Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change

Leigh Price is a member of the Centre for Critical Realism, an Associate of the International Centre for Critical Realism, a Research Associate of Rhodes University, South Africa, and a Visiting Research Associate of the Institute of Education, University College London, UK.Heila Lotz-Sisitka holds a Chair of Environmental Education, and is also part time Director of Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is editor of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education. Her research interests include critical research, environmental learning and social transformation.

• 1. Why critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change? Introducing the chapters 2. Key critical realist concepts for environmental educators 3. Using critical realism to explain change in the context of participatory mapping and resilience 4. Networking: Enabling or constraining institutionalization of environmental education courses in universities 5. Underlabouring systems thinking with critical realism in understanding Rhodes University’s response to the sustainability imperative 6. Bhaskar and collective action: Using lamination as a framework for reviewing the literature on collective action 7. Absenting the absence of parallel learning pathways for intermediate skills: The ‘missing middle’ in the environmental sector in South Africa 8. The emergence of environmental ethics discourses in stratified, open systems: some educational considerations 9. Working with critical realist perspective and tools at the interface of indigenous and scientific knowledge in a science curriculum setting 10. Indigenous knowledge and critical realism on the Eastern Coast of Tanzania 11. Dialectical critical realism and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT): Exploring and expanding learning processes in sustainable agriculture workplace contexts 12. Community learning as a passage through the dialectic? Engaging with absences in an irrigation scheme in Mozambique 13. Exploring contradictions and absences in mobilizing ‘learning as process’ for sustainable agricultural practices 14. Exploring critical realist insights into transformative environmental learning processes in contexts of social-ecological risk 15. Emergent properties and position-practice system of university educators in the mainstreaming of Education for Sustainable Development 16. Steel Valley and the absence of environmental justice in the new South Africa: Critical realism’s kinship with environmental justice 17. Absenting absence: Expanding zones of proximal development in environmental learning processes 18. Some implications of metaReality for environmental educators