EDUCATION
Most of our worldviews are created and shaped during our formative years of childhood and adolescence - the majority of which is spent in school. Transforming national educational systems is a key platform for systemic change. Below are some resources created by people doing just that.
The following educational process represents a conversation starter on Degrowth. However, given the interest and time availability it could be more than this. It has been created in the context of a workshop facilitated and further developed by Amerissa Giannouli, youth worker and project manager at Inter Alia NGO.
It contains questions and activities designed to stimulate critical thinking, along with resources to help facilitators build their arguments and present key aspects of Degrowth, such as the critique of growth and policy proposals for Degrowth. Download the toolkit here, or on Amerissa's website.
Games, Activities
Endlich Wachstum have created an impressive amount of educational resources looking at economic growth, what it is, how it affects us, how it affects the environment, and what alternatives exist beyond growth. They have developed interactive games designed for small to medium groups with one or two facilitators. All materials are provided.
Interactive Charts and Doughnuts
Very good source of interactive data based on Kate Raworth's doughnut model and related findings - great resource for teachers to create hands-on assignments and exercises! E.g. select individual countries to compare their performance relative to the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries. Check out a world map with our results, or explore relationships between variables to see what different thresholds for a good life would mean for sustainability.
Teacher Training
The Kreisau-Initiative brings a host of trainings for teachers and non-formal multipliers aimed at promoting the concept of “transformative education”. "By introducing a critical-emancipatory perspective, we wish to multiply methods that allow for a deconstruction of “mental infrastructures” such as the growth paradigm." Based in Germany-Poland, trainings run in Polish, German and English.
Research by Silja Graupe
Modern textbook economics has created a true monoculture of thought. Worldwide, it alone introduces the neoclassicism without even mentioning possible alternatives. At the same time, it consistently refrains from teaching economic thinking itself: no history of theory, hardly any methodology, no introduction to alternative perspectives. I consider this kind of economic education to be short-sighted and irresponsible. Consequently, I have criticized it in many ways in my publications as well as in my lectures, and I point out alternatives.
Readings available in english:
"The Power of Ideas. The Teaching of Economics and its Image of Man" (2012)
"“The market deals out profits and losses” – How Standard Economic Textbooks Promote Uncritical Thinking in Metaphors" (2019)
ECONOMIC GROWTH, BIOPHYSICAL LIMITS AND SUSTAINABILITY IN ECONOMICS TEXTBOOKS SINCE 1948
Chapter by Tom L. Green, Handbook on Growth and Sustainability, 2017
An historical investigation of economic textbooks and how they treat economic growth and the environment from the 1940s (when growth was quasi inexistent as a concept let alone as an object of policy) to the present day.
Article by Susie Steed, 2020
A brilliant questioning of current mainstream economics curricula, repleat with recources for incorporating other perspectives in order to shape a new curricula that reframes the history of modern capitalism.
Article by Tom L. Green, 2017
A 60-year history of how economics has been taught to undergraduates, focusing specifically on Paul Samuelson’s Economics textbook. What was thought to be essential for students to learn about economics and how has this evolved (or not) with time?
Article by Simon Choat, 2020
Recent calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ are especially pertinent to the teaching of political theory, which has traditionally been dominated by a canon made up overwhelmingly of White (and male) thinkers. This article explores why and how political theory curricula might be decolonised.
Short Guide by The Decolonisation Group, Utrecht University
A Teaching Guide, as its name suggests, is a guide we came up with as a product of a workshop. The workshop was about sharing and discussing our techniques and practices in the classroom. The fruitful discussions and ideas that were shared during the workshop are put together in this paper. This is not a definitive set of recommendations, but a list of suggestions and ideas about how we as a group try to decolonise teaching. It's available both in Dutch and English.
Article by Hanne Svarstad, International Studies in Sociology of Education, E2021
Drawing on critical pedagogy, political ecology, and environmental justice, Hanne Svarstad suggests the elaboration of a critical climate education that would provide citizens with knowledge and skills to respond to the climate crisis with responsible action.
AUDIO/VISUAL
A list of inspiring and critical audio-visual materials on climate change, educational systems and hegemonic forms of knowledge.
Documentary, 2019
Shot in Australia about Dujuan, a young aboriginal boy who is a healer in his community but a truant in his school. Participative observation and cinematic camera-work makes this documentary come to life as it draws the viewer in to the realities of a colonial educational system that suffocates other worlds and systems of knowledge.
Podcast, 2021
A moving, intelligent and at times sad journey travelling in reverse through the BBC archives to trace some of the present problems and oblique antecedents of the environmental crisis. It begins from the uncontroversial acceptance that man-made climate change is real and that the consequent cascading problems affecting the earth’s life-sustaining systems are exacerbated by the apparent difficulty of collective action in a deeply unequal world. The effects of climate change are projected to be felt everywhere and are also projected to fall disproportionately on the poor and vulnerable – and on those historically least responsible for the problem.
TAMBIEN LA LLUVIA
Film, 2010
A dramatic look at colonialism and its legacy in Latin America though the eyes of Quechua pepole hired to make an epic biopic of the arrival of Colombus to the Americas. Narrative fiction mixed-in with real life events of the Cochabamba Water War of 2010.
Documentary, 2010
A careful and critical look at how 'development' and well-meaning charity translates into present-day schooling of indigenous cultures in the Global South. Whos values and systems of knowledge are learnt and at what cost?