“Behaviour is what you do, culture is how you’ve learned to do it.” – (Shane Gero in Safina, 2020)
Shane Gero, whale ecologist and scientist- in – Residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, has spent almost two decades analysing the social-learning patterns of family groups of sperm whales. The results have led him to argue for the existence of a “cultural transmission” of information between individuals and groups of these social animals that reaches beyond instinct or simple imitation (Leitao et al. 2024). Although we award ourselves a certain uniqueness and advanced proficiency in this arena, similar arguments have been made for its existence in other species such as, songbirds learning and modifying songs from parents and elders (Slater 1986; Janik and Slater 2000), tool using in family groups of chimpanzees (Luncz et al. 2015) and many other non-human higher mammals (Safina 2021; 2022). Social learning in complex animal societies seems to be ubiquitous, between individuals and within community groups, contributing to awarenesses and ways of being in the ‘worlds’ they inhabit (Abram 1996). Behaviour, skills, and cautions are learned and disseminated socially benefitting the individual and the community, giving access to the collective experience of generations, and defining an ecological sense of place within the ecosystems that support them. My personal perspective is that we seem to have lost this ‘cultural ‘ awareness of being part of a wider collage of fellow living organisms. We seem to have collectively un-learned these most basic skills of co-existing and co-evolving with the environment that supports us.
Excepting indigenous human communities of earlier times and those currently struggling against all odds to maintain their intuitively more ecologically benign lifestyles, few species in the animal kingdom other than ourselves, so actively and consciously indulge in self-harm through the degradation of the ecosystems that support them. In the context of the “deep time” of geology, human existence is minuscule and yet our impact as a species has been disproportionally seismic. Throughout the Anthropocene Epoque which marks our presence as a dominant force impacting the natural systems of the planet, the resilience of the world’s ecosystems has diminished steadily and radically. Our delusional culture of human exceptionalism, endorsed by one myth or another, has justified management of the ‘natural ‘ world for the sole benefit of ourselves re-defining the concept of nature as a pool of natural resources and services. Driven by industrialised resource exploitation well beyond earth-system carrying capacities it is no longer mere conjecture that global ecosystems are in ecological crisis.
Certainly, Gero’s quote, “Behaviour is what you do, culture is how you’ve learned to do it.”(op cit) is a reflection prompted by the complex social interactions of the animal entities of his studies. Even so, the sentiments expressed (with minimal amendment) are seminal to this article.
Assuming formal education to be the principal vehicle of contemporary learning, then Gero’s proposition is apposite in the context of understanding our current clearly dysfunctional relationship with the life supporting ecosystems of the world that we depend on. Further, Feliz Giorgetti (2017), historian of education , has characterised the relationship between education and culture as a “chicken and egg” conundrum. Regardless of pecking order, the interplay between these fundamental elements of societal development have a potent influence on our perceptions of the natural world and how we value it. Together they lend credibility to the transferability of Gero’s contention as an insightful commentary on the human condition.
Global distinctions between education and learning – are there any?
Education and learning, although intimately linked, are not synonymous. Over 15 years embedding sustainability education on graduate and post-graduate science programmes both nationally and internationally has brought this home to me. On the one hand institutionalised education is an external provision of pre-selected information which reflects the goals of the provider. This is usually information, and values deemed good for society and thus, for the learner to learn. Whereas, learning of itself is an individually motivated assimilation of material made personally relevant or of consequence in the context of the learner’s own goals. Of course, these goals may frequently (hopefully) coincide for mutual benefit – but they do not lead to the same place. Eugene Matusov dubs institutionalised education as “educational learning” and observes that,
“education is an institutional process whereas, learning is a psychological process.”-(Matusov 2021, pp.1–5)
Pedagogical goals invariably conform to state or internationally determined benchmarks and are amongst the earliest and most influential communicators of behavioural memes and expressions of our collective cultural ethos. From personal experience, globally the only thing that seems to change in formal education worldwide is the language in which it is presented. The resulting homogenisation of content, cultural aspirations and values that have evolved throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has fostered an anthropocentric view of the world’s ecosystems, according them a principally utilitarian value dedicated to economic growth in the service of human welfare. Undeniably successful in a material sense for the developed world, these aspirations have largely failed as harbingers of ecological wisdom and have contributed greatly to the decline of ecosystem resilience and long term-sustainability.
