Abstract
In this paper I explore some of the roles that education can and needs to play in supporting “the great socio-ecological transition”, with particular emphasis on adult and vocational education and training. After briefly outlining some of the facets of the current pluricrisis, I examine a set of intersecting debates about transformation and transition(s) towards a more sustainable future, which is necessarily also more just. In this analysis, I build beyond the social science traditions usually evoked in these debates to draw on Catholic analyses of the nature of the problem. Catholic Social Teaching began with a concern about the effects of the transition to industrialisation, with Rerum Novarum (published by Pope Leo XIII in 1891), and increasingly has sought to address the need for the next transition beyond the Capitalocene, especially in Laudato Si’ (published by Pope Francis in 2015). It has always placed workers, work and learning at its core. Thus, there is much potentially to be gained from bringing together conventional educational research perspectives on education for sustainable development and education for human development with a Catholic Social Teaching lens in thinking about the possible roles for education in supporting just transitions.
1 Introduction
As humans, we face an acute set of intersecting crises. Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic has had the most visible global effects, more chronically we face crises of climate, democracy and inequality. It is increasingly clear in social science terms that we need another great transformation (cf. Polanyi 1944; Boulding 1964) or what has been more recently described as a set of just transitions (cf. Swilling 2020). Whilst there is a large secular literature on these issues, the whole of a century-and-a-third of writing of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has engaged with aspects of what some now call the Capitalocene, insisting that the problem is with capitalism, not people (Moore 2016). This paper starts from the assumption that this perspective can inform mainstream debates about education for just transitions. As the introduction to this special issue points out, we must be wary of talking of a single Catholic position. Nonetheless, CST’s core is a set of papal encyclicals that come from both the central authority of the Church and new encyclicals consciously seeking to form part of a consistent, though evolving, tradition.
The dangers of capitalism for humanity were at the heart of the initial impetus for CST, as represented by the encyclical Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII 1891), with its powerful condemnation of what capitalism did to individuals, families and communities. It was re-presented in the aftermath of the wave of political decolonisation in the critique of “underdevelopment” and “superdevelopment” in the encyclical Populorum Progressio (Paul VI 1967). More recently, especially in the encyclical Laudato Si’ (Francis 2015), it has developed into a focus on the environmental dimension of this wider crisis for humanity. Together, these and other texts from CST form the heart of integral human development (Deneulin 2021) – integral human development is the Church’s normative account of what a just transition would look like – reflected since 2017 in a dicastery (equivalent of a government ministry) in the Vatican.
Both Catholic and social science blueprints for a better future are centred on notions of radical change, whether this be radical incrementalism (Swilling 2020) or theological notions of metanoia and ecological conversion. Whilst some approaches to transitions tend towards techno-utopianism (Anderson 2016), I will focus on a shared understanding that “The Great Transition is a human event and humans are at its centre” (Raskin et al. 2002, 60).
Written from the perspective of a Catholic social scientist (who has no formal theological training), this paper looks at what potential roles education can play in bringing about these radical changes leading towards a flourishing future for people and planet (Sen 1993), and at the obstacles along the way towards this normative goal. By education, I expressly do not mean schooling, which too often is the understanding of the word by bishops and educationalists alike. Rather, I mean the full range of informal, non-formal and formal learning opportunities that exist, including within Catholic parishes and movements, such as the recently launched Laudato Si’ Action Platform.1 Adult and vocational education literatures will be central in the discussion that follows, as their resonance for CST is both powerful and understated. By looking both at CST and a broad notion of learning, I will offer an original angle on an issue of great importance to the education and development constituency.
Education’s interrelationship with just transitions has conventionally coalesced around two aspects. Aspect one is concerned with learning for the work of the future. I will consider in that regard what a radical view of the education-work relationship might look like in support of just transitions, and how this relates to dignity of work as a central theme of Catholic Social Teaching since Rerum Novarum. Given my concern with work, my principal focus will be on vocational education, and I will briefly explore UNESCO’s (2012) notion of double transformation.
