Situated environmental learning in Southern Africa at the start of the UN decade of education for sustainable development
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/183059 , vital:43908 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0814062600001737"
- Description: Within the globalising trajectory of modernism, conservation, then environmental (EE) and now sustainability education (ESD) have each emerged as developing responses to risk produced by and in the modern state. Through adopting a long term process perspective, this paper narrates the emergence of situated learning perspectives and a developing re-orientation of EE at the start of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD). We identified the need to examine ESD practice in responses to recent ESD consultations in 14 southern African countries, where a rhetorical marking was noted in discussions on ESD practices, particularly with regard to changing teaching and learning processes. The paper narrates how an interplay of review, research and practical engagement activities have all contributed to an extended critical review of learning interactions in environmental education in an attempt to provide useful perspective for educational activities within the UNDESD. We found that EE and ESD initiatives only acquired more substantive meaning and coherent orientation when examined within ongoing inquiries into situated learning, agency and risk reduction in contexts of poverty, vulnerability and risk, the key concern to us in this paper and the primary focus of the WEHAB (Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity) sustainable development agenda in the region.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/183059 , vital:43908 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0814062600001737"
- Description: Within the globalising trajectory of modernism, conservation, then environmental (EE) and now sustainability education (ESD) have each emerged as developing responses to risk produced by and in the modern state. Through adopting a long term process perspective, this paper narrates the emergence of situated learning perspectives and a developing re-orientation of EE at the start of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD). We identified the need to examine ESD practice in responses to recent ESD consultations in 14 southern African countries, where a rhetorical marking was noted in discussions on ESD practices, particularly with regard to changing teaching and learning processes. The paper narrates how an interplay of review, research and practical engagement activities have all contributed to an extended critical review of learning interactions in environmental education in an attempt to provide useful perspective for educational activities within the UNDESD. We found that EE and ESD initiatives only acquired more substantive meaning and coherent orientation when examined within ongoing inquiries into situated learning, agency and risk reduction in contexts of poverty, vulnerability and risk, the key concern to us in this paper and the primary focus of the WEHAB (Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity) sustainable development agenda in the region.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2006
Cholera in KwaZulu-Natal: Probing institutional governmentality and indigenous hand-washing practices
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373574 , vital:66704 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122699"
- Description: The paper reviews education activities in a successful anti-cholera campaign amongst rural communities in eastern southern Africa. It is centred on probing how a modern institutional governmentality was relatively blind to an historical legacy of Nguni hand-washing practices and came to exclude use of simple tests for coliform contamination in rural health education activities. The study examines institutional processes, probing discontinuities between the health education message and the complex social ecology of cholera. In so doing, it uncovers how a post-apartheid institutional rhetoric of participation, empowerment and social transformation is playing out in communicative interventions to instil healthier practices amongst the rural poor. Institutional perspectives such as this are rooted in an institutional legacy of appropriation and control. Despite the current rhetoric of participation, instrumental orientations are being sustained as the radical critique of struggle for freedom and change gives way, through comfortable submission and intellectual conformity, to an instrumental conservatism in many post-apartheid institutional settings today. The study notes and probes a surprising resonance between the ecology of the disease and an intergenerational social capital of indigenous hand-washing practices. The evidence suggests that these patterns of hand-washing practice would have served to contain the disease in earlier times and points to this social capital as a focus for co-engaged action on environment and health concerns. The findings suggest that an opposing of institutional and indigenous knowledge is not a simple matter and that moving beyond a legacy of cultural exclusion and marginalisation remains a challenge as the first decade of post-apartheid democratic governance comes to a close.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373574 , vital:66704 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122699"
- Description: The paper reviews education activities in a successful anti-cholera campaign amongst rural communities in eastern southern Africa. It is centred on probing how a modern institutional governmentality was relatively blind to an historical legacy of Nguni hand-washing practices and came to exclude use of simple tests for coliform contamination in rural health education activities. The study examines institutional processes, probing discontinuities between the health education message and the complex social ecology of cholera. In so doing, it uncovers how a post-apartheid institutional rhetoric of participation, empowerment and social transformation is playing out in communicative interventions to instil healthier practices amongst the rural poor. Institutional perspectives such as this are rooted in an institutional legacy of appropriation and control. Despite the current rhetoric of participation, instrumental orientations are being sustained as the radical critique of struggle for freedom and change gives way, through comfortable submission and intellectual conformity, to an instrumental conservatism in many post-apartheid institutional settings today. The study notes and probes a surprising resonance between the ecology of the disease and an intergenerational social capital of indigenous hand-washing practices. The evidence suggests that these patterns of hand-washing practice would have served to contain the disease in earlier times and points to this social capital as a focus for co-engaged action on environment and health concerns. The findings suggest that an opposing of institutional and indigenous knowledge is not a simple matter and that moving beyond a legacy of cultural exclusion and marginalisation remains a challenge as the first decade of post-apartheid democratic governance comes to a close.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Towards a better grasp of what matters in view of ‘the posts’
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182693 , vital:43854 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620500169593"
- Description: This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182693 , vital:43854 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620500169593"
- Description: This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Emerging patterns of abstraction in environmental education: A review of materials, methods and professional development perspectives
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Russo, Vladimir
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Russo, Vladimir
- Date: 2004
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373610 , vital:66707 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462042000258170"
- Description: The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field. And it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thoughts are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions and exclusions he unwittingly performs. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2004
