'Greening' education - or reimagining it?

At COP28 there's been an international commitment to 'greening education' to tackle the climate emergency - but what does this mean and how do we do it, in practice? And is 'greening' enough, or do education systems need a much deeper and more fundamental transformation?

The problems that humanity is currently grappling with are so complex, dynamic, and intertwined that we can’t even talk about them, much less teach anyone about them, without missing out crucial parts of the story.

The climate emergency can’t be teased out from other 'green issues', such as biodiversity loss, land degradation, pollution, ocean acidification, and freshwater depletion… or from social problems like poverty, hunger, discrimination and oppression… or from pandemics, the plethora of diseases caused by toxic food, and the global mental health crisis… or from the economic growth imperative and the fossil carbon that fuels it... or from human values.

As Albert Einstein is alleged to have said:

"We can’t solve problems using the same level of thinking that we used when we created them."

We need new ways of thinking, learning, and teaching if we’re to have any hope of addressing this mess. We need... mindshifts.

Why 'mindshifts' rather than 'mindset shifts'?

Neuroscientists tell us that neuroplasticity – our brains’ ability to make new connections – doesn’t end when we reach adulthood, as they once assumed.

In this context, it doesn't make sense to think of our minds as 'set', or even as transitioning from one fixed state to another when we make a radical change in our way of thinking. It may be more helpful to envision them constantly shifting and evolving in directions that support planetary health and our own wellbeing.

A mindshifts approach to problem-based learning

There are many possible mindshifts that could be valuable for tackling complex problems - transforming the patterns of thinking that contributed to creating the problems. In my work as an educator at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) I tend to focus on three specific ones: from separation to interconnection, from monoculture to diversity, and from rigidity to agility, as illustrated in Figure 1:

In the context of transformative education, we can associate each of these mindshifts with many different competencies or meta-skills that can be taught. For symmetry and an attractive fractal effect, I like to focus on three key competencies for each of the three mindshifts, as follows:

1. From separation to interconnection:

• Take a whole-systems view
• Connect the dots
• Collaborate and network

2. From monoculture to diversity:

• Understand the local and specific
• Honour lived experiences
• Seek and see multiple perspectives

3. From rigidity to agility:

• Challenge norms and assumptions (including our own)
• Embrace complexity and fluidity
• Address barriers to change

‍

Yet the overall picture is, of course, more complex than this, and we can discover other competencies emerging at the intersections of these mindshifts:

• 'Interconnection and Diversity' provides the ability to value diversity in group decision-making.
• ‘Diversity x Agility’ offers us the ability to envision multiple possible futures – the core of futures literacy.
• ‘Agility x Interconnection’ enables us to recognise the possibility of emergence – when a complex system develops properties that are different from those of its component parts.

These three mindshifts and their twelve associated competencies can provide a framework for a radically new approach to education - structured around complex problems rather than academic disciplines, and based on deep transformation rather than superficial 'greening'.

Multiple interpretations

The inherent vagueness and ambiguity of the mindshifts themselves, and the competencies, provides a way of holding space for multiple interpretations. For example, the phrase ‘connect the dots’ can be used to refer to:

• concept mapping: dots as aspects of the problem you're trying to address)
• interdisciplinary education: dots as academic disciplines
• transdisciplinary practice: dots as stakeholders from different sectors
• network-building: dots as people or organisations
• practical ecology: dots as areas of wildlife habitat
• ...and there are many other possibilities!

Similarly, ‘honour lived experiences’ and ‘understand the local and specific’ could mean listening to under-served people talking about the issues in their neighbourhood – or, as Peter Reason and his colleagues describe in their wonderful blog series Learning How Land Speaks, relating and connecting with other living beings who share the neighbourhood. We’re often too quick to dismiss all our kin as ‘nature’, without distinguishing an oak tree from a kingfisher, a bumblebee, a shrew, or a bracket fungus - much less taking the time to engage with an individual oak tree growing in a particular place.

Just as there are many plausible ways to interpret the twelve competencies, there are also many different practices that can be used to help people develop them. These include - among many others - problem (re)framing, stakeholder mapping, critical thinking, negotiation and mediation skills, and a plethora of different processes for navigating synthesis and integration.

The ‘Problems’ modules at LIS provide a fertile space for testing out some of these practices, linking them to different problem areas, iterating year on year, and supporting students to create individual projects focusing on the problems that matter to them. They're supported by 'Methods' modules focusing on more traditional research methods - qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods - that can be used to collect and analyse data on complex problems.

Where do these mindshifts come from?

I'm often asked about the source of the mindshifts framework: have I just made it all up, or is there some sort of academic basis to it? Can it be cited? Are there references?

There are three main categories of sources that have fed into the 13+ years of research and practice culminating in this framework. I like to envision these as three rivers flowing into the same sea. Each is a river of shared knowledge, understanding and wisdom that can change the futures (yes, plural intended) of education.

The first river comes from the mountains. This is the river of Indigenous and global-majority activism/postactivism, scholarship, and art that calls us to dismantle coloniality and to restore and maintain healthy relationships with/in the living world. If I mention a few people whose writing and practice have directly informed my own – Bayo Akomolafe, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sahana Chattopadhyay, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Aanka Batta, Injairu Kulundu, Heila Lotz-Sisitka – this is not intended to diminish the others, too numerous to list, working in these spaces across all continents and over many decades.

The second river comes from the forests. This is the river of what I like to describe as ‘post-sustainability’ conversations at the wild edges of global-minority (a.k.a. ‘Global North’) academia, usually in the borderlands between traditional disciplines.  I’m thinking of areas like inter- and transdisciplinarity, transformative education, transgressive learning, regenerative agriculture, symbiotic and biophilic design, resilience, multispecies ethnography, kincentric geographies, ecopsychology, technocultural futures…and many more. I won't even begin to try and cite people in this blog post, but when I write 'The Paper' (coming soon!) on mindshifts vs. complex problems, I promise it'll have a full bibliography.

The third river comes from the city. This is the river of quiet revolutions occurring in business, public policy, and the voluntary sector. It encompasses the trends towards ‘systems thinking’ (and practice) on the one hand, and (re)connection with local and global ecosystems on the other. Also included in the category of transformative practice are movements towards compassionate business, purpose-driven and values-based leadership, the quadruple bottom line, co-design, and so forth.

At the confluence of these three rivers is the recognition that the way we view ourselves, and the world, needs to change. We can no longer afford to think in silos, focusing on one narrow issue and ignoring the big and complex picture. We can no longer try to impose one standard, 'right' way of doing things, at the expense of diversity. And we can no longer treat problems as if they were static, insisting that the way things have always been is the way they'll always be.

Where next?

Apart from my own teaching, research, and curriculum design work, I don’t know where this ‘mindshifts vs. complex problems’ project is heading yet. I have some vague ideas, but agility will inevitably be necessary!

I’m provisionally thinking about a conference or symposium that would bring together all three groups (the ‘three rivers’) in the summer of 2024, leading into a co-created book and/or a multimedia platform. There are lots of challenges, including all the usual ones - time, head space, and resources. But if these ideas resonate with you, please follow me and stay tuned for more updates!

‍