Tomorrow today; 2010 - unesdoc - Unesco

Image: © UNESCO, Gary MastersChild participating in the early childhood education Roving Caregivers Programme in Jamaicato persuade them to change their way of life. Community actionprojects undertaken by graduate students have included:• Developing peace through literacy classes• Creating green areas; raising awareness of sustainability in aschool through a recycling project• Vegetable gardening• Reshaping a conservative church’s mental space to include aHIV/AIDS project.Students are also encouraged to read more deeply and widely thebroader environmental, social and economic texts, so that they areable to recognize other acts of unsustainable living – such as hotelsbuilt on fragile coastlines, or hotel activities that destroy reefs, andthe economic and political power behind this – and to identify waysto intervene. In other words, student teachers are encouraged toexamine further the concept of sustainable development, understandingthat degradation of the environment (i.e. the ecologicaland biophysical life support systems) places human beings at greatrisk. They are encouraged to reflect on the connection between theenvironment and social/cultural and economic development, to seeliterature and its texts as part of the cultural capital, related to allaspects of this ‘ecosystem’.Literature texts are thus read/taught with the awareness of thisinterconnection. Applying knowledge of various literary theories,for example eco-criticism and post-colonialism, students deepentheir interpretation of the literature texts as well as the actual social,economic and environmental texts of their world. In reading thestory of Limbo Island in Blue Latitudes, a collection of West Indianshort stories, for example, one focuses on the representationof the physical environment in relation to thesocio-cultural and economic environment. Limbo Islandrelates the story of a man caught up in the Americandream of ‘making it’ (a reverse Willy Loman figure asin Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman) who thendiscovers how empty the dream is because he has soldhis soul for it. A broad eco-critical reading uncovers thegrowing loss of land and culture of a people to tourism.The economic drivers of tourism lead to the destructionof the natural environment as well as the socialand cultural environment. Conflict between economicsustainability on one hand, and on the other hand,social, cultural and physical sustainability is thusrepresented by the writer. For Caribbean and othersmall island people where tourism is the number oneforeign exchange earner, such a text exposes clearly thetensions and the dangers of unsustainable tourism. Thepoint made here is that connecting the specificities ofthe subject with the awareness of sustainability can leadto students becoming citizens who are far more awareof the ambiguities and tensions in their society andare thus enabled to take meaningful action to addressthese. Equally importantly, the students can begin toarticulate an eco-critical resistance to development thatthreatens a sustainable future and also to imagine analternative future. This is a major part of what it meansto educate for sustainability.[ 100 ]