to provide orientation in a modern world that is characterised by emerging risk. It examines how ESD initially developed as a modernist process to enable social reorientation and has been centred on problem-solving engagement in relation to issues and risk. The intractable complexity of most social-ecological problems has meant that change-orientated and transformative imagi-naries arising in learning are not easily realised in tangible change to resolve the problems at hand. The chapter thus poses the question, “Is ESD as situated learning with trans-gressive social-ecological reorientation possible?” To address this question, the study reviews ESD as a reflexive social pro-cess in modernity and tracks some of the expansive trajecto-ries in the developing field over the last 10 years of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in South-ern Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Working with critical realist perspective and tools at the interface of indigenous and scientific knowledge in a science curriculum setting
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437081 , vital:73329 , ISBN 9781315660899 , https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Realism-Environmental-Learning-and-Social-Ecological-Change/Price-Lotz-Sistka/p/book/9780367597689
- Description: This chapter uses basic and dialectical critical realism to exam-ine and review prevailing dispositions on indigenous and insti-tutional knowledge (Western science) in environmental educa-tion processes. It examines some of the macro social pro-cesses that have inscribed assumptions of incommensurable differences between the two kinds of knowledge. It notes that whereas a previous hegemony of positivism would have re-sulted in the dismissal of much indigenous knowledge as mere superstition, contemporary intellectual perspectives (poststruc-tural and hermeneutical) have shaped a proliferation of worldview modelling that has resulted in a macro-level exempli-fying of indigenous knowledge as different and opposing Western science. Here, the lack of adequate mediating tools has given rise to a problematic inscription of assumed differ-ence between the knowledge of indigenous peoples and that of scientific institutions. Furthermore, despite an overt emancipatory intention in worldview discourses, the marginalization of indigenous peoples and knowledge remains.
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- Date Issued: 2015
A Search for Conjunctions at a Time of Direction-setting Review and Synthesis
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/387134 , vital:68209 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122240"
- Description: This journal reflects a diversity of environment and sustainability education research and viewpoints alongside two synthesis papers. Read as a whole and within a widely held ideal that diversity reflects resilience, the environment and education for sustainable development landscape in Africa might be said to be healthy and proliferating. But read against the pressure to produce tangible evidence of change on an African landscape of persistent climate variation and poverty, along with a widening gap between rich and poor, the picture remains challenging. These contrasting readings are notable at a time when we are looking towards the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) Triennial in February, 2012, the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012 and our own EEASA +30 conference in September 2012. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development is characterised by a proliferation of education imperatives. These emerged as modern education in response to the issues of the day and now a modernity in deepening crisis.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Engagement in local social-ecological knowledge practices in a seasonal cycles approach for transitioning to future sustainability
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/387971 , vital:68294 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/186419"
- Description: This paper explores climate as variable natural forces driving seasonal cycles1 that many African cultures had adjusted themselves to within intergenerational knowledge practices of longue durée. The study points to the need to re-orientate and expand climate science education so that it is centred on the seasonal cycles and intergenerational learning to better align transitioning to future sustainability with these in our southern African contexts of climate change today. The narrative touches upon historical accounts of knowledge practices amongst the Krobo, Bemba, Shona, Zulu and Xhosa, briefly pointing to how each, as an African culture, is situated as a social-ecological entity within the climatic tapestries of our African landscapes. It takes note of how cultural articulation within the seasonal cycles of regional climate have a long history with adaptive change in some contexts in more recent times. The review suggests that our learning in relation to emerging climate change should be informed by these histories of intergenerational knowledge practice. It notes how a better grasp of these could be important drivers of a widening cultural response to the changing dynamics in our climatic surroundings today. The brief study suggests that southern Africa is a special place with many unique and interesting climatic processes and associated socio-ecological systems and practices. These can provide engaging perspectives for informing education to mitigate or adapt to climate change. Here, a situated exploration of seasonal cycles can draw on both the latest in modern climate science and the rich social-ecological heritage of Africa briefly touched upon in the study. A model of process is offered for how both can be used in a seasonal cycles approach climate change education. This better situated and more inclusive approach can enable us to contemplate how we might best adjust our social-ecological dispositions and practices in the changing world that we all share.
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- Date Issued: 2019