List of Tables
Chapter 2: Youth and children in a landscape of educational change
2.4 Environmental education and the context of educational change in South Africa This section presents the landscape of education, environmental education and the
surrounds, entangled with the biophysical world. Further than neglecting learning in and about urban spaces, theories such as nature deficit disorder claim that nature can fix the child (Fletcher, 2017), and education in the ‘outdoors’ (away from urban) colludes with other problematic valuations such as high exam scores, when other forms of well-being, such as play, are side-lined as beneficial. Thus ‘culturally sedimented ideas’ which restrict
environmental education around nature deficit conceptualisations of children serve to further erase and dishonour the knowledge brought by the child of their living environments that are already ecological.
In response to these absences, Nxumalo and ross (2019) proposed that environmental education embraces a re-oriented pedagogy, “testifying to and witnessing the survival of black life amidst anti-blackness” as key to bringing an intersectional resonance into environmental learning for children and youth in South Africa. This reoriented pedagogy might be a starting point from which to develop a situated re-definition of sustainability;
rather than a modern and technicist environmentalism (Jickling, 1992), sustainability is considered here as centred on removing the violence against survival through an engagement with those who are on the frontlines of this struggle (Di Chiro, 2006; Dei, 2010). Working with environmental pedagogies as testifying to and witnessing would be an acknowledgement of the notion that children and youth have agency and are affected by social structures that are older than they are.
As far as the experiences and opinions of children, researchers are mostly scrambling around in the dark, rather than better-knowing elders. However, as adults and researchers, we may have influence over the enabling or dis-enabling structures that affect world-making action of children and youth (Aitken, 2017). Through this relationship, we develop a deeper change- oriented research practice, as the mediator and messenger aspiring to a with-ness.
2.4 Environmental education and the context of educational change in South Africa
For the children and youth who participated in this study, school is a significant component of their lives. It occupies most of their weekdays and, within our society, holds their
aspirations for future social mobility. The majority of children and youth in South Africa face precarious conditions (May, Witten and Lake, 2020) as they attempt to participate in the South African education system. These precarious conditions include the status of our education systems which are not serving the majority of the country. As much as 40% of learners who enter the school system do not complete the programme and only 6% complete an undergraduate tertiary degree. These numbers reflect various structural blockages. One aggravating example is that most children are not schooled in their mother tongue making literacy more challenging. In addition to this, material conditions, pedagogical approaches (Zipin, Fataar and Brennan, 2015), western knowledge paradigms (Odora Hoppers, 2017) and the emerging global ‘knowledge economy’ (Christie, 2008a) are inhibiting the potential of young South African citizens to flourish. Research into the everyday lived realities of South African learners reveals the ways in which dominant pedagogical approaches in schools ignore “the complex processes by which human beings now transact their lives, amidst racialised neoliberal living in newer class formations, collapsing infrastructures, and with desperate, unorthodox, and informalised livelihoods” (Fataar, 2016, p. 11). Long before the recent Cape Town water crisis reached the headlines, the participants in this study
experienced school closures as a result of water cut-offs. This is an example of how
experiences of education are both disconnected in terms of pedagogical approaches and yet embedded in precarious living conditions.
The participants who joined me in this research are growing up in a South Africa that has failed to structurally transform in a just and sustainable way. This failure is due to lack of radically reimagined economic policies, very little redress in terms of access to land and resources, and a maintenance of a neoliberal global economic regime (Klein, 2011; Radical Education Network, 2020). Some would argue that the idea of ‘transformation’ has been run into the ground in the 25+ years since the advent of democracy in 1994, by the immanent failure to realise the hoped for, deeply grounded just transition from the apartheid era. The result is that the country is seeing a rising voice of young people calling for decolonisation instead of transformation (Kamanzi, 2015).
Education within and beyond formal structures – school-life – has been a site of struggle for broader transformation. Following Bhaskar’s model of transformative model of social
activity, education is seen as a kind of socio-cultural structure which holds significant weight
of the past – it is not unchangeable but is significant in informing what activity is possible in the present. “Historic dominance of the social over the personal” (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 53) is evident, especially given the reality of a world where the majority of people are surviving in a way that constrains flourishing. Through writing about this struggle, I hope to communicate what has been learned about educational ideas in practice in the South African context. I cover the following points:
1. I present the historical emergence of environmental education in South Africa and Southern Africa along with relevant origins, contextual and theoretical influences.
