Southern African Journal of Environmental Education

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

2023-05-23T13:08:25+00:00

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

2023-05-23T13:08:26+00:00

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

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

2023-05-23T13:08:24+00:00

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

2023-05-23T13:08:26+00:00

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