Towards Climate- and Ecosocial Curricula
Based at Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE) and Common Ecologies in collaboration with Casa dels Futurs Barcelona, the project discusses how to bring socio-ecological education into the existing curriculum and schools of public education systems, in Europe and worldwide.
This project (2024 is its pilot year) brings together schoolteachers, educators, parents, policy makers and activists who think the socio-ecological crisis urgently needs to be addressed in schools. It proceeds via collective online fora and labs that investigate the state of eco-social education in different contexts, identify needs and potentials, and exchange tools, tactics, as well as campaign experiences across different institutional frames and local-national contexts. In this process, we are building a mutual support network of educator-activists within which broader campaigns, demands and approaches are discussed and tested, as well as an archive of existing eco-social learning materials and curricula.
Our process is open to all and sets out to provide a frame for mutual support in our efforts to make education reflect socio-ecological crises and knowledge about them, from the smallest attempts to bring exercises and materials into classrooms, to larger campaigns within specific institutions as well as at different national levels. This is a co-research process that seeks to respond to specific needs and situations of participants and is therefore open-ended and flexible.
- What tactics and strategies are teachers, students and parents trying out currently, to get eco-social education onto their institution's agenda?
- What is the role of education NGOs, policy makers, administrators and activists in working with public schools? What synergies can be built?
- What core concepts, matters and methods does eco-social education need to feature at different age levels?
- What is the state of the art of eco-social education across different regional contexts in and beyond Europe, who are pioneer actors at the school, political, social movement and social level?
- What demands may we forge across different regional and social contexts, when it comes to public eco-social education?
Public schools are the most fundamental and vital organs for establishing consciousness and knowledge about eco-social matters from an early age. Whether at primary, secondary or higher education levels, educational institutions are sites where knowledge and values for resilience, justice and earth care must be discussed and forged. Children and young people care a great deal about climate and ecological crisis and suffer a great deal from anxieties relating to their future, yet at this stage few national curricula take our current ecological crisis into account at all, not to mention its social dimensions. It matters a great deal that schools become sites for learning about how to imagine and build sustainable futures, empower young people to be active at different levels, and offer training and knowledge that students find useful for future work and life. Ecological and social matters are highly interdependent, as sustainable and just futures are part of the same problem of building worlds where human and more-than-human life are valued and cared for. This is the core idea of eco-social education we pursue here.
Activities
Between January and September 2024, the project held monthly online forums featuring campaigns and tools presentations with a focus on participatory co-research and debate; two online laboratories focusing on specific traditions and methodologies of situated co-learning and campaigning; and an in-person meeting to collaborate, assess our progress, launch the archive of materials we had compiled, and transition into our next phase together.
Launch of Ways into Ecosocial Education
In the fall of 2026, Common Ecologies’ ecosocial education strand, who have worked across all corners of the European Continent and to South Africa in recent years, will launch their guidebook Ways into Ecosocial Education. The guidebook looks at different positionalities and stakeholders in education and how they may come together to shape ecosocial education for our times.
Parents, teachers, teacher trainers, school directors and administrators, policy makers, researchers, activists and students are all welcome! Co-funded by CApE, this translocally comparative project develops tools and pedagogies for situated, context-specific, place based and embodied ecosocial learning and justice.
The launch will take place at CApE in Læderstræde 20, Copenhagen. Here we invite you to think with us about how this book can be useful and translated for the Danish context, in a presentation and short workshop followed by a reception. See our calendar for more information.
Researcher
Manuela Zechner, External Researcher, +4535323213