Think Piece on Amanzi for Food: Working with Critical Realism to Inform a Situated Learning Framework for Climate Change Education

Abstract

This study is developed as a think piece which deliberates the problem of transformative human agency in a curriculum setting. Using a critical realism perspective and schematic tools it  examines the deliberative framing of an Amanzi for Food teaching garden as an education process for mediating the learning of rainwater harvesting. Working with Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Activity and using expansions of his ‘four-planar social being’ schema and its resolution in his ‘social cube’ model, the study contemplates the framing for a curriculum for the mediation of co-engaged social learning in the contexts of practical work in an agricultural college curriculum setting. In this way the research process is developed as an under-labouring review of the emerging curriculum in search of theory to inform pedagogy for mediating situated processes of transformative social learning.