SASUF Sustainability Forum 2024

Our humanity and planet is under threat and this calls for sectors like education to rise to the challenges of our time. The Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 in turn yearns for innovative proposals and transformative possibilities where education promotes sustainable development and embraces global citizenship. This workshop highlights the centrality of ethics education for attaining a more acute understanding and meaningful application of this goal.

Being inspired by the UNESCO Education Futures Report (UNESCO, 2021), this workshop invites vital conversations to deliberate the transformational potential of education towards sustainable collective futures. By arguing for a new social contract to repair injustices, the report proposes five dimensions central to education 2050:
1. Pedagogies of solidarity and cooperation;
2. Curriculum and the knowledge commons;
3. Teachers and the teaching profession;
4. Safeguarding and transforming schools; and
5. Education across different times and spaces.

As UNESCO addresses the global education community in search of a new social contract, this challenge needs to be taken up Swedish and South Africa researchers.

South African and Swedish scholars collaborative work in/on/with ethics education can be one way to reimagine more sustainable futures through education. The care for life on earth is a normative and ethical endeavour, and central to ethically inspired education. While ethics in education traditionally has aimed at fostering individual responsibility for other human beings within stable nation states, the ethical concern in times of sustainability crises extends time and place, addressing global justice, the well-being of future generations and more-than-human life. The processes of species depletion and destruction of ecosystems, call for ethical aspects in education to extends the scope to other life forms, sensitive for human entanglements with the myriad of life, including future life on earth. The embeddedness of ethics education in ecological, social and political contexts requires consideration because of its ongoing relational reality with existential, ethical and political bearings on education.

The workshop will initiate vital, ethically inspired conversations to reimagine more sustainable futures by drawing on theoretical perspectives, competences, associated knowledges and approaches. Thereby drawing on how ethics in education could support young people to engage ethically with these complex issues. Rethinking ethics education by exploring the five dimensions of the Education Futures Report (UNESCO, 2021) in relation to known education and societal conditions in Sweden and South Africa will contribute to new knowledge in the field of education ethics research and unlock deeper engagement with sustainable futures.

Future collaborations will transpire from this workshop because the workshop will open-up creative research possibilities and novel ideas that can be explored further through South African and Sweden partnerships. This will develop research and new approaches for university and school curriculum to consider.

Time
5 min
Welcome by chair
Shan Simmonds (North-West University, South Africa)
20 min
One presenter for each of the five dimensions central to education 2050 as stated in the Education Futures Report (UNESCO, 2021):
1. Pedagogies of solidarity and cooperation
2. Curriculum and the knowledge commons
3. Teachers and the teaching profession
4. Safeguarding and transforming schools
5. Education across different times and spaces

1. SA colleague (Demaine Solomons, University of the Western Cape)
2. SA colleague (Dumsani Mncube, North-West University)
3. Swedish colleague (Annika Lilja, Gothenburg University)
4. SA colleague (Zama Simamane and Anette Hay, North-West University)
5. Swedish colleague (Karin Sporre, Umeå University)

Break up into five groups (chair to facilitate)
Same five presenters for each dimension
Five creative listeners (one per group) to capture the engagements
Workshop attendees

40 min
Each group will engage in vital conversations to open up the possibilities of rethinking ethics in education to reimagine more sustainable futures in relation to known education and societal conditions in Sweden and South Africa
5 Creative listeners:
Anna Westin (Umeå University, Sweden)
John Bhurekeni (Rhodes University, South Africa)
Ole Andreas Kvamme (University of Oslo, Norway)
Shan Simmonds (North-West University, South Africa)
Christina Osbeck (Gothenburg University, Sweden)
Go back to the collective group

25 min
Creative listeners provide main arguments and proposals raised to the collective group
(5 min per creative listener)

15 min
Discussant will draw on the theoretical perspectives, competences, associated knowledges and approaches that were raised
Heila Lotz-Sistka (Rhodes University, South Africa)
15 min
Concluding remarks to invite the input of the workshop attendees based on the discussants insights
Christina Osbeck (Gothenburg University, Sweden)

Keywords: Ethics in education; Sustainable futures; Sustainable Development Goal 4.7;