Situated Learning in Relation to Human Conduct and Social-Ecological Change

Abstract

This chapter traces how education has developed to provide orientation in a modern world that is characterised by emerging risk. It examines how ESD initially developed as a modernist process to enable social reorientation and has been centred on problem-solving engagement in relation to issues and risk. The intractable complexity of most social -ecological problems has meant that change - orientated and transformative imaginaries arising in learning are not easily realised in tangible change to resolve the problems at hand. The chapter thus poses the question, ``Is ESD as situated learning with transgressive social -ecological reorientation possible ?{''} To address this question, the study reviews ESD as a reflexive social process in modernity and tracks some of the expansive trajectories in the developing field over the last 10 years of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in Southern Africa. To situate and contemplate learning interactions, the issues of waste, climate change and biodiversity loss are briefly examined as learning-led processes of situated social change. In each case the focus is on the interplay of context, life experience and new environmental knowledge to probe how ethics-led knowledge work is foundational in reflexive learning processes that might enable change. The three cases are then contemplated in a teacher professional development and school curriculum context as learning processes where knowledge acquisition with participation and reflexive learning are contemplated in and as open-ended learning progressions. The study concludes that an overemphasis on problems and problem-solving in ESD pedagogy needs reframing in relation to matters of concern and purposeful human conduct, so that situated learning progressions might more directly enable learning-led change that is satisfying and contributes to the common good