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About the Workshop
We will explore the crucial role that educational leaders play in addressing the climate crisis. Through interactive discussions, group activities, and expert-led sessions, you will gain valuable insights and practical strategies to make a positive impact on the environment and inspire change within your educational community.
All participants will get a certificate from The University of Manchester at the end of the workshop.
This masterclass attempts to introduce Educational Leadership at a time of planetary challenge i.e., climate change, which could be viewed as the human disconnection from the earth observable, the exploitation of natural resources in service of endless growth. Learn what educators can offer amidst the slow-burn crisis, in the 2020’s as world governments sail casually past emissions targets for ‘sustainable development’ with unthinkable consequences for earth’s atmosphere, flora, and fauna. Given the gravity of the moment, this contribution attempts to understand whether education and its leadership can be emancipatory and act as a pragmatic influencer for planetary good, or whether it represents a bendy ideal in service of ‘business as usual’.
During the session, we will learn to make conceptual contribution with a review of education and its pedigree by dealing with the concept of alienation (Entfremdung). Originating in Hegelian thought, the concept of Alienation offers social insight into ‘how we got here’ and goes some way to explain the broken relationship between humanity and nature in which individuals think and act as if isolated from the natural world. Entfremdung is assumed to be a socially driven process which propels (human) nature, its artifacts, and even its spiritual transformation to acculturate around non-native institutions. Those external systems dominate people as soon as they gain control of them by reacting to their individual and collective needs.
As global crises form the background to the thinking espoused here, we will also go through a very human sense of regeneration. In Arendtian (1954) terms, these are opportunities for colourful rebirth in a natural world within a field of education in time characterised by certainty, measurement and finality. Contextually, the planet, students, and future citizens are placed centrally to the enquiry. While national systems appear to struggle in the Neoliberal policy-scape, International Schools and their cosmopolitan pedagogy, outlook, staffing and students appear to offer a renaissance for teaching and teachers, invoking a new hopes for professionalism at global scale. Education is a formidable tool for influencing society, conveying cultural principles to future generations of students and shaping social change for a (un)sustainable planet. In cautionary fashion, this contribution problematises education in the 21st Century to understand what is helpful for teachers and students in a changing world.