ENVISIONING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION AS A REGENERATIVE “LIVING SPIRAL”
Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) brings together theories and practices of education with those of environment and sustainability, resonant with ideas of regenerative education. This seminar will explore possibilities for transgressive teaching and learning to span boundaries between academic disciplines and between the university and community by examining ESE collaborations. I will present the regenerative Living Spiral metaphor of Transgressive Sustainability Learning (Macintyre, 2019) as a model to visualize how ESE pedagogies might help us understand root causes of environmental or social justice (or injustice).
Through the metaphor of a growing, spiraling vine, I will share how university students in an ESE course engaged in community partnerships to co-develop pedagogical projects designed with justice in mind. In so doing, I hope to interrogate whether and how such ESE partnerships might create opportunities to cultivate justice and agency among students as they negotiate relations and tensions in their projects. I invite seminar participants to also consider the ways that our current and future collaborations in regenerative education might be represented by emergent shoots of justice or blossoms of collective agency, which can propagate regenerative pedagogies.
Keywords
Transgressive learning, environmental and sustainability education, relational and epistemic justice
Registration
The REGEN|ED Seminar Series (organized by the REGEN|ED research environment at NMD) brings together educators, researchers, practitioners, students, and community members interested in regenerative education, sustainability, and social-ecological transformation. We warmly welcome anyone curious about these questions to join us in a spirit of curiosity, engagement, and reciprocity as we learn with and from one another across diverse disciplines, contexts, and perspectives.
Registration for the REGEN|ED Seminar Series 2026/2027 is now open, and you can sign up here: Registration REGEN|ED Seminar Series 2026/2027
Emily Sprowls
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education and Professional Studies - Schulich School of Education, Nipissing University, North Bay, Canada
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