Building on the Millennium Development Goals, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) were established. Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace the SDGs, given escalating sustainability challenges, this article questions whether ESDG is desirable as “an education for the future”. Many challenges outlined by the SDGs are supposed to be solved by “inclusive” or “sustainable” economic growth, assuming that economic growth can be conveniently decoupled from resource consumption. Yet, the current hegemony of the sustainability-through-growth paradigm has actually increased inequalities and pressure on natural resources, exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change and resulting social tensions. With unreflective support for growth, far from challenging the status quo, the SDGs and consequently, the ESDGs, condone continuing environmental exploitation, depriving millions of species of their right to flourish, and impoverishing future generations. This article creates greater awareness of the paradoxes of sustainable development and encourages teaching for sustainability through various examples of alternative education that emphasizes planetary ethic and degrowth. The alternatives include Indigenous learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, education for steady-state and circular economy, empowerment and liberation. “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in 'Journal of Environmental Education' on 01/20/20, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00958964.2019.1710444 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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PPT presentatie tijdens de GTE Conference 2014
The European Values Study (EVS) is a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal research programme on basic human values, initiated in the late 1970s. A product of this research is the Atlas of European Values (AoEV), published by the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands for the second time. The Atlas of European Values offers maps and background information on the opinions of the population in 46 European countries. In chapters about Europe, family, work, religion, politics, society and well-being, diversity and similarities in values patterns are shown. On the website www.atlasofeuropeanvalues.eu maps of the European Values Study are accessible for free. In addition, the website offers different map tools, videos, background information and other teaching materials that are very useful sources of information for geographers and geography teachers. The most important theories to explain the value patterns that the research shows us are modernization theories. In this article, the basic findings on values are explained with respect to the theoretical frame and some examples with a special focus on Turkey are given. The findings challenge geography and other sciences, to what extent mapping the values of Europeans is possible. Two of these challenges are regionalizing the data and exploring the "context" for explaining the differences among countries.
