Overcoming the erosion of childhood in times of systemic global dysfunction
Most welcome to an on-line keynote presentation with professor Arjen Wals within the ‘Global Childhoods research group’.
Many children today grow up in technologically mediated worlds that serve commercial interests. Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) inform much of what we do, also as parents and as teachers. Like adults, they come to live in a world of perpetual distraction and stimuli overload. This is not just a ' Western phenomenon' but rather a global one. affecting people of all creeds and socio-economic backgrounds. Videophilia (our love for screens) has replaced biophilia (our love for the living world) and our sense of technology and the call for digital literacy has become stronger than our sense of place and ecological literacy. Richard Louv introduced the notion of nature deficiency disorder over two decades ago already. When loosing our connection with the living environment we also loose the incentive to take care of it. Early childhood is formative and probably decisive in creating a healthy foundation for a sustainable world. In my talk I will speak about a relational place-based pedagogy that can transgress the current erosion of childhood focusing on children's entanglement with the world and the cultivating relations needed to nurture such entanglement underpinned by an ethic of care and solidarity.
Arjen Wals is a Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University where he also holds the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development. Furthermore, he is a Guest Professor at the Norwegian University for the Life Sciences (NMBU). He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Gothenburg.
His work focusses on enabling, supporting and assessing ecologies of learning that foster sustainable living by inviting more relational, ethical and critical ways of knowing and being. Much of his research focusses on the development of Whole Institution Approaches to sustainability and the decolonization of education.
He writes a regular blog that signals developments in the emerging field of sustainability education: www.transformativelearning.nl