Dear Collegues,

With this Special Issue, we aim to contribute to a recent focus on Education for Sustainability (ESD) literature: an attempt to scrutinize the educational efficacy of practices in which humans are engaged in the material world and are quite literally challenged to respond to the remarkable question: ‘Where are we, what and who is at stake, and how do we live together?’

The inspiration for this research focus is twofold. The first is the observation that a global orientation (pursuing sustainability on a planetary scale and as a planetary challenge) often leads to cynical reactions (“we can't do anything”). One way to avoid such cynicism can be found in small-scale, bottom-up practices that arise in concrete places. Such practices pose their ‘own’ issues of sustainability, and allow the inhabitants of these places to take care of these concrete places and things that are present in those places (such as a shoreline, a brownfield, or a park). Secondly, a growing number of studies point at the specific abilities that people (re)acquire in these practices. The responses that emerge in these place-engaged practices are neither instrumental (with a focus on the question: ‘how do I fix this problem?’) nor emancipatory (with a focus on the question: Who am I, and who do I need to be(come)?). Instead, they propel humans to attentively care for the many relationships and dependencies (social, material, spatial) in that place. Humans are in these practices not in some sort of leading position towards more sustainable ways of living, but are part and parcel of living together with both human and non-human actors.

Researchers have started to articulate the distinctive characteristics of a pedagogy that aims to learn to navigate in these more-than-human worlds and become able to compose a response to the question of what these situated worlds need in order to thrive and prosper.  (Decuypere et al., 2019; Schildermans et al., 2019; Weaver & Snaza, 2017;  Taylor, 2017; Rousell, 2016). We invite scholars to elaborate on one or more of the following topics and questions and in doing so discuss the outspoken educational dynamic of these initiatives:

• what kind of educational activities, tools, and dynamics can foster this sensitivity to the human and non-human entanglements in particular places or establish a learning milieu in which humans learn to think in the presence of these entanglements.
• how, through these activities, tools, and dynamics, do specific abilities of, for example, noticing, corresponding, regenerating, commoning, valuing, and imagining become possible and how do these differ from activities, tools, and dynamics that abstract, represent, clarify, make visible, etc.
• how can this pedagogy intensify the experience that something is at stake in inhabiting the world in the here-and-now (rather than in a globally projected future) and make possible an attentiveness to the ways in which humans and things (can) hold together?

We welcome contributions that elaborate extensively on one particular case in the broad range of formal and nonformal education types and in very different places (urban rural, (non)Western). We equally welcome more theory-driven reflections on how such place-engaged pedagogies have the potential to reconfigure humanist conceptualizations of time, space, and more-than-human collectives.

Decuypere, M., Hoet, H., & Vandenabeele, J. (2019). Learning to Navigate (in) the Anthropocene. Sustainability, 11(2), 547. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. Rousell, D. (2016). Dwelling in the Anthropocene: Reimagining University Learning Environments in Response to Social and Ecological Change. Australian journal of environmental education, 32 (2), p.137-153. Schildermans, H., Vandenabeele, J. & Vlieghe, J., (2019). Study Practices and the Creation of a Common World. Unearthing the dynamics of an urban farming initiative. Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 31 (2), 87-108. Weaver, J. A., & Snaza, N. (2017). Against methodocentrism in educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1055–1065.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Education Sciencese.

Prof. Dr. Joke Vandenabeele
Prof. Dr. Mathias Decuypere
Prof. Dr. Katia Biedenkopf
Prof. Dr. Matthias Lievens
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• place-engaged practices
• more-than-human pedagogy
• Anthropocene
• formal education
• non-formal education