Southern African Journal of Environmental Education

TVET SI: Designing the Future - Youth innovation, informality and transformed VET

David Monk — 2023-10-31

This article argues that Vocational Education and Training (VET) can be a valuable space to develop the innovation required to deal with the wicked problems of the world; however, radical and rapid transformation in approaches to VET is needed. While we use a case study from Gulu, Uganda, the fi ndings can be applied more broadly. A new approach cannot be taken in isolation from other social circumstances, and desperately needs to include epistemic contributions both in relation to content and approach so that it bolsters and supports the initiatives, designs and dreams of the intended participants, especially women. We argue that epistemic injustice is a major limiting factor for environmental learning and innovation. We share potential opportunities from our research to shift towards a climate and socially conscious social skills ecosystem capable of designing a positive future.

Keywords: Transformative Vocational Education and Training (VET), social skills ecosystem, epistemic justice, environmental sustainability, intersectionality and VET

TVET SI: Towards Sustainable Vocational Education and Training: Thinking beyond the formal

Simon McGrath — 2023-05-23

Mainstream vocational education and training (VET) has been complicit in unsustainable practices due to its longstanding relationship with productivism, extractivism and colonialism. However, it is beginning to address the need to balance its dominant focus on skills for employability with a growing awareness of the imperative to promote environmental sustainability, in terms of skills for sustainable production. There is also a sense that vocational institutions must also be sustainable in the wider sense of viability, durability, etc. While these positive steps are welcome, careful analysis is needed regarding how far recent initiatives are limited both by institutional capacities and wider disenabling environments, and how far they are meaningful steps towards sustainable VET for just transitions. Moreover, the current debate is also limited in its overwhelming focus on formal spaces of learning and work. Yet, most vocational learning and work sits outside this formal realm. We contribute to this debate by exploring four case studies of complex skills ecosystems with varying levels of (in)formality taken from both rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa. We consider how the dynamics of each ecosystem generate complex mixes of sustainability and employability concerns. We suggest that, in cases like the more formalised ones presented here, there is a possibility to look at the development of centres of skills formation excellence grounded in sector and place but that this also requires thinking about bigger challenges of just transitions. More radically, by highlighting the contexts of less formalised skills ecosystems in two other cases, we point towards new ways of thinking about supporting such ecosystems’ work on sustainable livelihoods in ways that enhance their durability. Although context always matters, we suggest that our arguments are pertinent beyond the countries or region of this research and have international salience.

Keywords: vocational education and training, Africa, green skills, sustainable development, skills for sustainability

TVET SI: Evaluating Boundary Crossing Social Learning in Vocational Education and Training: A value creation approach

Heila Lotz-Sisitka — 2023-05-23

This article focuses on the development and application of an evaluation model and approach for evaluating boundary crossing social learning in a Vocational Education and Training (VET) learning network in South Africa, with an emphasis on a Training of Trainers (ToT) course that helped to catalyse and strengthen this learning network via two iterations of the course over an eight-year period. The article shares how we adapted the value creation framework (VCF) of Wenger, Traynor and De Laat (2011; Wenger & Wenger-Traynor, 2020) in the evaluation of a VET Training of Trainers (ToT) programme and learning network that focussed on the uptake and circulation of rainwater harvesting and conservation (RWH&C) knowledge in a particular formal and informal VET context in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, where smallholder farmers were struggling to find water for producing food. The evaluated ToT course was catalytic in establishing a boundary crossing social learning network approach in a VET context that linked formal and informal VET (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2016; Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2022; Pesanayi, 2019); hence we found it important to develop adequate tools for its evaluation. The focus of this article is to share how we developed an evaluation approach to this work. We share insights on the indicators developed for diff erent types of value created, and also insights gained into the use of this evaluation approach in a boundary crossing VET social learning project that took a ToT course as focus. In short, evaluation findings show that the boundary crossing ToT course off ers strong immediate, potential and applied value that can lead to realised and reframed value, especially if supported by ongoing learning network activities that follow the initial engagement in the boundary crossing ToT course. Th is leads, over time, to transformative value which is important in achieving the overall objective of such social learning, namely making knowledge more co-engaging, accessible and useful in the context where improved food security via better use of rainwater harvesting and conservation amongst smallholder farmers and household food producers is a necessary form of sustainable development. Orientation value, and enabling value were found to be vital for the emergence of other kinds of value. The evaluation model also allows for the lifting out of strategic value which points to wider uptake potential. All this creates the possibility for indicator development that can help inform iterative development of boundary crossing VET courses used to stimulate the co-construction of learning networks and ongoing social learning for sustainable development.

