No time to waste? Dealing with ‘urgency’ in environmental and sustainability education

Abstract

In this article, we explore how and why the concept of rhythm is crucial to understand how environmental and sustainability education (ESE) may deal with the urgency of taking action regarding climate change. Many activists consider sustainability educators as important allies in this struggle. Our argument is that ESE has a different role and responsibility. Both activism and education can be important allies; however, they operate in different modes and rhythms. Three scholars John Dewey, Michel Alhadeff-Jones and Sharan Todd inspire us with captivating ideas on education as a rhythmic aesthetic experience. Their ideas also show the importance of the interruption of existing rhythms for opening new perspectives on how humans relate to the world. Our encounter with these ideas results into a plea for a pedagogy that provides for alternative, aesthetic arrangements of time and space. In line with this, we explore three examples of place-based education. We conclude that there is no time to waste regarding the problems of climate change. However, ESE requires a pedagogy that provides for alternative arrangements of time and space, while enabling educative moments interrupting a linear flow of time, including our familiar experiences of the world.

Keywords:

• Time and rhythm
• aesthetics
• Chronos
• Kairos
• place-based education
• experiential learning transaction
• climate change
• environmental and sustainability education

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and particularly Michel Alhadeff-Jones for his suggestions regarding the central theme of time and rhythm in education.

Notes

1 At a later stage, Gruenewald changed his author’s name into Greenwood.