Aspect two considers how we learn to be more sustainable in our daily lives. In terms of literatures, I will primarily draw upon the adult education for sustainable development tradition and how it intersects with an approach to education for ecological conversion. I will place the rather underdeveloped Laudato Si’ account of ecological conversion (Francis 2015) within a wider Catholic theological tradition. This account has largely focused on the individual level, but this is inadequate in the light of structural sin, as I will argue. This will lead into some proposals and practices related to both pedagogies for ecological conversion and secular equivalents in sustainable education and transgressive pedagogies, viewed primarily through an adult education literature.
However, whilst this distinction between the two aspects is a useful tool, we should be mindful of how well it conforms to neoliberal orthodoxy, where, as Raworth (2017) notes, we are primarily understood as only producers (aspect one) or consumers and investors (aspect two), and not carers, parents, neighbours, citizens or activists. Therefore, in the final section, I briefly consider new directions in thinking about the possibilities for education for just transitions.
2 Learning for Just, Transitioned Work
2.1 What Are Just Transitions?
Before proceeding any further, I need to be clear what I mean by a transition. Indeed, it is probably better to talk about transitions in the plural as this gives a better sense both of the indeterminacy of what exactly is the destination, and the need to see this as having multiple elements at different scalar levels and spatial contexts. However, Swilling’s singular definition is a good working one:
just transition is a process of increasingly radical incremental changes that accumulate over time in the actually emergent transformed world envisaged by the SDGs and sustainability. The outcome is a state of well-being founded on greater environmental sustainability and social justice (including the eradication of poverty). These changes arise from a vast multiplicity of struggles, each with their own context-specific temporal and spatial dimensions. (Swilling 2020, 7)
As Bennie and Satgoor (2018, 293) note, such transitions are inherently political, and moves towards just transitions face both active opposition and structural barriers: “Realising a ‘just transition’ requires movement from below that mobilises to contest and reshape relations to overcome the structural barriers to such a transition”.
In Catholic Social Teaching, the need for a transition runs deep, as I have already noted. The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP)’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004) makes clear that what it terms “the ecological question” is fundamentally about the unjust distribution of resources (cf. John Paul II 1989). Whilst it sees individual greed and sin as central to the problem, the Compendium notes that the resultant crisis is of planetary scale, but needs resolution across all scales, a point to which I will return below. The PCJP views climate crisis and poverty as inseparable:
The present environmental crisis affects those who are poorest in a particular way, whether they live in those lands subject to erosion and desertification, are involved in armed conflicts or subject to forced immigration, or because they do not have the economic and technological means to protect themselves from other calamities. (PCJP 2004, 482)2
Moreover, it is clear that this is not simply about addressing the needs of the present generation. Popes Paul VI (1967) and John Paul II (1991), for instance, stress the responsibility of the present generation to those who come after us. This is synthesised by the PCJP:
Responsibility for the environment, the common heritage of mankind, extends not only to present needs but also to those of the future. We have inherited from past generations, and we have benefited from the work of our contemporaries: for this reason we have obligations towards all, and we cannot refuse to interest ourselves in those who will come after us, to enlarge the human family. This is a responsibility that present generations have towards those of the future. (PCJP 2004, 467)
One of the important aspects that marks this out as a theological rather than a secular account is the emphasis on the world as created (cf. Johnson 2019). The approach taken in CST firmly places God’s relationship to humanity at its centre. This results in an emphasis on the unconditional value of the human person and a focus on all aspects of humanity, rather than just economic growth or poverty reduction:
It is not just a question of eliminating hunger and reducing poverty. It is not just a question of fighting wretched conditions, though this is an urgent and necessary task. It involves building a human community where men [sic] can live truly human lives, free from discrimination on account of race, religion or nationality, free from servitude to other men or to natural forces which they cannot yet control satisfactorily. It involves building a human community where liberty is not an idle word. (Paul VI 1967, 47)
2.2 The Centrality of Work
Work sits at the heart of the CST approach to realising the above vision and has been there from CST’s origins. Workers, and hence work, were at the centre of the polycrisis of the late nineteenth century to which Pope Leo XIII was responding with his encyclical Rerum Novarum. As capitalism evolved, so did Leo XIII (1891, 3) bemoan a situation in which “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself”. Beyond the injustice of this, Leo XIII was concerned with both its direct effects on the family and the Catholic community, and the danger that it would lead workers into the arms of communism. (Catholic) trade unions were seen by Leo XIII as crucial to a just society.
