Think Piece: Food Gardening and Intergenerational Learning in Times of Uncertainty

To people who base their livelihoods on land and animals, climate changes generate experiences of increased livelihood uncertainty. With the point of departure in a case story from the Amanzi for Food project in the Eastern Cape and older case material on community gardens in Port Elizabeth, in this paper I reflect on ways of experiencing and coping with uncertain livelihood conditions. The focus of discussion is the intergenerational interactions and learning processes involved in food gardening and their role in shaping responses to uncertainty which point towards ‘creative solutions’ rather than ‘debilitation’ (cf. Calkins, 2016:2)

HAVEARBEJDE: Moralsk praksis i en sydafrikansk storby

Ten years after democratization, the township areas surrounding South African cities are still dominated by poverty and unemployment. For most township inhabitants, wage employment is not an option, and they engage in numerous activities to provide their families with the daily bread. One of these activities is the cultivation of vegetables in community gardens. In Port Elizabeth, community garden projects have received support from a number of development institutions working in the townships. Development institutions and township inhabitants alike regard cultivation as not just a matter of putting food on the table, but also an activity with significant moral connotations. To the township inhabitants, the moral person is a person who continuously participates in social networks through everyday exchanges with family and neighbours, and ritual exchanges with their forefathers. Cultivation of the soil provides cultivators with crops for those exchanges and creates a feeling of being close to the forefathers. Furthermore, cultivators underline that morality becomes embodied through hard work, which teaches people good social behaviour. Development institutions, on the other hand, see the moral person as an autonomous individual who works hard to sustain his family and develop and thus proves himself as a good citizen. While development institutions expect cultivators to concentrate their efforts on making the gardens productive and sustainable projects, the cultivators use cultivation as an investment in social relations and focus on the sustainability of their life as such. In this way, cultivators’ practice is also a way of reworking and reinterpreting the meaning of a development intervention to fit a local moral world. &nbsp

Editorial: Understanding Collective Learning and Human Agency in Diverse Social, Cultural and Material Settings

The significance of environment and sustainability education research and practice, and its potential contribution to a sustainable future for humanity, is conveyed by the International Social Science Council (n.d.), which explains:People everywhere will need to learn how to create new forms of human activity and new social systems that are more sustainable and socially just. However, we have limited knowledge about the type of learning that creates such change, how such learning emerges, or how it can be scaled-up to create transformations at many levels.Here, the important shift is towards considering what social systems, forms of knowledge, learning processes and questions of justice are associated with perpetuating or halting the decline of Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems. This edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education contributes three research papers and a themed Think Piece collection to these international deliberations about the role of education in enabling transformations to sustainability. Collectively, the articles highlight how relationality and the formation of human agency in socio-cultural and material settings in past–present–future configurations underpin all environment-oriented learning processes. The three research papers constituting the first part of this volume offer glimpses into how current unsustainable socio-cultural and material configurations might be transformed to address social inequalities and damaged people–nature relations. The Think Piece collection, introduced by Lotz-Sisitka, Læssøe and Jørgensen later in this editorial, focuses on how learning can foster and contribute to the development of change agents and collective agency for climate-resilient development

Statens eller familiens børn? Tvang og omsorg i mødet mellem nytilkomne familier og danske daginstitutioner

