Chapter 17
Bringing the Classroom Back to Life Jonathan Dawson and Hugo Oliveira Our educational systems are in crisis, beset by multiple sources of disruption. These include the growing gulf between the mindsets, competencies, and skills required to address our converging “wicked” crises and those provided by a conventional university education, as well as growing student dissatisfaction with what is being offered. This is something that cannot be tackled using the old methods alone. Replacing one set of textbooks with another is not going to do the trick. The revolution that is required in our educational practice needs to be felt on an embodied level as much as understood cognitively. It can be described as nothing short of bringing the classroom back to life. “New approaches to teaching and learning reject the conventional neat separation between the observer and the observed that is central to traditional, mechanistic, educational philosophy.” Jonathan Dawson is head of economics at Schumacher College in England, where he coordinates and teaches/facilitates on the innovative Economics for Transition postgraduate program. Hugo Oliveira is a landscape ecologist and permaculture specialist at OrlaDesign and a researcher at the Center for Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Change at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Last May received the 2nd edition of the "Nature-Based Design Frameworks" a Center for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Change (CE3C) Advanced course, from the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences @ the Lisbon Botanical Garden. |
Orla DesignEco Social Regeneration Archives
August 2021
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