Who really is the agent of change?

"Becoming acquainted with a people as an agent of a development organisation or a bearer of charity is profoundly different from working among friends for a common purpose. In the latter case, one's perception of reality is not shaped simply by academic theories that describe, from the outside, the needs and aspirations of the great masses of humanity." Farzam Arbab in 'The Lab, the Temple, and the Market'. 

I think this statement also applies to teachers and students, program providers and their audience (eg. young people), educators and the educated, we and they... This thinking is prescriptive and disempowering. In my opinion, challenging this thinking and the ego behind it is where sustainability education still needs to grow...

I attended a couple of meetings last week that got me thinking more about the importance of genuine relationships in the field of Education for Sustainability, in particular with young people (10-15 year olds,  my area of interest). By this I mean relationships that involve truly listening to the voices and opinions of young people, the very audience to whom one is reaching out to and trying to 'educate'. Relationships that can put aside any expectations or vested interest in the outcomes of a project, and instead be flexible to the design that emerges through consultation first among the young people themselves and second among all stakeholders. Relationships that nurture the capacity and speak to the potential of young people to rise and meet their challenge with integrity, careful thought and enthusiasm. 

This kind of approach, as referred to in the quote above, requires stepping back from the teacher / student model of education and moving towards the mentor / participant model. In this model the mentor can still have more experience, knowledge and insight in a particular subject area, but in order to empower the participants to become agents of their own education the mentor must allow them to own and drive the process. Young people that I've observed experience this in an authentic way are the same young people rising up as agents of change in their local community. 

So who really is the agent of change? Honestly, I say it's the young people themselves, not the teacher or even the mentor...

Over the half-way mark

I find myself staring at my computer screen often these days. In the past few months I've been entering into my computer all the survey and interview data that I collected late last year. Transcribing interviews is a tiring, long process but I have enjoyed hearing all the stories again and reflecting on the major themes emerging from them. Consequently I'm becoming excited about reaching a more creative point in the process, writing. That's where I get to weave together the rich tapestry of stories with the quantitative data collected from the surveys and make sense of it all. But before then I need to become closely acquainted with SPSS, the statistical package I'll be using to analyse my survey data. Unfortunately it won't be as simple as running an ANOVA and some t-tests.

My data is hierarchical in structure, with various levels that will influence each other unless the variance of each is properly accounted for. The levels in my data consist of three schools (A,B and C), each of which has three year groups (4,5, and 6), and each of those have two or three classes (x,y and sometimes z). You see, the children of one class might have quite different responses to the children of another class in the same year group because their teachers differ. The same goes for year level and school. So I need to use a multi-level approach to analysing my data in order to see clearly where differences lie, if there are any. Perhaps, as one might hope, the average attitude of children in each of the classes and year groups in a school that has adopted a whole-school integrated sustainability program will be very positive in response to a question such as "These environmental experiences are important to me". If so that's a great measure of how well the school is motivating and involving children in the school's sustainability initiatives, but I think it's fair to admit that such a finding might be unlikely. For example there may be one or two classes out of the six or so classes that were surveyed whose teachers just aren't that interested in environmental topics. As such one might expect that the average attitude of children in their class to the question stated above would be less than the average attitude of children in other classes (not to mention year groups). Of course, this is where the story will become more complex and this is where my qualitative data collected through interviews and open-answer questions in the surveys will come in handy :)

That's enough talk about data analysis for today I think. Instead it's time for me to go do some! ;)