2. I outline the transformation of the curriculum. I compare this to a pendulum, extending the often invoked metaphor of South Africa’s post-apartheid educational milieu.
3. I draw out some principles and frameworks within the current curriculum that speak to critical environmental learning
4. Finally, I review scholarship which considers how the educational system has impacted on the lived experience of young South Africans
Taken together, these four sections attempt to cover the spread of contextual space in which young people are being, reading and re-writing their worlds. It is in this
challenging educational context, that South African environmental education scholarship has laid the ground and positioned a rationale for exploring transformative environmental learning processes at the level of practice in conversation with young people.
2.4.1 Environmental education roots in educational change
This sub-section presents the evolution of the environmental education movement in South Africa as a way to understand how the practice and theory has emerged in the South African/African context.
Scholars and educational practitioners in South Africa have been grappling with how education can overcome racist and exploitative, life-erasing structures. There are rich
histories of educational movements struggling for social justice and democracy (Cooper and Luckett, 2017), including a significant and well mobilised environmental education
movement (O’Donoghue, 1987) and curriculum initiatives (Lotz-Sisitka and Schudel, 2007).
These movements are both in the context of apartheid where efforts were resistance based as well as in post-apartheid where policy efforts were made to build the new South African society (Von Kotze, Walters and Luckett, 2016). The new school curriculum included
normative values of ‘human rights, inclusivity, diversity’, for example (Lotz-Sisitka and Schudel, 2007).
O’Donoghue (1987) described the environmental education movement as participating in a broader movement of educational change in the late stages of apartheid along with the people’s education movement. They were both forces of change, galvanised as sensitising concepts, that at some point were described as coming into tension with the institutions of education, having “outstripped the adaptive capacity of our institutionalised education bureaucracy” (1987, p. 12). While these movements were both under a broader umbrella of change in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, they were also in productive tension. The People’s Education movement did not focus on biophysical degradation and the environmental
education movement paid less attention to the political and the social (see Figure 1 below).
Of course, this polarisation is disrupted by the many environmental movements who engaged ecological degradation from a political standpoint (Cock, 2004). But it is important to
understand the shape that environmental politics took in educational debates. This
polarisation echoes the separation of science and politics in educational and epistemological ways around the world (Kellner and Kneller, 2010).
Figure 1: Representation of educational change matters of concern (O'Donoghue, 1987)
Part of the process of educational change behind the sensitising concept of environmental education was a process of distinguishing itself from the well-established and socially, culturally and materially problematic, though somewhat straightforward tradition of conservation education (O’Donoghue, 1993). The challenge was that environmental education was still at risk of being usurped by a range of other agendas.
Critical education seemed to be a significant element in clarifying the work of environmental education. More recent reflective scholarly work by O’Donoghue (2018) has traced shifts in environmental education and the rise of critical pedagogy, especially in post-1994
educational conversations. In this reflection he wrote that “early critical education discourses began influencing environmental education in the 1980s and proliferated in the early 1990s before briefly receding to become more prominent again in postcolonial trajectories that have come to the fore in recent years” (O’Donoghue, 2018, p. 2).
Emerging from these two influences, conservation education and critical education, at a time of socio-political change, there were two opposing educational approaches that in fact collapsed into a corrective assumption: the functionalist ‘let’s fix our broken environment’
and the critical ‘let’s fix our problematic education system’ (O’Donoghue, 2018). There were two problems with this corrective approach; firstly, an absence of a deep engagement with context, not simply in terms of what is there materially but what “traditions of understanding”
exist in the context. The second issue was the reification and universalisation of pedagogical process. The educational ideas of critical education became enacted in an abstracted process eventually synonymous with Participatory Action Research looking something like “plan-act- reflect” (O’Donoghue, 2018, p. 13). Understanding how these ideas played out in practice revealed that not enough work was being done with the reflexive, cultural and institutional context from which they emerged.
The result of these two problems was that new contradictions emerged. For example, the opposition of ‘acquisition’ and ‘participation’ (O’Donoghue, 2018 referencing Sfard). This resulted in the two influential forces in the formation of environmental education movements being in tension but also subsumed into a troubled dualistic educational tendency which tended towards a corrective process.
