Learning to survive amidst nested crises: can the coronavirus pandemic help us change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis?

Abstract

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper discusses how education can help to form a new generation of children, young people, and adults equipped for the new post-Corona world, and equipped to respond appropriately to the eco-crisis. This requires significant changes to existing arrangements of education systems. What is needed is new practice architectures – new conditions of possibility – under which human beings can learn to live sustainably within the community of life on Earth.

Video abstract

Keywords:

• Ecological crisis
• COVID-19
• practice architectures
• social learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In much of Europe, the question of how to teach is discussed in terms of Didactics, not Pedagogy. In much of Europe, Pedagogy is the overarching field that covers all aspects of upbringing, including what to teach and why, the nature and purpose of education, and the history and evolution of different pedagogical approaches like progressive education or constructivist approaches.

2 For the same reason, crises such as COVID-19 seem to make individuals increasingly willing to take orders from governments. Thus, it can be argued that large-scale crises change fundamental relations between state, civil society and private enterprise.

3 Faced with two mothers, both of whom claim a baby is their own son, Solomon offers to cut the child in half, believing that the true mother will reveal herself by offering to forego, and thus save, the child.

4 The idea of education for social reconstruction was proposed by Dewey and Childs (1933, as cited in Zuga 1992).