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Russo, Vladimir
- Date: 2004
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373610 , vital:66707 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462042000258170"
- Description: The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field. And it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thoughts are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions and exclusions he unwittingly performs. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2004
Some insights on the gap
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182720 , vital:43856 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145410"
- Description: In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2002
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182720 , vital:43856 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145410"
- Description: In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2002
Detached harmonies : a study in/on developing social processes of environmental education in eastern southern Africa
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 1997
- Subjects: Environmental education -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:1939 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007726
- Description: Long-term social processes are explored to examine the shaping of environmental education in eastern southern Africa. The study opens with early Nguni social figurations when 'to conserve was to hunt.' It then examines colonial conservation on the frontiers of imperial expansion and developing struggles for and against wildlife preservation. These processes shaped an inversion of earlier harmonies as declining wildlife was protected in island sanctuaries of natural wilderness and 'to conserve was not to hunt.' Inside protected areas, conservation management struggles shaped new harmonies of interdependence in nature, enabling better steering choices in developing conservation science institutions. Here more reality congruent knowledge also revealed escalating risk which was linked to a lack of awareness amongst communities of 'others' outside. Within continuing conservation struggles, education in, about and for the environment emerged as new institutional processes of social control. The study examines wilderness experience, interpretation, extension, conservancies and the development of an environmental education field centre, a teacher education programme and a school curriculum. Naming and clarifying the emergent education game for reshaping the awareness and behaviour of others is examined within a developing figuration of environmental education specialists. Particular attention is given to academic and statutory processes shaping environmental education as a field of objective principles and rational processes within modernist continuities and discontinuities into the 1990's. An environmental education field centre, an earth-love curriculum and research on reserve neighbour interaction are examined as political sociologies developing within a declining power gradient and wide ranging socio-political change. Into the present, a final window on a local case of water pollution examines shifting relational dynamics revealing how environment and development education models of process may have little resonance amidst long-term socio-historical struggles and shifting controls over surroundings, others and self. A concluding review suggests that grounded critical processes engaging somewhat blind control over surroundings may yet reshape self-control and social control amongst others. The trajectories of these clarifying struggles must remain open-ended as sedimented myth and memory is reshaped within ongoing processes of escalating risk and global intermeshing.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1997
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 1997
- Subjects: Environmental education -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:1939 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007726
- Description: Long-term social processes are explored to examine the shaping of environmental education in eastern southern Africa. The study opens with early Nguni social figurations when 'to conserve was to hunt.' It then examines colonial conservation on the frontiers of imperial expansion and developing struggles for and against wildlife preservation. These processes shaped an inversion of earlier harmonies as declining wildlife was protected in island sanctuaries of natural wilderness and 'to conserve was not to hunt.' Inside protected areas, conservation management struggles shaped new harmonies of interdependence in nature, enabling better steering choices in developing conservation science institutions. Here more reality congruent knowledge also revealed escalating risk which was linked to a lack of awareness amongst communities of 'others' outside. Within continuing conservation struggles, education in, about and for the environment emerged as new institutional processes of social control. The study examines wilderness experience, interpretation, extension, conservancies and the development of an environmental education field centre, a teacher education programme and a school curriculum. Naming and clarifying the emergent education game for reshaping the awareness and behaviour of others is examined within a developing figuration of environmental education specialists. Particular attention is given to academic and statutory processes shaping environmental education as a field of objective principles and rational processes within modernist continuities and discontinuities into the 1990's. An environmental education field centre, an earth-love curriculum and research on reserve neighbour interaction are examined as political sociologies developing within a declining power gradient and wide ranging socio-political change. Into the present, a final window on a local case of water pollution examines shifting relational dynamics revealing how environment and development education models of process may have little resonance amidst long-term socio-historical struggles and shifting controls over surroundings, others and self. A concluding review suggests that grounded critical processes engaging somewhat blind control over surroundings may yet reshape self-control and social control amongst others. The trajectories of these clarifying struggles must remain open-ended as sedimented myth and memory is reshaped within ongoing processes of escalating risk and global intermeshing.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1997
A critique of the proposed council for the environment national core syllabus for environmental education in South Africa
- Taylor, Jim, O'Donoghue, Rob B, Clacherty, Allistair
- Authors: Taylor, Jim , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Clacherty, Allistair
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450119 , vital:74884
- Description: The Department of Environment Affairs, in cooperation with EEASA, undertook a broad consultative process, a central feature of which was the recent Dikhololo Workshop (see Clacherty in this issue). The process led to the Environmental Education Policy Initiative (EEPI), the purpose of which is to foster broad-based processes to promote policy change with respect to environmental education in formal education. The EEPI is not a unilateral initiative; it seeks to work within existing education policy development and change processes.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1993
- Authors: Taylor, Jim , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Clacherty, Allistair
- Date: 1993
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/450119 , vital:74884
- Description: The Department of Environment Affairs, in cooperation with EEASA, undertook a broad consultative process, a central feature of which was the recent Dikhololo Workshop (see Clacherty in this issue). The process led to the Environmental Education Policy Initiative (EEPI), the purpose of which is to foster broad-based processes to promote policy change with respect to environmental education in formal education. The EEPI is not a unilateral initiative; it seeks to work within existing education policy development and change processes.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1993