Following this thread into more recent scholarship, critical education’s ‘wrong turn’ was not unique to the South African context. Developments in thinking relating to critical education have been articulated by Lotz-Sisitka (2016a). She has traced three generations of critical theory. The problematisation of critical education by Ellsworth (1989) is extended into a fourth generation that draws significantly on Bhaskar’s critical realism and involves action and reflexivity as a push back against idealistic notions of democracy. From my reading into various educational theorists, this duality that emerges from corrective and contextually blind educational approaches distracts from the heart of that matter which links to “meaning
making tools” (O’Donoghue, 1993) or analytical tools (Carpenter and Mojab, 2017) for reading the world; in a sense the matter of concern (Latour, 2015) will determine (and even create) the analytical tools – the content determines process – so that process cannot be abstracted.
Environmental education scholars have also made considerable efforts toward bringing decolonial thought into educational thinking. Indigenous knowledge is here defined in terms of a number of characteristics (Shava, 2016) and includes a consideration of the rift that has been created between western science and knowledge emerging from lived and local
community. These works speak to transforming the South African education systems and explaining and repairing the rift between life and school. Indigenous knowledge as worked with here includes creating “space to bring into the educational processes knowledge from their own lived experiences” (Shava, 2016, p. 122). This work has been done on both theoretical and practical levels, addressing the possibility of synergy between indigenous knowledge and formal curriculum with examples (as well as a comprehensive collection of indigenous knowledge relating to multiple environmental education themes by O’Donoghue, Shava and Zazu, 2013; see also Shava, 2016). This work has been expanded through a detailed consideration for the lived experience knowledge held by children in a rural village (Masuku, 2018). Masuku’s work brings post-colonial, decolonial and indigenous knowledge thinking to environmental education and serves as a significant transformative theoretical and practical impulse for the field of environmental education.
This section outlines the social and political situation in which environmental pedagogical practices have emerged. Environmental education faced a number of obstacles to realising theories and practice at the intersection of functional ecological literacy and socio-cultural- political justice: ‘myopic modernist institutions’ enabling conformity (O’Donoghue, 2005), top-down corrective tendencies (in both critical pedagogical influence in the curriculum and
the environmental education stream) (O’Donoghue, 2018), international influences predominating educational theory and shifting it back towards ‘human capital’ and the urgency to participate in the knowledge economy.
At the same time, it emerged alongside impulses that informed as well as affected change.
The environmental education contended, in parallel with the rest of the scholarly world, the use of critical theory in environmental education. Southern African environmental educators have also done important groundwork for connecting environmental concerns to the lived realities on the African context.
2.4.2 The curriculum and its pendulum swings
The transformative impulses of South Africa’s transition to democracy were met with neoliberal influences. This means that OBE’s philosophical basis was compromised with the purpose of change being co-opted by market logics. Outcomes Based Education (OBE) (also known as Curriculum 2005) was introduced after apartheid. The intention was to replace the racist (or conservative) curriculum with a progressive curriculum. The intentions were to instigate the ‘erosion of boundaries’: “between education and training, between academic and everyday knowledge, and between different forms of knowledge, disciplines or subjects”
(Hoadley, 2011, p. 145). The influences were partly the local impulse for change but also due to foreign education consultants introducing ideas such as ‘outcomes’ and ‘competencies’
(Schudel, 2017a referencing Christie, 1997). This curriculum change unfolded in the broader context of influences from “the neoliberal cast of 1990s ‘development’ and ‘globalisation’
discourse” (Zipin, 2017, p. 70). This strong current of neoliberalism in part led to widening class divisions with well- resourced schools better able to adapt to the changes with more resources to support OBE pedagogical practices. The effects in practice were a widening gap between former whites only and better resourced schools, and under resourced former black schools.
