The 4C’s : Outdoor Education for eco-social-cultural change

In this presentation I will bring forward one strand of our recent work done in relation to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. Themes/frames that arose in our analysis and that have important implications for outdoor education in particular. We have called this strand the 4 C’s: community, change, critical, care/coeur. Each will be described in turn with a focus on the outdoor educator. This presentation arises out of work done in response to a SSHRC (Canada’s research granting agency) “knowledge synthesis” grant. Therein we set out to provide scholars, activists, educators, and policy- makers with a wide-ranging review of the current state of education for eco-social-cultural change. The starting point for our work was to acknowledge the following: that the ecological crisis is the consequence of entrenched attitudes, discourses and behaviours in many “modern” human societies; that modern educational traditions, processes and institutions have played a key role in fostering and reinforcing these cultural traits; that these same structures and processes are implicated in myriad forms of social inequity and injustice therefore, learning to live with Earth implies far-reaching, systemic educational transformation. The project had three main components: A review of contemporary philosophical and theoretical work that critiques damaging or limiting assumptions and practices in mainstream education systems and points towards ways of being, thinking, valuing, acting, learning and teaching that are more consonant with the goal of living in harmony with Earth; A review of generative and transformative educational practices, including outdoor education, scattered throughout both formal and informal educational systems, with the goal of bringing these disparate practices into conversation with each other in the context of a shared project of eco-social-cultural change; A review of current work on systemic social change, with a particular focus on how outdoor educa