This defensive account of work’s place in the polycrisis of early industrialisation is made more positive through a response that builds on the longer-standing notion of ora et labora, prayer and work. Here, whilst work is understood to be part of our fallen human nature, it is also identified as a source of dignity, of human development and of becoming more in touch with God’s transcendence. As the PCJP puts it, work is not only
the “essential key” to the whole social question and is the condition not only for economic development but also for the cultural and moral development of persons, the family, society and the entire human race. (PCJP 2004, 269)
Indeed, in the Compendium, work gets as much attention as the family, more conventionally seen as the core of Catholic social thinking.
Moreover, this concern with work is fundamentally linked to an ecological perspective, though this is rarely brought to the fore. In this light, it is striking that in the Compendium the first subsection of the work chapter is about the “duty to cultivate and care for the earth” (PCJP 2004, 6.1.a). This is an important subtheme of Laudato Si’, receiving six paragraphs. Francis (2015, 124) argues that “Any approach to an integral ecology, which by definition does not exclude human beings, needs to take account of the value of labour”.
And work is relational in the sense that its meaning and value derive from its placing of the individual in relationship with other individuals on whom the work impacts. As Pope John Paul II (1991, 832) put it, “work is work with others and work for others. It is a matter of doing something for someone else”. Pope Francis (2015, 125) returns to this when he writes, “Underlying every form of work is a concept of the relationship which we can and must have with what is other than ourselves”. Incidentally, this is an increasingly important theme of secular research on Vocational Education Training (VET) and on sustainability (cf. De Jaeghere 2020; McGrath 2020). Equally, Tim Jackson’s language as an environmental economist is very close to that of Pope Francis:
Work matters. It’s more than just the means to a livelihood. It is also a vital ingredient in our connection to each other – part of the “glue” of society. Good work offers respect, motivation, fulfilment, involvement in community and, in the best cases, a sense of meaning and purpose in life. (Jackson 2017, 144)
As a result of this theological perspective, the Vatican has been a very vocal support of the decent work campaign of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) (e.g. Benedict XVI 2009). The ILO argues:
Decent work sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives. It involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men. (ILO, n.d.)
The debate about decent work has generated a huge literature on how to operationalise and measure the notion, and how to examine policies and practices for their adherence to and/or promotion of decent work standards. As the quotation above makes clear, the challenge is not simply about minimum labour standards, important though these are, but about how to develop an expansive, humanistic view of what work should be about as a key component of human life.
Importantly, this approach sees employment and work in an expended way that includes the informal economy. It has been slower, however, to embrace certain other debates about the nature of work such as those emanating from feminist economics (e.g. Donath 2000). Indeed, the debate needs to go further, to engage with approaches such as that of Raworth’s (2017) when she argues that there are four realms of the economy: household, market, economy and state. We need to think more about what kind of work, and skills, are needed in each of these.
More recently, the debate has begun to shift to the challenge of transforming work as part of a wider move towards just transitions. This is seen, for instance, in the heavy involvement of trade unions in theorising the “green new deal” (e.g. Cha et al. 2022).
2.3 The Place and Potential of Vocational Education and Training
However, there is far to go in realising this vision. One part of the problem is vocational education and training (VET). Mainstream, formal VET is complicit in unsustainable practices that were integral to industrialisation and the emergence of the Capitalocene (McGrath and Russon 2023). In colonised parts of the South, a combination of the negative effects of global industrialised capitalism and the particular inflection of colonialism in different settings, including whether the economy was a settler one, produced a form of vocationalism that was tied to the extractive logic of colonial capitalism and to the wider Northern paradigm of fossil capitalism (Malm 2016). As a result, the key trades of early vocationalism were attached to metals, mining, motors and manufacturing, in both North and South. As part of the later neoliberal turn, public forms of VET were reformed to reduce their educational and public good components and to focus more narrowly on economic rationales. The heightened focus on securing or self-creating jobs had nothing to say about the decency or sustainability of work (McGrath and Russon 2023).
