CUHRE Ecoliteracy Spring Lecture by Sean Blenkinsop
CUHRE Ecoliteracy Spring Lecture 2024 by Sean Blenkinsop, Professor Simon Fraser University
21st May: Talk by Sean Blenkinsop “Principles of eco-socio-cultural change for education” from 10.15-11.45 in DIAS auditorium
Content: The current environmental crisis stems from a particular way of being human in the world. Place, community, and nature-based education strives to better connect people with their local histories and environments, but if we primarily center the well-being of humans within our approach, we are in danger of perpetuating world views that ultimately harm the Earth. In this talk I will offer 6 principles for eco-social-cultural change: All My Relations, Abundant Time, Mystery/Unknowability, Embeddedness/Integration, Ancient Futures, (Re)creative Dissonance. These principles, drawn from an 18-month research project funded by SSHRC, seek to respond educationally to the challenge of “living within the Earth’s carrying capacity.” This research dove deeply into literature in the areas of social change/innovation, critiques of mainstream Canadian education, and transformative (both formal and informal) educational practices. We coupled this with a series of interviews with organizations and small communities engaged in systemic social change and generative resilience projects, including Indigenous communities, eco-villages, community-based support organizations, non-traditional school projects, and others. We also employed several quite innovative research methods including the use of speculative fiction in order to generate these 6 principles. I hope we have the time to explore a bunch of this terrain together.
Follow-up research seminar 21st Mayfrom 13.00-15.00 in OD SUN M2.21 (V11-701a-2 )
Sign up for the seminar: https://event.sdu.dk/followupresearchseminar
Bio Sean Blenkinsop
Sean is a professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He undertook his doctoral work in philosophy of education at Harvard University with a focus on existentialism, education, dialogue, and the environment. His current research explores teacher education and imagination, school and cultural change, nature as co-teacher, eco-social justice, and the challenges of justice, equity, and the environmental crisis in a rapidly changing world. Sean has also been, and still is, involved in creating and researching five innovative public elementary schools in British Columbia that are focused on being much more community, place, and nature-based in both pedagogy and curriculum. Sean has published more than 100 articles and chapters. His most recent books are: Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene published by Palgrave-McMillan in 2018; Ecoportraiture: The Art of Research when Nature Matters published by Peter Lang in 2022; Education as Practice of Eco-social-cultural change published by Palgrave-McMillan in 2023, and, Ecologizing Education published by Cornell University Press in 2024 which gathers learnings from these school projects and shares them with a more general public.