Transformative Sustainability Education

How do we move towards more sustainable relations with the more-than-human (natural) world? My educational research and practice examines how to disrupt social norms that support and often reproduce separation, and hierarchy, between humans and non-human others. Using the lens of “threshold concepts” which characterize challenging and troublesome points of transformation, this scholarship begins with epistemological stretching: expanding the ways of knowing that someone respects, understands, and/or engages with. It then extends to seek processes for learning how to communicate with animals.

My focus on expanding ways of knowing (epistemologies) and being (ontologies) contributes to enhanced relations with the natural world and deeper understanding of Indigenous worldviews. The first two years of this research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Go back to the Research page or see our Working Papers section.