This paper explores futures learning strategies enacted by ecosystem building futurists working with organizations and communities for social transformation and adaptation to uncertain futures. The research is based on interviews with futurists who work as ecosystem builders to understand the "what," "how," and "why"…

Drawing upon Heron and Reason's (1997) participatory inquiry paradigm and extended epistemology, this article explores how six Master of Social Work (MSW) students engaged in sensory arts-based critical reflection concerning their social location, identities, social justice, and social policy. We share our process for creating sensory arts-based…

Poetry informed by indigenous knowledge systems, whether written, spoken or heard, offers ideal pathways for healing and transformation. Being "medicine" in the broadest non-clinical sense, it is deeply restorative as activism, as caregiving practice and as balm in the face of relentless assaults on our bodies and beings. This I…

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an educational approach that, by being a catalyst of social change, promotes sustainability. Although South African education policy and practice appear to be oriented towards ESD, the concept is contested, and ragged with ambiguity and vagueness. Because the transformation of South African education…

Interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and learning is recognised as important for twenty-first century tertiary education that seeks to build students' critical thinking, cultural competence and global understanding. The core elements needed for truly successful collaboration are, however, little understood. This article presents a critical…

Providing opportunities to foster students' civic engagement during their undergraduate education is a goal of many universities. There are a variety of ways in which students participate in community service and in community change efforts and social change initiatives; capturing how students integrate these experiences into their broader…

How might an arts-informed pedagogy in a leadership development programme work to inspire, create and educate the leaders needed for creating more socially just and inclusive communities? This self-study explores how a post-secondary educator has integrated arts-informed approaches to teaching and learning in a leadership development programme at…

This paper explores how ESD activities may be viewed on a continuum from "causal" approaches, seeking to cause change in others, to "enabling" orientations where efforts are made to enable people to implement the principles of ESD and respond to the environmental challenges they face from their own context. An enabling…

The subject of this inquiry is to explore university students' stories of transformation from the practice of integral yoga in an undergraduate course exploring human biology, health, and spirituality. The stories of participants give evidence for successful educational performance when yoga and meditation are combined with academic learning in…

Transformative learning aims to awaken students to issues of injustice, and to promote their critical analysis of assumptions, beliefs and values that lead to and sustain social inequities, so that they may become agents of social change. This paper introduces the Sensitise Take Action and Reflection (STAR) framework, which encapsulates…

College and university educators seek to increase student engagement in learning content, skills, and applications. To achieve this goal, we used transformative teaching techniques in the design of a World Challenge: a two-week, group-based, reflective course for sophomores leading their own learning in developing creative solutions to the problem…

Although critical ethnographers have explored in some depth the ways that social critique informs how youth assess their schooling experiences, the implications of social critique by educators themselves have been of much less interest. Yet, numerous professional educational movements have been wrought from social critique or, at the very least,…

Participatory research (PR) is a term that was first articulated in Tanzania in the early 1970s to describe a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge. Taken together these approaches combine social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process. The International Council for Adult Education provided a…

Various disciplinary perspectives can help in understanding relationships among cultural identity, spirituality, and sociopolitical development and their role in teaching for transformation. Educators must consider how the spirituality omnipresent in the learning environment informs emancipatory education. Cultural identity development is coming…