Keywords: Vocational Education and Training, evaluation, social learning, value creation framework

TVET SI: Renewable Energy Technologies: How technical curricula could enable a brighter future

Christine Winberg — 2023-10-31

The potential of renewable energy technologies to mitigate climate change while meeting the energy demand of future generations is recognised globally. In South Africa, occupations such as wind turbine technicians and solar photovoltaic installers are in high demand. In response to these needs, Renewable Energy Technologies (RET) subjects were developed as specialised electives within the Electrical Infrastructure Construction programme that is off ered by technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges. The focus of this study is the knowledge that underpins the RET subjects. The guiding research question is: What forms of knowledge underpin the RET curricula, and what is the relationship between these knowledge forms? The semantic dimension of Legitimation Code Theory was used to explain the knowledge forms underpinning the RET subjects. The study uncovered gaps and imbalances across the range of knowledge forms selected, while the relationships between the knowledge forms constrained cumulative knowledge building. The contribution made by the study is a principled understanding of how knowledge selection and sequencing in technical curricula could enable cumulative learning and build valued competencies within the renewable energy field.

Keywords: renewable energy technologies, technical and vocational education and training, wind turbine technicians, solar photovoltaic installers

TVET SI: Learning at Sea - Blended courseware creation for non-accredited vocational education and training for sea-farers at sea and ashore

Robin Ferguson — 2023-10-31

Approximately 80% of South Africans do not receive formal post-school education and training (Southafricami, 2020) which implies that the majority of adults may receive non-accredited Vocational Education and Training (VET) or teach themselves. This article provides a theoretical and practical lens for VET educators and researchers on non-accredited VET courseware creation at an intra-programmatic level and it joins a long conversation in the regional and international academy on VET. It draws upon the case study of a production programme which was rolled out in three phases over five years for approximately 400 seafarers. The production programme was a forerunner in the deep-sea trawl industry and facilitated the inclusion of sea-going factory workers in workplace training for the first time. The Theory of Practice Architectures was employed as a conceptual framework to analyse and synthesis the corpus of data arising from a case study with nine methods for data collection. The findings reflect four characteristics concerning the practices of courseware creation for non-accredited VET. Three recommendations are made in the conclusion of this article which concern theoretical, methodological and systemic areas of of non-accredited VET.

Keywords: non-accredited Vocational Education and Training (VET); Theory of Practice Architectures; courseware creation; sea-going workers

Towards an Understanding of Eco-Justice and its Related Principles and Interventions that can Advance Environmental Justice

Sandhya Chandramohan — 2023-10-31

Deep ecology considers the ecosystem as a living whole with humanity only one part of this whole (O’Donnell, 2015). There is growing concern regarding environmental problems that are challenging human and environmental well-being. Current social, health and environmental damage warrants the consideration of eco-justice as a paradigm that can potentially advance environmental preservation. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, with Health Science academics and students at a University of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal, this study sought to inquire how they understand eco-justice, the principles underpinning ecojustice and what eco-justice projects could be initiated amongst tertiary students to preserve the environment. Eco-justice was found to relate to the need to care for and preserve ecosystems, by reducing over consumption and the overuse of natural resources. Of significance was that participants supported the need for projects related to cleaning the oceans, planting trees and crops and recycling to advance the eco-justice mandate.