In response, in 2012, UNESCO committed to the notion of VET that was doubly transformational – seeking to transform itself in order to contribute to a wider transformation towards sustainable development (UNESCO 2012).
Since then, a number of strands of academic literature have developed that seek to consider what forms of skills, work and industries are developing and need to develop to support just transitions (e.g. McGrath and Powell 2016; Rosenberg, Ramsarup, and Lotz-Sisitka 2020; VET Africa 4.0 Collective 2023). Whilst some of this literature focuses on existing formal sector industries, other aspects look more broadly at sustainable livelihoods (McGrath 2020). Some of this work draws explicitly on the human development tradition and envisages an approach
that supports the rights, freedoms and capabilities of existing and future generations to live the lives they have reason to value whilst protecting and coevolving in a more harmonious relationship with the natural environment of which human beings are an integral part so that natural and social systems may flourish. (Tikly et al. 2020, 3)
As part of its wider commitment to transformative VET, UNESCO has been at the forefront of an approach to greening vocational learning institutions, drawing on wider education for sustainability traditions. This is particularly apparent in the work of its International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (UNEVOC).3 Its second director, Majumdar, proposes a five-stage model of greening VET institutions.
Greening VET institutions
Citation: Religion and Development 2, 1 (2023) ; 10.30965/27507955-20230019
Source: Majumdar (2010, 6)
Greening VET institutions
Citation: Religion and Development 2, 1 (2023) ; 10.30965/27507955-20230019
Source: Majumdar (2010, 6)Greening VET institutions
Citation: Religion and Development 2, 1 (2023) ; 10.30965/27507955-20230019
Source: Majumdar (2010, 6)Greening VET institutions
Citation: Religion and Development 2, 1 (2023) ; 10.30965/27507955-20230019
Source: Majumdar (2010, 6)Greening VET institutions
Citation: Religion and Development 2, 1 (2023) ; 10.30965/27507955-20230019
Source: Majumdar (2010, 6)This is a comprehensive model. Moving through all of these dimensions would appear to generate what Sterling (2008) describes as sustainable education institutions or providers that are sustaining, tenable, healthy and durable; that is, are capable not just of introducing positive changes but of maintaining them over time. We can see parallel trends in Catholic VET, as key education providers seek to strengthen the environmental dimension of formal and non-formal programmes in the light of Laudato Si’.
3 Education for Sustainable Development and Ecological Conversion
Whilst these moves towards a transformed approach to how we become and remain sustainable producers are welcome, they do not get to the heart of the challenge. As Gough (2017) reminds us, any just transition requires a radical change in consumption, not just production. Hence, individuals and communities need to address this aspect of transition and where their agency lies therein.
In this section, I will extend the analysis to consider the challenge of educating people to be better consumers and investors, to be actors in promoting sustainable development, to become ecologically converted. I will start with the last of these, the most theological dimension, before coming back to the secular adult education for sustainable development tradition.
3.1 Ecological Conversion
Laudato Si’ has an explicit focus on education as a means of rebuilding the covenant between humanity and the environment. This is seen as being threefold in nature. First, education is needed to reduce the belief in and practices of consumerism, individualism, competition and the free market. Second, education is required to support greater harmony with ourselves, others, nature and God. Third, education has a role to play in promoting ecological citizenship and conversion.
Pope Francis explicitly celebrates that
Environmental education has broadened its goals. Whereas in the beginning it was mainly centred on scientific information, consciousness-raising and the prevention of environmental risks, it tends now to include a critique of the “myths” of a modernity grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market). It seeks also to restore the various levels of ecological equilibrium, establishing harmony within ourselves, with others, with nature and other living creatures, and with God. (Francis 2015, 210)
However, he wants to go further, in keeping with a Catholic view of transcendence, as the rest of his paragraph makes clear:
Environmental education should facilitate making the leap towards the transcendent which gives ecological ethics its deepest meaning. It needs educators capable of developing an ethics of ecology, and helping people, through effective pedagogy, to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care. (Francis 2015, 210)
One challenge, however, with the call of Laudato Si’ for education for ecological conversion is that the notion of ecological conversion is rather underdeveloped in the encyclical. Therefore, it is important to locate the encyclical text within a wider Catholic theological tradition on the topic.
