Title:
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Minding the world : integral transformative learning for geographical and environmental wisdom
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This thesis explores how to promote, through education, environmental
sustainability, intercultural understanding and personal signification in a mutually
compatible manner. These aims are considered to be particularly well served through a transdisciplinary approach which combines perspectives drawn particularly, but not
exclusively, from the fields of geography and environmental studies with 'place' and
'landscape' representing powerful integrative concepts. An 'enactivist' epistemology is presented which sees both a continuity, but also qualitative distinction, between human perception and that found in the non-human world. Such a perspective stresses the
importance of both the milieu and the human subject in the perceptual process, and the
neologism emplaced imagination is presented to stress this dyadic relationship.
In addition, a neo-Piagetian epistemology is defended in which the emplaced
imagination is understood to undergo a series of qualitatively different developmental
(shifts', with a 'postformal' stage (heuristically referred to as 'wisdom' and characterised
by a multiperspectival outlook and a motivation to work towards the Common Good)
being seen as the desirable goal. This goal is seen to be promoted by transformative or
'fourth order education' which is most likely to be associated with adult learning. A
special focus is therefore placed on Higher Education and, in particular, the development
of 'transformative' or 'vanguard' educators.
An attempt is made to generate a 'mixed discourse' that permits a rapprochement
between science, religion and art through the presentation of a non-materially reductive
ontology within which to set this educational project. Implications of such a perspective
for human-environment/place transactions are considered, drawing heavily on recent
thinking in geography and environmental psychology and philosophy. Finally, important
educational implications of the preceding chapters are considered.
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