Keywords: eco-justice, academics, students, health, South Africa

An Enlightened Common Sense Approach to Environmental Education, with Special Reference to Climate Change

Leigh Price — 2023-05-23

This article argues that, in order for humanity to act timeously to ameliorate threats such as climate change, we would do well to heed the central tenets of Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism, which he also calls enlightened common sense. This is because transcendental realism is critical of the unnecessarily burdensome assumption allied with systems/complexity theory that statistical analyses and complex computer models are necessary and suffi cient to deal with complex systems such as climate. To the contrary, from the perspective of transcendental realism, it is knowing ‘how things work’ – being enlightened – that is necessary, and often sufficient, to deal with complex systems. For example, in terms of climate change, knowing how the Greenhouse Eff ect works – that is, knowing how extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere heats the Earth – makes it as simple to decide to act to reduce carbon dioxide as knowing how gravity works makes it simple to decide not to step off a high-rise building. This does not detract from the further need to (preferably democratically) consider diff erent action options, for which computer models can be a helpful tool. Transcendental realism also has implications for how environmental educators define climate and climate change and it provides an antidote to certain challenges posed by climate change deniers. Much of the critique applied in this article to systems/complexity theory can also be applied to posthumanism.

Keywords: climate change education, Roy Bhaskar, climate scepticism, complex systems, posthumanism

From Being Literate about Health to Becoming Capable of Achieving Health: Health literacy capabilities of Zimbabwean school youth

Martin Micklesson — 2023-05-23

Food security is an enduring sustainability challenge in the Southern African region. Food availability, accessibility and affordability have profound health impacts and affect the quality of life of a substantial proportion of the world’s population. This article aims to explore, together with students in educational settings, questions about the relationships between food and health, including the contextual conditions of food availability, accessibility and affordability. This provides opportunities to re-embody food by contextualising it as part of natural and built environments, thus engaging with how challenges of human health intersect with animal and environmental health. The research centres on co-creating knowledge with youth based on their valued beings and doings about health and considers how their health goals relate to food and the sustainability challenges of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). By considering how youths’ understandings, evaluations and decisions regarding health, including setting health goals, intersect with the determinants of food, we come to consider their health literacy capabilities to achieve nonpredetermined health goals that align with their valued beings and doings. As such, the implementation gap between knowing and doing is bridged through practices of health and well-being contextually grounded in the lives and experiences of the student youth.

Keywords: health literacy, health education, capabilities approach, antimicrobial resistance, knowledge co-creation

Green Man You Owe Me: Surprises using puppetry with rural children in environmental education

Carol Preston — 2024-02-02

Wakkerstroom, Mpumalanga, is a rural South African village, set against the backdrop of a wetland, grasslands and rolling hills (Mpumalanga Information Directory, nd). Sadly, children that live here appear to have little concept of the beauty that surrounds them, and do not care for the natural environment. The reasons for this are that they are not exposed to the natural environment other than for available resources, parents are absent due to work commitments or have passed away, and most children here cannot swim, meaning visiting the wetland is dangerous. There are also no parks where they can play. Th eir view of the environment is litter-infested roads and streams, and informal dumps.

This article explores a single moment of clarity during an intervention using a puppet, that occurred during a programme in 2023 which aimed to reintroduce a group of 31 children between the ages of 11 to 15 from The Clay Educentre to the wonders of nature, using the arts, refl ective practice, and immersion into the natural environment. Here I argue that puppetry, in informal environmental education, with reflective practice, has the capacity to be more transformative than other art forms, such as drawing, drama and dance.

Keywords: applied arts, reflexivity, stop moment, environmental education

Africanising Distributed Leadership in Environmental Education Curriculum Management

Nonkanyiso Pamella Shabalala — 2024-02-02

Distributed leadership (DL) is a collaborative leadership approach that involves sharing decision-making and responsibilities among multiple individuals or groups within an organisation or institution. In the context of environmental education (EE) curriculum management, DL holds signifi cant relevance and can bring several benefits to stakeholders. This article critically examines the concept of DL in EE curriculum management and argues for an Africanised approach. It is focused on but not limited to institutions of learning. Managing EE curricula shows minimal consideration of Africanised DL. Drawing on an African philosophy of ubuntu, the article argues that an Africanised approach to DL can better serve the needs of African communities and promote sustainability in the region. As a conceptual article, we explore relevant literature to advance the idea of DL from an African perspective. In an era of environmental crisis and degradation in South Africa and other parts of the continent, an Africanised DL on EE curriculum management has the potential to off er relevant solutions. The article concludes by refl ecting on the Africanisation of DL and making recommendations for implementing an Africanised approach to DL in EE curriculum management.

Keywords: Africanised distributed leadership, distributed leadership, environmental education, environmental education curriculum management, ubuntu