The introduction of the National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) introduced the pendulum shift from a focus on the ‘how’ (learning process) in education to a focus on the ‘what’ (the knowledge) in education. In Hoadley’s terms, it was a re-
establishment of what we see as boundaries that were attempted to be broken in the OBE phase and yet, as described above, this was not the root of the problem. Toward the
construction of CAPS, a small collective of scholars who identify as social realists, argued to centre curriculum on ‘powerful knowledge’ – the knowledge required for entering positions
of power in society (Hoadley, 2011, p. 151). These arguments were prone to being
‘(mis)read’ in policy as ‘education needed for the global knowledge economy’, and as a kind of instrumentalist move towards growth (Zipin, Fataar and Brennan, 2015, p. 10). With the neoliberal trends rising, this shift further entrenches the challenges described above.
This swing, from OBE to CAPS, has been problematic as it seemingly addresses the wrong problem. For example, Zipin noted that there is an equal danger in both the OBE tendency of reifying everyday knowledge, and the CAPS approach to dismissing everyday knowledge, shifting the concern to relationships within educational process. Reification or dismissal of everyday knowledge firstly “weakens the knowledge and its learning” and secondly,
“sustains the frame of deep grammars by which curriculum work unjustly reproduces social- structural inequalities” (Zipin, 2017, p. 73). Indigenous knowledge environmental educators also problematise processes of alienation that occur in education systems with historical and contemporary colonial influences (Shava, 2016).
How might we reimagine the polarising tensions within the curriculum to help respond to these historically and globally situated contradictions in curriculum thinking. Zipin suggested the following:
That is, ‘power sensitive conversation’ across life-world settings, furthered by educative processes, can raise consciousness to how place-based [Funds of Knowledge] carry global dimensions running across locales. ... In this process, educators and power marginalised think together, teach one another, and raise critical consciousness to ‘generative themes’ of global connection that run within and across local social space .... This is another kind of dialectical education that, in linking local FoK with globalising problematics, identifies deep and extensive we might say
‘verticalizing’, global connections between localities. verticalizing global connections between locals. (Zipin, Fataar and Brennan, 2015, p. 27)
What is missing from curriculum debates, according to Zipin, is power sensitive
conversations which might orient us to learning processes that do not reproduce the duality of school and everyday life divisions. Instead, we might consider knowledge resources that exist within homes and communities for an engagement with generative themes that can link local experience to global connections (as has been exemplified by O’Donoghue, Shava and Zazu, 2013). In a sense, we need to present an alternative literacy of vertical knowledge, one that taps into the political ecology, spatio-temporality of the world. It is at this moment of tension,
where historical inequalities, global market forces and experiences of alienation remain at play in the curriculum, that I position my research.
2.4.3 What can we learn from research on educational experience?
The image of a pendulum can be helpful here. A pendulum is a physical process of perpetual motion. We can ‘de-abstract’ a pendulum and ask, what is it standing on? What are the forces making it swing? How might we get it to swing in more than two directions and perhaps free itself from the structure that is part of the reason for its linear movement. That many young people have been excluded and others are crying out for change by the time they reach university, indicates that we must ask what our curriculum transformation looks like in practice. Zipin (2017) named this phenomenon “coin conserving binaries”: the curriculum is a coin that gets flipped over from one extreme to the other but with similar implications overall and particularly regarding the possibility of educational justice. For this I turn to research that focuses on the lived experience of schools and their curricula in community.
An important view of curriculum is how it is being experienced (Lotz-Sisitka, 2002). Young people who have received a privileged education today expressed that even in receiving such an education, they feel alienated from the rest of the country (Gamedze and Gamedze, 2015).
Masuku argued that “[t]he prescribed statements, as much as they may open doors for learning for diversity, are also far removed from the reality of the South African historical context, with the majority of poorly resourced schools situated in increasingly precarious conditions” (Masuku, 2018, pp. 32–33). This work showed, how the knowledge of the lived and knowledgeable world of young children, remains unrecognised in their curriculum. In this section I trace how the curriculum is not responding to this world.
Young people do not experience the classroom as quarantined from society (I would add that COVID-19 has shown this more clearly). Conducting ethnographic research in an urban community on the peripheries of Cape Town, Cooper (2017, p. 145) drew attention to the range of learning places that exist outside the classroom and argues effectively to avoid envisioning the classroom as “quarantined from society”. This consideration is inadequately considered in educational transformation discussions which are dominated by notions of
“increasing the efficiency, regulation of assessment practice and development of more sophisticated standardised tests” (2017, p. 145). In addition to “improving teachers’
conceptual knowledge” and redistributing material resources, links should be made between