Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Designing and Facilitating Eco-Spiritual Learning

This book offers stories and tools for designing and facilitating transformative sustainability pedagogy and explores how educators can intentionally design and facilitate eco-spiritual learning that promotes healing and wholeness. In these times of accelerating climate change and systemic injustice, we need learning spaces that both challenge our unsustainable dominant paradigms and support us in re-learning how to live in relational and regenerative ways. Rooted in the paradigm of interconnection and relationality, this book offers practical ways to design and facilitate learning toward more just, ecological, and spiritual ways of being. The author weaves together a variety of personal stories of teaching and learning, an exploration of how new science can be applied to transformative sustainability pedagogy, and eco-spiritual practices to help educators nurture wholeness and connection in themselves and in learning spaces.

Heather Burns is Associate Professor in the Leadership for Sustainability Education graduate program at Portland State University, USA. Her scholarship has focused on sustainability pedagogy, including the roles of transformative learning, contemplative inquiry, whole-person learning, ecological design, and deep ecology in creating sustainable change.