Educational Learning, Sustainability and Culture
For the greater part of the 20th century, from the vantage point of the more affluent regions of the world, this progressive decline was perceived as being remote by geography and comfortably distant in the future. Now in the opening decades of the 21st century, this future has become the present, and an edgy realisation has taken hold that we are probably the first generations of a complex and technology-dependent global citizenship compelled to recognise sustainability as an essential survival skill. Confronted with intractable problems at scale [such as our current global ecosystem impairment] our civilisation invariably turns to education as the first port of call for resolution and politics as the second. [I discuss this unholy alignment further in Part 2]. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been an early key actor in raising awareness of these issues but with a chequered pattern of success as evidenced by the halting progress of the Sustainable Development Goals (Bendell 2022). Arising as a companion concept to Sustainable Development (UN WCED 1987) ESD has grown to have a considerable influence on education policy worldwide (Johnston 2011; 2018; 2019). A history of ESD is not useful here, beyond noting that it is not without criticism. To be clear, the potentially transformative role of sustainability education in transitioning towards a more ecologically mature global society is to be welcomed. However, sustainability itself, both in theory and in practice is a confused and confusing panacea outside of ‘expert’ circles. Further to this, Part 2 explores the dichotomy between sustainability as a social practice and sustainable development as an international socio-economic political response. Of greater relevance to the current discourse is sustainability education’s potential for succeeding as a substantive transformative influence in the absence of a unifying cultural skein which promotes a more empathic socioecological interaction with the natural world. Anastasia Nasibulina (2015) presents a vision of education for sustainable development as an opportunity to form a new consciousness and behaviour, founded on principles of environmental ethics and that this should form a conceptual foundation of the entire educational ethos. I concur wholeheartedly. Detractors tend to argue that we must get on with the job of educating rather than philosophising. It is certainly essential that it should feature as a mandatory embedded element of conventional education worldwide (Johnston 2018; Johnston 2019; Johnston 2022). However, regardless of attempts at innovation, the pedagogical goals of institutionalised learning remain largely unchanged, maintaining a commitment to technocentric problem solving and resolutions whilst perpetuating a cultural status quo – which some have labelled a “business as usual” mindset.
It would be naïve and grossly unjustified to discount the importance of the contribution that education has made to human well-being over the centuries. Nevertheless, the impact of cultural memes on the nature and outcomes of ‘educational learning’ – in Gero’s world how we have learned it – cannot be dismissed. The crucial factor here is not (as the foregoing might suggest) whether historical and current educational approaches are the originators of our polarity with the rest of the natural world. Rather, the question is to what extent has pedagogical practice perpetuated and endorsed a culture of heedless exploitation to the detriment of all else, with the justification of it being for the common good of humanity. It follows that, reorientation (transformation) of pedagogical practice to enable informed engagement with current social-ecological issues necessarily implies a cultural shift which guards against perpetuation of those cultural values that have led us to where we stand today (Johnston 2024 in press). While perhaps not the whole story, Gero’s contention provides a useful springboard for a re-examination of the cultural prompts that direct our approach to education and learning.
This article draws upon and is expanded in a chapter by the author “Communicating Sustainability: Science Literacy and Transformative Pedagogies”, in the forthcoming collection edited by Simon Cottle Communicating a World in Crisis. New York: Peter Lang (2024 in press)
References
Abram, D. 1996. The spell of the sensuous : perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books.
Bendell, J. 2022. Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters. Sustainability 14, p. 8185.
Gero, S. 2024. How do animals learn how to be, well, animals? Through a shared culture. Available at: https://ideas.ted.com/how-do-animals-learn-how-to-be-well-animals-through-a-shared-culture/ [Accessed: 10 January 2023].
Giorgetti, F.M., Campbell, C. and Arslan, A. 2017. Culture and education: Looking back to culture through education. Paedagogica Historica 53(1–2), pp. 1–6.
Janik, V.M. and Slater, P.J.B. 2000. The different roles of social learning in vocal communication. Animal Behaviour 60(1), pp. 1–11. doi: 10.1006/ANBE.2000.1410.
Johnston, R. 2011. Science Education and Education for Citizenship and Sustainable Development. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching 4, p. 107. Available at: https://celt.uwindsor.ca/index.php/CELT/article/view/3281.
Johnston, R. 2018. Achieving SDG 4.7 : embedding sustainability issues into subject-specific texts – a guide for textbook authors. Research in Action (Special Issue August), pp. 51–60.
Johnston, R. 2022. Achieving SDG 4.7 by matching sustainability learning outcomes to subject-specific curricula: a guide | THE Campus Learn, Share, Connect. Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/achieving-sdg-47-matching-sustainability-learning-outcomes-subjectspecific-curricula-guide [Accessed: 13 December 2022].
Johnston, R.A.S. 2019. Embedding ESD into elementary stage textbooks: lessons from a small Himalayan state. In: Philip Bamber (Liverpool Hope University) ed. Research in Action. pp. 53–59.
Johnston, R. 2024. Communicating Sustainability: Science Literacy and Transformative Pedagogies. In: Cottle Simon ed. Communicating a World-in-Crisis. New York: Peter Lang (in press).
Leitao, A. et al. 2024. Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales. doi: 10.7554/eLife.96362.1.
Luncz, L. V., Wittig, R.M. and Boesch, C. 2015. Primate archaeology reveals cultural transmission in wild chimpanzees (pan troglodytes verus). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370(1682). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0348.
Matusov, E. 2021. The relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal 9, pp. E1–E19.
Nasibulina, A. 2015. Education for Sustainable Development and Environmental Ethics. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences 214, pp. 1077–1082. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.708.
Safina, C. 2021. Considering nonhuman culture Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. doi: 10.1126/science.aba6489.
Safina, C. 2022. Becoming wild : how animals learn to be animals. One World Publications.
Slater, P.J.B. 1986. The cultural transmission of bird song. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1(4), pp. 94–97. doi: 10.1016/0169-5347(86)90032-7.
UN WCED. 1987. Our Common Future. Available at: https://www.are.admin.ch/are/en/home/media/publications/sustainable-development/brundtland-report.html [Accessed: 5 June 2024].
This author’s publications | Sustainable Futures (ronjohnstonsustainablefutures.com)
