Philosophy of education in a new key: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Education and environment after the coronavirus

Abstract

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, ‘As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch’, gathers wider philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, ‘Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?’, looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’, focuses to Greta Thunberg’s messages and their responses. The last section, ‘Towards a new (educational) normal’, explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles’ parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic (philosophy of) education.

Keywords:

• Philosophy of education
• new key
• environment
• Covid-19
• coronavirus
• pandemic
• new normal
• postdigital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The question Who remembers Greta Thunberg? came out of a discussion between Petar Jandrić and Peter McLaren while we revised the article 'Critical intellectuals in postdigital times' for Policy Futures in Education (Jandrić and McLaren forthcoming 2020). The article was in its final stages of publication and we managed to squeeze in only a few sentences on the topic. Following Michael Peters' invitation to develop a collective article exploring an aspect of philosophy of education in a new key (Peters, Arndt, et al., 2020), I decided to pursue this important question further by tapping into collective wisdom.

2 See https://www.springer.com/journal/42438.

3 See https://editorscollective.org.nz/.

4 Steve Fuller responds to the call for an interdisciplinary future on Twitter https://twitter.com/ProfSteveFuller/status/1277153737702768642

5 This title paraphrases a sentence from Greta Thunberg's viral speech at the 2019 UN Climate Action summit in New York (Thunberg, 2019a).

6 Ninette Rothmüller is grateful to Marco Piana, Simone Gugliotta and Giovanna Bellesia from the Department of Italian Studies at Smith College for their advice on the origins of the name Presena and to Amy Larson Rhodes from the Department of Geosciences, also at Smith College, for her advice on the formation of Italian glaciers. Ninette extends her gratitude to Petar Jandrić for inviting her contribution and to Gregory Brown for copy editing it.

7 Please consult Miller Cantzler and Huynh (2016) for an analysis of the intersectional injustices established between e.g. racial inequality, tribal and human rights, human agency, institutional colonialization and overfishing, and environmental injustice.

8 As a clear example of such practices, consider Kuh’s (2008) work on High Impact Practices. As Kuh notes, such practices, like community-based learning, collaborative projects, learning communities, and common intellectual experiences, have repeatedly been shown to positively impact student success (Kinzie et al., 2008).