Connecting ESD and Green Skills: breaking down silos

Lightening talk prepared for a workshop at the EAUC Scotland Conference (Step Change for Sustainability), held at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh on 13.11.24

I think the first thing I want to say to you is that anti-competition is at the heart of our Green Changemakers work. That’s more significant than it initially sounds. When I first started to research anti-competitive practice a few years ago, everything I googled suggested it was a bad thing. Eventually, the penny dropped. Anti-competitive = anti-capitalist. So what we are doing, working together here today, is fundamentally resistance. 

Anti-competitive practice means that whatever we call what we do, all of us are part of something together. We use the term Green Skills, and we see what we do as also being Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). But we are wasting energy as a movement, if we have to keep discussing this, so we welcome this EAUC collective green/yellow model because it finds room for all us (please note the image below is a work-in-progress which we’ll be developing further in the conference workshops. It draws on Kwauk and Casey, 2021). Reproduced here with permission from EAUC).

Green Changemakers operate mainly in the second left dimension - skills for a green transformation - with some natural and healthy leakage into cross-cutting green skills. We are not technical green skills (more on that later) and not purposefully ESD, though you’d find little in our two approaches that didn’t align. So it’s all good.

It helps to make sense of what Green Changemakers are, if you focus on the changemakers first, then the green. We train people in a specific set of changemaking skills. You can see them here on the infographic at the top of this blog and they pretty much reside in that ‘Skills for a Green Transformation’ space. Above all, we teach about this concept here - potentia. A changemaking kind of power. Potentia comes from the work of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, centuries ago now but we’ve never needed it more. He was writing in Latin and he had two words for ‘power’ at his disposal. Potestas is power-as-usual, power-over. Potentia is power-with, but it’s more than that. It’s an energy, a joyful determination to drive momentum for change. You can teach the changemaking skills and you can feel the changemaking energy. Feel it now, coming off me. Feel it in those of your colleagues you love being around, the ones you come away buzzing from. Feel it in yourself. 

So we have 40 Green Changemakers, trained in changemaking skills. Those Four Seasons of Change you see there aren’t our only frame. Our facilitation frame is the Thinking Environment, about which I’ve written much elsewhere. Our climate justice frame is AimHi Earth’s ‘15 Green Skills’ and that’s what sets our conception of green skills aside from the narrowly technical focus taken in much of FE and Skills. AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills are expansive (there are also 45 of them, in 15 categories). They range across the familiar technical to people, nature and systems thinking. I’ll give you a couple of examples which are real favourites of the Green Changemakers: 

Seven Generations Thinking - the bit that Maslow didn’t understand when he stayed with the Siksika people, the importance of recognising that the Earth is only ever in our stewardship and that every action we take needs to be mindful of the generations to come, as generations before us will have tried to do for us. The Long Now, indigenous wisdom which is long overdue its time.

The Adventure Ready Squad - not a closed team or a single organisation but a constellation of changemakers who can support one another not only with ideas and resources but with energy, that potentia energy. Who can uplift and share hope.

There are so many more illuminating green skills in that suite. Nobody can encounter the AimHiEarth 15 Green Skills and come away thinking that they are not also a Green Changemaker. It’s impossible to dive in and come out with zero self-responsibility for climate action. 

And that’s why we teach changemaking in the context of the 15 Green Skills. It’s why we don’t teach generic ‘green skills’ - because they are never generic, they are always subject- and context-specific. What the Green Changemakers do is empower their colleagues to develop - and stay on top of - green skills in their own subject or campus area. We believe in the potentia of colleagues too. That educators, in particular, are mavens - people with a deep interest and pride in their subject area - who, given the right conditions, will research and teach contemporary green skills because it’s the right thing to do. Teachers don’t want yet another thing to embed. They want to be appreciated and valued for embodying green skills in their work. 

There are Green Skills resources coming out of our ears - for plumbing, for hairdressing, for maths, English, for equine, for graphic design - and phase 2 of our project is a Virtual Green Skills Hub where we are gathering in as many as we can. Green Changemakers are ensuring that we are all pulling together so that we can drive momentum in the face of the day job.

Because that’s the biggest challenge of all. The short-termism of both FE and HE means that momentum around vital, longer-term change is hard to sustain. Initiatives get discussed, even funded, then fizzle out. We lack appropriate metrics because - let’s be right about this - all the KPIs we’re expected to serve are tied up in the business cycle. We refuse to pretend that we can make a simplistic causal link between the changemaking we’re doing and the ultimate, world-changing, preposterous goal of climate justice. We need different metrics and different evaluation practices. That’s why, eight months after the end of the pilot, we are still together, a live dataset, still in our adventure ready squad, learning forward and investigating ways of designing and evaluating impact in the Long Now.