by 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.
SDG 4.7 aims to provide learners with the knowledge and competencies they need to make all of the SDGs a reality. In the current context, it also helps to set education on the path toward a sustainable and resilient recovery, by equipping learners and educators alike to better respond to the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This timely book, edited by Radhika Iyengar and Christina T. Kwauk, focuses on exploring the full potential of SDG 4.7. It examines how to “build back better” after the pandemic – collaborating through global citizenship, and with a transformative (society-changing) approach.
This book is one of a kind in the way it brings together a diversity of voices, which all say that because time is of the essence, education planning and delivery mechanisms need to quickly build on the momentum of the SDGs. Such an effort can profitably use some of the frameworks suggested in the book. Although a comprehensive, systems approach has been part of the global educational discourse for a long time, this book explains how to add a layer of implementation, which is the need of the hour.
Every single chapter of the book urges us to pay attention to climate change in education not as a peripheral topic, but as a core part of curriculum design and implementation. The book urges us to look at the various pathways that students learn from. It urges us to see how the messages of climate education and education for sustainable development can become a driving force in the kind of change the global education community envisions.
As in the youth movement created by Greta Thunberg, the voices of youth are loud and clear on climate issues. Young people are getting organized and protesting. They are using digital media to spread awareness about climate change. We hear in this book from student authors themselves, about their hunger to learn about climate and how it affects all the aspects of their day-to-day lives. How they are eager to have a positive impact on their neighborhoods, using the skills and knowledge they get from their formal education. How they also learn how to reverse the human impact on climate from non-school sources, such as online lectures, internships, and educational resources, as well as informally through their communities. We hear their reflections, desires, and determination to demand transformative change.
The experienced teachers among the authors make clear that formal education with its various elements – exams, formal assessments, syllabi – needs to be more project based, more portfolio based (that is, combining learning from school and from outside school), and more open to students’ getting field experience in real-life settings. These teachers raise their voices against top-down structures; they ask rather for the flexibility to meaningfully incorporate SDG 4.7 into their teaching practices.
The book presents a variety of experiences in creating intersectional, transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability and climate education. It makes a strong case that climate change is not only a challenge with regard to sustainable development. It is also a human rights issue, in the remedying of which SDG 4.7’s concept of global citizenship education can serve as a foundation.
For policymakers, ministries of education, and other stakeholders, the book provides kernels of ideas for integrating a transformative vision. It suggests how education for sustainable development and global citizenship education can work at local, regional, and national levels, through formal and non-formal channels.
Non-profits engaged in community organizing for green causes can use some of the frameworks outlined in the book to convert “roadblocks” to climate education into “roadmaps”. Universities, community colleges, and other higher education institutions and technical, vocational, and education training programs can use key lessons from the book to rethink their structures and curricula.
In short, this is an essential book. It provides a starting place at all levels of educational policy for the thinking and, more important, the action, needed to address the most complex and challenging issues facing humanity today. We need to urgently address these issues, with an eye toward fostering a resilient, peaceful, and justice-oriented society for all.