Although the need for ecological conversion is certainly implicit in Pope Paul VI’s address to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1970 in which he warned that “the carrying out of these technical possibilities [such as irrigation and reclaiming of marshes] at an accelerated pace is not accomplished without dangerous repercussions on the balance of our natural surroundings”, and that there was an “urgent need of a radical change in the conduct of humanity if it wishes to assure its survival” (Paul VI 1970). The first explicit reference to the concept of ecological conversion is generally believed to be by John Paul II at a General Audience in January 2001, where he spoke about transformation of our relationship with nature:
Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth’s habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydrogeological and atmospheric systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialization, degrading that “flowerbed” – to use an image from Dante Alighieri (Paradiso, XXII, 151) – which is the earth, our dwelling-place. We must therefore encourage and support the “ecological conversion” which in recent decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading. Man is no longer the Creator’s “steward”, but an autonomous despot, who is finally beginning to understand that he must stop at the edge of the abyss. (John Paul II 2001)
It is useful here to consider the wider modern Catholic theology of conversion for what it can tell us about the ecological dimension. This wider approach is grounded in the work of Lonergan (1972), expanded upon by Doran (1981). Lonergan distinguishes between religious, moral and intellectual conversion, to which Doran added psychic. According to Lonergan (1972, 330), “Conversion is a radical shift of one’s fundamental orientation, one’s horizon, an ongoing process toward consistent self-transcendence and authenticity”. He argues that this is about love:
Being in love with God opens up the possibility not only of loving God, but of loving all that God loves, and loving as God loves. Our human loving has the potential to become unconditional. Ecological conversion pushes the boundaries of that unconditionality to include the whole universe. (Lonergan 1972, 334)
In considering an ecological dimension, Johnson (2014) sees this as a pro‑ cess of
falling in love with the earth as an inherently valuable, living community in which we participate, and bending every effort to be creatively faithful to its well-being, in tune with the living God who brought it into being and cherishes it with unconditional love. (Johnson 2014, 259)
As Deneulin and Bano note in their introduction, love is a key contribution of both Catholic and Muslim traditions to debates around development and sustainability.
In considering the place of Laudato Si’ in the Catholic tradition, Ormerod and Vanin (2016) stress the moral dimension as being the most important. They argue that a moral conversion entails a transformation from basing choices on satisfactions to putting values first. This is crucial to notions of green behaviour. They argue:
The presenting problem that ecological conversion is seeking to address (environmental degradation) arises primarily from human decisions, and these decisions are either informed by values, or fall back onto mere satisfactions, to the detriment of human as well as other-than-human flourishing. The present environmental destruction is the end product of generations of decisions based on a failure to attend to the ecological impact of those decisions, either initially through ignorance, or, as evidence of that impact has accumulated, wilfully and maliciously. To choose satisfactions over genuine values is to choose without question what has gone before, to continue in patterns of routine and comfort, even in the face of mounting evidence that doing so is destroying our delicate ecological balance upon which human life depends. (Ormerod and Vanin 2016: 336)
This challenge highlights a key tension that permeates the adult education literature: how do we move from knowing to doing and then to being? In Catholic terms, it can be thought of in terms of metanoia, a turning away from the sins of the past and a turning towards God (Hanchin and Hearlson 2020).
Hanchin and Hearlson ask what this means in pedagogical terms. They note the deeply problematic nature of many past programmes on conversion, which have done significant violence to individuals, communities and cultures. However, they stress that we do need an education for conversion. They see this as having two main elements. First, they argue that the rationalistic classroom is a major barrier to moving from knowing to being. They suggest that we need an approach that allows space for feelings and facilitates the re-establishment of broken connections between the rational and the emotional. This clearly relates back to Lonergan and Johnson in their talking of ecological conversion in terms of love (cf. introduction to this special issue). Secondly, Hanchin and Hearlson advocate a focus on encounter, explicitly drawing on Lonergan. In this, “the educator invites learners to discover what they had previously failed to notice” (Hanchin and Hearlson 2020, 264). This necessitates spaces for encounter with the other in the form of the earth, or the poor if we are dealing with affluent students.
