This webinar will be of particular interest to educators, teachers and researchers wishing to extend their thinking about the challenges of climate change and eager to explore and share pedagogical strategies for positively engaging with and relating to colleagues, students and communities on these vital issues. 

Relationality represents more than a simple mapping exercise or description; it is an organic process that implies ethical positioning and implicit value judgements, through which our democratic engagement with each other and the future emerges. I argue that humans and other-than-humans face unprecedented existential dilemmas together, and only by profound eco-political change, can we reimagine our relationships upon and within our very fragile planet.

Eco-political change can be enacted in many different ways, but educators now need to engage more fully with the profound implications of inaction for future generations. There is a growing appetite for this engagement, and the purpose of this webinar is to begin to explore how eco-relationality plays out in the rich educational spaces, physical and metaphysical, that we can create beyond the boundaries of normative and linear approaches to curriculum and pedagogy.    

Dr Chris Turner OBE FRSA FLS is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter where he is an active member of the Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures Network and an Associate  of the Global Systems Institute. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education at University College London and until recently was a member of Senate at the Open University.

His particular research, writing and teaching interests are in aesthoecology, eco-philosophy and transdisciplinarity centered around the crises arising from anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation. He has written widely on these issues with his colleague Dr Emese Hall (School of Education, University of Exeter). Most recently he has co-edited a book entitled ‘Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures’ (co-editors Kerry Chappell and Heather Wren) to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in early 2024.

The webinar link

Contact: C.Turner5@exeter.ac.uk