Ethical deliberations in environmental education workplaces: a case story of contextualised and personalised reflexivity
- Authors: Olvitt, Lausanne L
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437421 , vital:73377 , ISBN 9789086867578 , https://doi.org/10.3920/9789086867578_0010
- Description: This chapter explores the fluidity and complexity of individual ethical deliberations in an environmental education workplace and ‘teases out’the associated learning processes. Based on the author’s recent doctoral research, the chapter tells the story of one South African environmental educator grappling with environmentoriented ethical tensions in his work. These ten-sions range from immediate officebased concerns such as paper wastage, to wider concerns such as lowering his carbon footprint through his choice of transport. The environmental educator has recently completed a one-year part-time course in environmental education. Does the course’s new capital of concepts and terminology influence his ethical deliberations? Does learning about environmental philosophies and other people’s ethical dilemmas support him to deepen his engage-ment with ethical tensions in his ownwork? The case study suggests that course-based learning processes are not espe-cially influential until they interface with the multi-layered soci-ocultural and historical dynamics in work-based and home-based ethical deliberations. Deciding what is ‘right’, and then teaching others about that ‘rightness’ is not as simple as know-ing the facts or norms, and acting on them. Past experiences, cultural norms, religious convictions, power gradients and even logistical constraints, all influence the nature and outcome of individual ethical deliberations, as do people’s future aspira-tions and their professional identities as environmental educa-tors.
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In pursuit of participation tracking the influence of local action for sustainable development
- Authors: Kulundu, Injairu
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/437123 , vital:73332 , ISBN 978-1-919991-81-8 , https://transformativelearning.education/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/reviews-on-social-learning-literature.pdf
- Description: This literature review charts the cumulative lessons that have emerged from the participatory development discourse in its various guises over the past fifty years, relating them to current emerging perspectives on social learning. Acknowledging the tensions that occur when the theoreti-cally sound proponents of the participatory discourse are translated into practice, this review seeks to outline the practical and ethical implications of this terrain. It will do so with reference to three points in its evolution: the great influence of Participatory Development (popularly known through focuses such as Participatory Rural Appraisal), the effect of Hu-man Development and the Capabilities Approach, and lastly, the growing discourse on Social Learning and what its ideas contribute to the dis-course. As such the paper helps to ‘locate’ social learning discourse within the wider arena of participatory development, showing the antecedent links that exist between social learning discourse (as it is emerging today), and wider participatory development discourses. The paper argues that more attention needs to be given to the ‘hidden work’ involved in turning all of these theories of participatory development, learning and agency into practice, and that the discourses can only really live in practice, a process for which we can only partially be prepared for by our literature (re)views.
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