Although metanoia is often discussed in terms of an individual’s relationship with God, an important theological strand, beginning in the Old Testament, emphasises the collective dimension of sin and metanoia. This leads Deneulin and Zampini Davies (2016) to argue that whilst sin is always personal, depending as it does on individual free will, it is also always social. They see this operating at three levels. First, the consequences of sin are always relational, being essentially a turning away from both God and others, as well as being a form of self-alienation. Second, sins often cause direct harm to others. Third, sins can become so powerful and generative of further sins that they constrain the ability of individuals and communities to avoid committing other sins. Returning to the core focus of this paper, the sin of environmental degradation is so powerful and pervasive that it is far from simple to effect an individual ecological conversion or for such individual conversions to aggregate towards the overcoming of socio-structural sins. This is addressed by Pope Francis when he writes:
self-improvement on the part of individuals will not by itself remedy the extremely complex situation facing our world today. Isolated individuals can lose their ability and freedom to escape the utilitarian mindset, and end up prey to an unethical consumerism bereft of social or ecological awareness. Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds. … The ecological conversion needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion. (Francis 2015, 219)
Thus, the “ecstatic pedagogy” that Hanchin and Hearlson (2020) advocate needs to be thought of as both individual and collective. This is important for thinking about a just transition, which must involve individual change but be situated relationally within wider collective practices and understandings of transformation.
3.2 Transformative and Transgressive Learning
Parallel debates are also part of the adult education tradition, though discussed in a different language. Perhaps the most important related notion in this tradition is transformative learning (Mezirow 1991). Mezirow’s approach stresses the importance of critical reflection on past experiences in developing new frames of reference to guide future actions. Although, over time, Mezirow modified his approach to respond to critiques that his work was too rational and cognitive, he does not go as far as some critics argue is necessary regarding the transformation of the interior self. For instance, in a dialogical article with Mezirow, Dirkx argues that transformative learning involves “deepening our understanding of ourselves, of the inner worlds which seem so much a part of us but yet so distant from the everydayness of our normal, waking lives” (Dirkx, Mezirow, and Cranton 2006, 129). Clearly, this perspective is close to that of CST.
In the context of just transitions, a sizeable literature on transformative learning for sustainable development has emerged (McGrath and Deneulin 2021). Moyer, Sinclair, and Quinn (2016) argue for a stronger focus on the learning – action nexus. They suggest that action is pivotal to learning because it allows for embodied learning, which they propose is key to learning the skills necessary to address the challenges related to just transitions (Moyer, Sinclair, and Quinn 2016, 323). In a more recent paper, the same team reflect on how their transformative learning lens initially led them to understand the “instrumental” aspects of environmental learning as less meaningful than “transformative” elements (Moyer and Sinclair 2020). They recount how they have come to realise that both interact and, indeed, more practical learning can be foundational to further, more critically reflexive, learning. This has echoes of Hanchin and Hearlson’s argument about encounter, who assert that participation in projects to restore habitats quickly move from action on to communion with.
The adult education and education for sustainable development literatures initially evolved in isolation from each other. However, whilst the bulk of work on education for sustainable development (ESD) remains focused on the school sector, there has been a recent growth of work on ESD in adult, community and non-formal education (Wals, Mochizuki, and Leicht 2017). This work typically addresses the relationships between learning and community. Whether we are considering existing communities faced with an environmental challenge or new groups formed to learn about and act in response to an environmental challenge, this literature makes it clear that such learning often needs to be enabled (Didham, Ofei-Manu, and Nagareo 2017). The relational insights of this approach appear congruent with those of CST.
Recently, there has been a growth of a new notion of transgressive learning. Macintyre, Tassone, and Wals (2020, 2) describe this as “radical forms of learning-based change for socio-ecological change within the framework of climate change … a form of learning which encourages transformation and seeks to disrupt norms and structures which maintain an unsustainable status quo”. Drawing on Engeström’s (2016) work on expansive learning, this approach of transgressive learning seeks to go beyond what it sees as the individualist and cognitive biases of transformative learning. Engeström’s approach is explicitly about “what is not yet there” and how to nurture this. Again, the theological resonance of this stance is obvious.
