Pathways to the Future - Reflections from Tallinn

Jesse, Nea and Sachiko, three of the co-founders of Ekolibria had the privilege to attend a very inspiring conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

Researchers, teachers, practitioners, and students gathered together at the International Conference on education for sustainable development “Pathways to the Future” 22-24 April in Tallinn. Ekolibria was given the opportunity to present a poster at the conference as well as attend the many sessions.

Being a part of this conference, all three of us had various thoughts, deep reflections, and gained many new perspectives. One of the many messages that I (Sachiko) personally received was to make meaning out of the information and knowledge, grounded in yourself and in the specific time and place.

What does it mean to you? How do you feel? How do you make these big issues of sustainability into something personal?

Those were the questions that reached my heart, as to continue asking myself when I go back to being a student and an educator.

Here, I will try to share some of my meaning making and reflections from the conference, and also share the questions that emerged or remained.

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Some argued that education (including ESD) should not be (and/or could not be) neutral or objective. Values are, and should be, embedded. But which values is the ‘right’ one? One of the title of the sessions was “What’s love got to do with it? – Values and Ethics.” What does love have to do with it? And also one question posed by a keynote speaker and organizer Rea Raus was “Can we teach to love nature?”

Many shared ideas to bring in art into science and to integrate knowledge and art. What we need is not to know more, but to change our attitudes, and art was their way of engaging people’s hearts in addition to their minds. How do you bring in art into science? How can you bring in art and creativity into ESD in higher education?

Examples and methods used in or outside of the classroom were shared, and many included a participatory element also in their presentations. Some presenters invited the participants to join a game, an improvised performance, or to throw paper airplanes with messages in the auditorium.

Others made space for us to talk to each other, performed a shadow-play, brought a ‘ecosystem in a bottle’, or showed us a video of using song-making and story-telling for empowerment and sharing experiences for community resilience.

Many presenters were role models of walking the talk – the way you present what they do was also creative and engaging, so that we could also get a gist ourselves of what the students experience.

And perhaps that was the most encouraging part of all – that many people I met were engaging educators. They were people that reminded me of the kind of nice teachers that you recall about, who remembers your name and face, cares how you are doing, and are passionate about their job as a teacher.

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Coming from natural science, removing yourself from the picture was something that I have been trained to do. The idea of research is that it is replicable – anyone else should be able to do the same research and get the same results. “Nature” is objective. Other disciplines also go through the same training that you should never write “I” in academic papers.

I feel that the same could be said for many sustainability discussions, which is based on natural science. Education also has the pressure to be “neutral.”

Rea Raus was also a keynote speaker in the Baltic Conference on ESD in Riga.

Having Deep Ecology as her inspiration, at Riga she talked about the ‘ecological self’, raising the question of how we identify our ‘self’ with nature – the connectedness to Earth, place, time, and other beings.

Shortly after the Riga conference, I took a trip in my home country Japan.

I visited Itsukushima Shrine at an island called Miyajima close to Hiroshima City in western Japan.

The coming and going of tides showed the different faces of the shrine.

It was the first time in my life when I felt the power of the moon and ocean so close to me, and so special, that I might even call it sacred or spiritual.

I reflected on Rea’s speech. I felt that this big, dynamic thing is what is called nature and I was a part of it. I felt so small in that big thing, but having a sense of being a part of it also felt pretty good. Something that I couldn’t feel standing in the concrete jungles of Tokyo. In Tokyo, some days I will feel so lost and isolated, reminding me of the movie Lost in Translation.

The ocean tides and the shrine was the scenery I was imagining when I was listening to Rea talk in Tallinn. Feeling connected to nature and other beings myself is a big step in leading the students to feel that connection. It also relates to her emphasis on developing one’s identity in teacher training – who do you want to be as an educator?

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Bringing subjectivity (what you think and feel) into ESD was my big take away from this conference.

But how?

John Fien from Australia, another keynote speaker, introduced Integral Thinking, which I understood was one way of putting yourself in the picture when talking and teaching about sustainability.

There are four quadrants, and to really understand a topic holistically, you need to look at all four aspects.

He gave an example of water.

How I feel and think about water is the subjective quadrant (I): I feel very attached to this lake, for example.

Then there is an objective quadrant (It), this is how one acts: I go fishing on the lake.

The inter-subjective quadrant (We) is the collective subjective, including shared values, meanings, the symbolic world and culture: This lake has strong religious and cultural meaning to our community.

The final quadrant is the inter-objective (Its), which is the physical reality of natural systems and socio-economic conditions: The lake is the main freshwater resource to inhabitants and the fishing is the primary economic source.

The four quadrants could guide you in having a holistic understanding of water.

He then connected this to transformative learning, which is also the education that Ekolibria is aiming to achieve.

So often does sustainability education talk about holistic thinking, and yet I am unsure if I actually have the tools for it. Perhaps Integral Thinking (Theory) will supplement Systems Thinking through bringing in the subjective (yourself).

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There is more to share and reflect on, but perhaps I will stop here for now.

What I will take back to my work as a student that is writing a thesis, my ideas for Ekolibria and into my course I am coordinating at CEMUS is still in process of digestion.

But I hope to share that process with you again.

Best,

Sachiko

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