Reframing the role of education and knowledge sharing in support of sustainable development in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

Too often, education is not viewed as a key discipline or field to include in the interdisciplinary mix for studying sustainable development in the Arctic, but rather is seen primarily as a means for disseminating the concepts and research findings to students. In this special issue of Polar Geography we set out to address the gap in the literature on education and sustainable development and to present a broader set of perspectives on the role education plays in achieving a sustainable future.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• sustainable development
• knowledge sharing

Introduction

Sustainable development is a ‘hot’ subject in Arctic research circles. A quick search of the University of Alaska Anchorage library database for peer-reviewed journal articles with the keywords ‘sustainable development’ and ‘Arctic’ reveals over 4000 hits for the past five years. However, what sustainable development is, and how communities can achieve this is still being contested by academics across the north (Exner-Pirot & Heininen, 2018). That said, one thing has been consistent in the literature I’ve read, the conferences I’ve attended, and even some of the projects with which I’ve been associated: education is not viewed as a key discipline or field to include in the interdisciplinary mix for studying sustainable development in the Arctic, but rather is seen primarily as a means for disseminating the concepts and research findings to students (e.g. Ariffin & Ng, 2020; Glavič, 2020; Svalfors, 2017; Wals & Benavot, 2017).

There are actually two pieces to this story. One is that education often is overlooked in discussions about sustainable development generally, and the other is that the ways in which education and knowledge transfer are defined and discussed tend to be very narrow. Indeed, even the project from which these papers emerged fell prey to these faults. Arctic-FROST, a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded research collaboration network, was built on a broad, interdisciplinary rendering of a theory of sustainable development in the Arctic: ‘development that improves the health and well-being of Arctic communities and residents while conserving ecosystem structures, functions and resources’ (Arctic-FROST, 2014). However, education was conceptualized only as the means by which the findings of the network would be disseminated to secondary and post-secondary students. ArcticFROST proposed a robust set of goals for sustainable development in the Arctic, including sustainable economies, cultures, communities, and environments.

When you dive into these goals it becomes quite clear that we need to think about human capital and knowledge sharing – you can’t have a vibrant economy without an educated workforce. And yet somehow this is often, or I might even say nearly always left out of the discussion of sustainable development in Arctic research circles. Sustainable cultures certainly rely on knowledge transfer and here in particular there needs to be recognition of knowledge-sharing systems that are not solely based on formal schooling. And we need an educated citizenry to create food security systems, to understand how best to define and enact sustainable practices in terms of our ecosystems. But this isn’t necessarily ‘book knowledge’, nor again is the role of education often discussed when scientists go out to work with communities to try to do this work. How do you really have a successful community-based observation system if you don’t have people with the knowledge to engage in the work?

In recognition of the ongoing challenges in discussions of education and sustainable development, in this and a subsequent second special edition of Polar Geography, we set out to address the gap in the literature on education and sustainable development and to present a broader set of perspectives. Our initial call for submissions to this special issue asked for articles that addressed how we:

• teach about sustainable development in the Arctic at the K-12 & Postsecondary level;

• rethink the role of education in sustainable development efforts, whether through educational institutions or community-based ways of knowledge sharing; and

• incorporate education issues / include education research as part of interdisciplinary research on sustainable development in the Arctic.

Three of the articles we are publishing in this volume address environmental and land-based education issues directly, all from within North American Arctic contexts, and the fourth explores ways to strengthen teacher education toward producing educators focused on helping communities achieve sustainability. In all cases, the articles argue for education that is engaged with and happening within communities, rather than just occurring in isolated classrooms.

Green, et. al., in their article ‘Alaskan Children’s Perspectives of Environmental Stewardship in a Changing Arctic Environment' explores how children in Alaska view and act on their roles in enacting environmental stewardship. Her work illustrates approaches that can promote children’s agency in caring for others and for their environments. In their article ‘Inuit youth-engaged community-based environmental research as supporting local development in Nunavut’ Brunet, et al. discuss ways that engagement in community-based environmental research becomes a form of experiential learning for Inuit youth as well as a way to enhance the capacity of Arctic communities. They also discuss how researchers and their work can benefit from projects involving young people. In ‘Towards Inummarik (well-balanced humans): an investigation of the role of land-based learning programs in public education,’ Kathy Snow and Diane Obed add to the literature supporting land-based learning as a legitimate pedagogy in public education. Their findings show that this approach can enhance youth resilience, Inuit autonomy, and authenticity in learning. In ‘Incorporating sustainable development and inclusive education in teacher education for the Arctic’ Windsor et al. address how teacher education institutions can better prepare teachers to help to create inclusive and sustainable self-determined Arctic communities from a Nordic perspective. They argue for moving education for sustainable development (ESD) and inclusive education (IE) to the forefront of teacher education, alongside preparing new teachers to engage in critical participatory action research in order to enable them to collaborate with Arctic communities.

These collectively provide a roadmap for transforming practice in the classroom as well as preparation of educators to enable the needed transformation. The next special edition will further add to this body of literature, and hopefully, together, these works will start pushing the conversation about education and sustainable development in new and needed directions to help foster the knowledge creation and sharing that help community members and students create a sustainable future for themselves and the generations to follow.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This volume is available as an open-access publication through the National Science Foundation supported project RCNSEES Arctic-FROST: Arctic Frontiers of Sustainability: Resources, Societies, Environments and Development in the Changing North [grant # 1338850].