Environmental literacies for regenerative and sustainable futures: indigenous and traditional perspectives

Abstract

Education for Sustainability (EfS) as practiced within formal higher education institutions (HEIs), colleges and schools is seldom evidenced to engage deeply with indigenous and traditional environmental literacies (ITELs) (Blenkinsop et al., 2017; Van Poeck and Vandenabeele, 2012). Indigenous refers to environmental literacies originating from indigenous knowledge systems and traditional to those developed through long standing faith, spiritual, and/or cultural traditions. This research inquiry explores and investigates the use of ITELs for EfS and regeneration in non-formal educational contexts in Scotland and Malawi. Foregrounding ITELs, this post-qualitative inquiry utilises a decolonial and pluriversal approach that decentres universalised, dualist, Euro-Western narratives of humans and nature as separate entities (Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew, 2020). Contributing to the industrial revolution, these narratives have globally propagated capitalist, materialist, notions of socio-economic development at the cost of the natural environment (Stein, 2019). This research inquiry, therefore, centres historically marginalised knowledge systems, philosophies, and literacies specifically as they relate to human-nature relationality to respond to contemporary sustainability challenges. The decolonial and pluriversal approach informs the theoretical framework for the study that recognises plural ways of knowing and being and brings together three distinct but intertwining theoretical spaces from across geographies and time. The framework draws from: ecopedgagogy as it has developed from the theory and practice of critical pedagogy, originating from the work of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (Kahn, 2010); deep ecology and the concepts behind the long-range deep ecology movement as envisioned by Norwegian philosopher and activist Arne Naess (Naess, 1986); and traditional and contemporary philosophies of Islamic Environmentalism (IE) as they relate to human-nature relationality (Gade, 2019; Nasr, 1987). These three spaces create the decolonial and pluriversal theoretical lens for the study intertwining modern educational theory with faith-based paradigms, bridging “Eastern” and “Western” thought and practice. The theoretical lens enables the creation of educational spaces that allow for a diversity of individuals and plurality of knowledges to come together and create effective responses to the environmental crisis. It also informs the participatory and creative methodologies used for the data generation activities of the study. I designed a series of themed workshops to revive, apply, and celebrate ITELs and facilitated them with student and community participants at a HEI and community organisation in Scotland, including a condensed workshop with members of the Sustainable Futures Global Network (a social enterprise with a focus on creating ethical, equitable, partnerships for sustainability research and practice) in Malawi. I used a range of participatory methods including reflective discussions, problem solving with Ketso, Sharing Circles, embodied expressions, and arts-based inquiry to generate multimodal data. My findings demonstrate that the use of ITELs for EfS promoted holistic material and spiritual conceptions of human-nature relationality, including reflections on articulation of interconnectedness, enabling participants to revive this core ITEL literacy. The findings also show that using an ITEL approach to problem solve for contemporary sustainability challenges enabled the articulation of strong resistance to environmentally destructive norms, greater understanding of the “other”, and expressions of hopeful resilience. Further, using an ITEL focused ecopedagogy enabled the acknowledgement and honouring of each other’s diversity, allowing us to celebrate each other and the plurality of knowledges and literacies we brought to the workshop spaces