ResuméNytilkomne familier bliver mødt med mange krav fra den danske velfærdsstat. Et af kravene er, at de skal sende deres 0-6 årige børn i dagtilbud, så forældrene kan gå på sprogskole eller komme i praktik. Artiklen belyser nogle af de dilemmaer, der opstår i forældresamarbejdet i mødet mellem pædagoger og nytilkomne familier. Disse dilemmaer udspringer af den myndighedsrolle som pædagogerne har, samtidig med at de ofte får en tæt relation til forældrene, og har et oprigtigt ønske om at hjælpe både børn og forældre til at kunne navigere rundt i det danske samfund. Artiklen bygger på etnografisk feltarbejde i fire kommuner, og de valgte eksempler viser, hvordan pædagogerne navigerer mellem omsorg og magtudøvelse, og hvordan magtrelationen mellem forældre og pædagoger kan være uklar for forældrene og i nogle tilfælde også for pædagogerne selv. Artiklen giver ikke svar på dilemmaerne, men peger på behovet for en stadig professionel refleksion over de pædagogiske udfordringer i forældresamarbejdet samt over den politiske kontekst, som forældresamarbejde med nytilkomne familier indgår i. AbstractChildren of the state or children of the family? Care and coercion in the encounter between refugee families and Danish day-care institutions. Newly arrived families in Denmark are faced with multiple requirement by the Danish welfare state and it is mandatory that they send their children to Danish day-care institutions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in four day-care institutions in Denmark this article sheds light on some of the dilemmas that arise in the encounter between refuge families and Danish pedagogues. More specifically we focus on the notion “forældresamarbejde” – a term which connotes the widespread idea that parents and institutions must communicate in an intimate way and work together to create the best circumstances for the concerted cultivation of children. Through concrete ethnographic cases we discuss how pedagogues attempt to manage the dilemma between caring for children without disempowering their parents and argue that the pedagogical task requires tact and sensitivity faced with dilemmas that admit no easy resolution since they are inherently contradictory

Understanding Collective Learning and Human Agency in Diverse Social, Cultural and Material Settings

The significance of environment and sustainability education research and practice, and its potential contribution to a sustainable future for humanity, is conveyed by the International Social Science Council (n.d.), which explains: People everywhere will need to learn how to create new forms of human activity and new social systems that are more sustainable and socially just. However, we have limited knowledge about the type of learning that creates such change, how such learning emerges, or how it can be scaled-up to create transformations at many levels.Here, the important shift is towards considering what social systems, forms of knowledge, learning processes and questions of justice are associated with perpetuating or halting the decline of Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems. This edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education contributes three research papers and a themed Think Piece collection to these international deliberations about the role of education in enabling transformations to sustainability. Collectively, the articles highlight how relationality and the formation of human agency in socio-cultural and material settings in past–present–future configurations underpin all environment-oriented learning processes. The three research papers constituting the first part of this volume offer glimpses into how current unsustainable socio-cultural and material configurations might be transformed to address social inequalities and damaged people–nature relations. The Think Piece collection, introduced by Lotz-Sisitka, Læssøe and Jørgensen later in this editorial, focuses on how learning can foster and contribute to the development of change agents and collective agency for climate-resilient development

Sustainability education and social inclusion in Nordic early childhood education

This article explores the relations and tensions between sustainability education and social inclusion in the context of Nordic early childhood education. Based on ethnographic field studies of ecological sustainability education in socially vulnerable neighborhoods, we discuss how a focus on access to nature experiences and nature education appears to overlook societal mechanisms of exclusion, which frame and get entangled with sustainability education activities. This, we argue, becomes a barrier for inclusive sustainability education, but it also prevents attention being paid to ambivalent emotions connected with relations to nature that could be a key to developing further the content of early childhood sustainability education. (DIPF/Orig.)Dieser Artikel untersucht die Beziehungen und Spannungen zwischen Nachhaltigkeitsbildung und sozialer Integration im Kontext der nordischen frühkindlichen Bildung. Basierend auf ethnographischen Feldstudien zur ökologischen Nachhaltigkeitsbildung in sozial gefährdeten Nachbarschaften diskutieren die Autoren, wie ein Fokus auf den Zugang zu Naturerfahrungen und Naturbildung gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzungsmechanismen zu übersehen scheint, die Aktivitäten der Nachhaltigkeitsbildung einrahmen und mit diesen verflochten sind. Dies, so argumentieren die Autoren, wird zu einer Barriere für eine inklusive Nachhaltigkeitsbildung, aber es behindert auch die Aufmerksamkeit für ambivalente Emotionen in den Naturbeziehungen, was ein Schlüssel zur Weiterentwicklung der Inhalte frühkindlicher Nachhaltigkeitsbildung sein könnte. (DIPF/Orig.