In this episode of The (Re)generative Education Podcast I chat with Maria Garcia Alvarez, senior lecturer at the Global Project Management and Change Management at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences as well as a Earthcharter certified lecturer. She is a self-described educational rebel that works to transform education in line with life. Maria argues for the importance of helping learners to ask more, deeper and better questions in their quest to become change agents. In her education she leaves from a value-based approach to engaging with sustainability as education. She argues passionate for a re-association of our relationships with the rest of the natural world, sketching the role of an educator as facilitating the reconnecting with other forms of life and to learn to truly care and steward for the ecosystems of which we are part and expressions. One of the ways she does this is by using the overview effect, showing the Earth in all of its beauty, grandeur and vulnerability of the little blue dot we call our home.

In this discussion the following systemic barriers and opportunities emerged:

Seeing sustainability as a way of thinking and being as part of ecosystems.
Start by challenging the worldviews of learners, the status-quo of their thinking, before working with transforming existing (eco)systems.
The importance of challenging what is normal, and what should be.
The power of realizing that the way we perceive and look at the world is socially constructed and can thus be reconstructured (much like the systems we have co-created over time).
The challenge and importance of reconnecting with ecosystems as educational institutions, including leveraging the strengths of (natural) ecological systems such as collaboration and regeneration.
The contradiction between the financial’s sectors impact on (higher) education and the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The difficulty of changing higher education at the institutional level and transgressing from the ivory tower to the entangled university of the future and the question whether it is possible to take the necessary steps to go through this transformation.
The need for deconstruction of the university and higher education so that a new version can be constructed that focusses on ecosystem learning.
Teachers can be key players in the transition towards a more sustainable future.
Systemic problems with hierarchial models in education that do not reward those that are practicing the change.

External Links

Maria G. | LinkedIn

María García Alvarez - Earth Charter

Maria Garcia Alvarez | Social Innovation Lab

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