Touchstone #5: Socio-cultural change

The way many humans currently exist on the planet needs to change. This change is cultural and education is a necessarily political player in this process. However, much of current educational practice is anti-environmental. It will not be enough to simply tinker with its edges.

This touchstone places the teacher in the role of activist, who recognizes that choices made in classrooms have explicit and implicit implications for how learners come to understand themselves and the natural world. It also recognizes that the future is no longer predictable, and that children are not growing into the same kind of world that their parents or grandparents did. Thus, educators need to challenge children to respond to uncertainty with creativity, visions for change, and building of shared community outcomes.

With this discussion as background, consider the question:

How did my practice today provide students with possibilities for alternative relational ways of being and knowing, while not furthering a sense of catastrophe fatigue? And what further steps might I take to do so?