The transgressive learning approach also finds echoes in the social movement literature on hope (Dinerstein and Deneulin 2012; Ojala 2017). This focuses on how to imagine and create new forms of relationships and models of production around the values of solidarity, equality and sustainability, key concepts also of CST. More broadly, there is a growing literature on transgressive social movements (Espinosa 2014; Rosset et al. 2019; Walters and von Kotze 2019).
Circling back round to the religious dimension, it is increasingly being realised that faith communities are integral to both the social movements and adult education traditions (Kidwell 2020; McGrath and Deneulin 2021). As Streck and Zanini Moretti (2017) note, the roots of many social movements in the Americas were in the emancipatory reading of religious texts. And, of course, the seminal adult education text of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1972) must be understood in the context of the Brazilian and Latin American liberation theology of the 1960s.
4 Imagining Futures for Education for Just Transitions
There is much to approve of in existing efforts to build skills for sustainable futures and to encourage education for sustainable development. Though Catholic and secular developments in both areas have been largely independent of each other, they are also largely complementary. However, is this enough? If not, what else might be done? It is clear that a focus on knowledge is not sufficient. For several decades, the adult education tradition has placed much emphasis on the challenge of moving from knowing to doing to being. It makes clear that transformation of knowledge in itself is not enough. Work such as that of Moyer and Sinclair highlights that doing can be important in knowing and ultimately can be a key element of personal transformation. The transformative is clearly at the core of the CST account. Notions of sin, conversion and metanoia all point to the importance of not simply knowing or doing but of becoming a new person, someone who has turned away from sin and towards God, creation and the rest of humanity. Hanchin and Hearlson (2020) point us towards a pedagogy for ecological conversion.
Equally, the secular tradition is increasingly following the insight of the Catholic (and wider religious) tradition that sees relationality as key. Individual action can do little in the face of the size of the challenges. Conversely, understanding ourselves to be connected to others (and to God, and increasingly to other species in both Catholic and Muslim traditions) brings strength in facing the scale and uncertainty of the required transformation. This points us to relational pedagogies and to the centrality of love.
However, the process of developing pedagogies of hope and transformation is still weakly developed. In the formal education system, the space for transformation is still small and contested in the face of the power of education as a conservative force. Formal education, even in Catholic schooling, is dominated by a drive to reproduce society and to build investments in human capital as part of a wider process of reinforcing the dynamics of the Capitalocene. Moreover, it is a site of violence, both symbolic and physical (McGrath 2018), which is particularly powerfully directed at the most marginalised and vulnerable. Whilst there are important efforts to transform formal education (e.g. Renouard et al. 2021), we are very far from a generalised transformative formal education. Much of the most promising practice, rather, lies in non-formal spaces. However, here questions of scale and sustainability are always at the fore. The biggest challenge and opportunity may instead lie in informal learning spaces. The literature on social movement learning may be instructive here. Within the Catholic tradition there are sites of exciting social movement learning initiatives, with the aforementioned Laudato Si’ Action Platform perhaps being the most ambitious, though still in its very early stages of development (cf. McGrath and Deneulin 2021). The Church has the potential to enable informal learning in the ways outlined by Didham, Ofei-Manu, and Nagareo (2017) but, like schooling, it has to break free from the shackles of its patriarchal tradition. As McGrath and Deneulin (2021, 653) note:
the authority of Pope Francis has been a key factor in facilitating such learning, and has enabled community members to bypass unsupportive leadership at the local level – typically parish priests who see environmental activism as alien to Christian faith and contest the authority of Pope Francis.
A Catholic approach to informal learning for just transitions cannot be so dependent on papal authority if it is to be sustained. Nor can it go to the necessary scale if, like CST more broadly, it is the “church’s best-kept secret” (Shea 2020).
Issue and Editors
This article is part of the special issue “Care for the Poor, Care for the Earth: Catholic-Muslim Dialogues on Development”, edited by Séverine Deneulin and Masooda Bano.
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Whereas references to academic sources use date and page number, for Church documents, the latter number refers to the paragraph, which is always clearly numbered in such texts.