The General Teaching Council for Scotland invited Dr Beth Christie, Senior Lecturer, and Director for the Learning for Sustainability programme at the University of Edinburgh, to provide “a provocation” to help the GTC review its Code of Professionalism and Conduct. Beth was one of a series of invited education professionals and experts with diverse, and sometimes potentially controversial views, to stimulate discussion about ethics in the teaching profession. The GTC doesn’t necessarily agree with all of the views presented, but believes that it is by actively seeking to understand different perspectives and engaging in open reasoned, discussion and debate that we become critically informed.
This is how Beth’s presentation begins:
“… I firmly believe that every act is educational in some form, so the questions and provocations I’ll pose are first and foremost questions to ask of ourselves, about our positionality: about how we act, who we are and what we value as teachers and learners, but fundamentally as planetary citizens. And I’m asking them of myself too.
This could be understood in a number of ways. Firstly, yes, it is a play on ‘Learning for Sustainability’ – the policy and professional context I and many of you have been engaged in since it became part of Scottish education in 2013 – but I don’t want this to be a policy piece. We may all be familiar with LfS policy – at least in in principle – that it is an entitlement for learners, that it’s a whole-setting approach to life and learning that every practitioner has a responsibility to weave across their practice, and core to the GTCS Professional standards. And it has been strengthened in recent years; and in fact, the LfS Action plan is currently being updated and is due out in April. So, whilst I don’t want to go down that policy route, I do keep a critical eye on the ways in which policy is working, and not working, and how it translates into our daily professional practice.
This brings me to the issues I really want to explore today, which are to ask: what does it means to be a teacher in Scotland today? We are in times of uncertainty; we are amidst planetary and social fracture. So how do we respond professionally when facing issues of inequity, poverty, hunger, the climate crisis, mass consumerism, loss of species and so on. And before we think about how we might take action, I want to pause to think about what led us here, and the role of education in carving a way forward. The initial thoughts I had were to ask:
- To think deeply about why the Learning for Sustainability policy was created and felt to be needed in the first place?
- To examine our individual ethical stance and consider what becomes of us all – and our planet – if we don’t take issues of sustainability seriously?
- And what becomes of us if feel we are reduced to a ‘tick-box’ exercise; that we may only find time to ‘fly the flag’ for sustainability without questioning the very structures, systems and conditions that maintain and perpetuate these dangerous times…. are we then complicit in ‘learning for unsustainability’?
These are the issues I want to explore further – they are deep and real concerns of mine – and they genuinely keep me awake at night. To start with and to stick to the task set by GTCS, I have tried to narrow my thinking into a neat provocation statement; the overarching theme of which is:
“Given the enduring complex global challenges (ecological, social, political, economic) that we all (internationally, nationally, locally) face (in various ways, shapes, forms and intensities) educators have an ethical obligation to orient education to acknowledge and act upon these issues as a core priority.”
Now this is broad and rangy – I accept that. Planetary and societal collapse and education’s role in that is not easy to fit into a single slide, never mind a catchy soundbite. But I think this point in itself is important as this is a complex task, not least because of its interdisciplinary nature – the way in which it connects across so many issues – but that it also operates on many levels – at an international, national and local level. But the clear point here is the foregrounding of ethics, that this provocation is intentionally calling us to think about our own positionality.
But before I push on that further and pose some questions, I want to foreground a few things and set the scene a bit more. Firstly, I want to say a bit more about these complex and interlinked ecological, social, economic issues and share a framework for thinking about them. That framework is the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
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You can watch the whole talk here, and the full transcript with slides is here. Beth can be contacted at beth.christie@ed.ac.uk