Part III: Regenerative Education, Sustainability and Global Futures

Claudio Díaz^a and Susanne Gannon^b

^aDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Concepción, Chile

^bSchool of Education, Western Sydney University, Australia

This section focuses on transformative, interdisciplinary, future-focused pedagogies. In all its forms, both within and beyond formal institutions and curriculum structures, education is pivotal for creating more just, inclusive and liveable worlds. The chapters in this section outline responses to the climate crisis and innovations in cross-sector practice, demonstrating how we might rethink the potential of education to shape planetary and civic futures. They challenge individualised, competitive, outcome-focused, extractive approaches to learning and teaching – instead promoting responsive, collective, non-hierarchical actions, events and organisations. Framing education as regenerative brings attention to well-being, resilience, agency and diversity as ethical imperatives that cannot be disentangled from all modes of justice.

Through a critical lens, these chapters trace how people and communities practise resistance, transformation and resilience in settings dominated by the structural constraints of ethnocentric policies and systems in which human beings’ cultural and socio-emotional experiences are covertly dismissed. They show how colonial practices reproduce logics of exclusion, marginalisation and stigmatisation that erode people’s sense of belonging, collaboration and understanding. Planetary justice and environmental sustainability cannot be disentangled from the necessity of sustaining and building community. Collectively, the chapters are a call to rethink Western practices and embrace more sustainable and meaningful ways of relating with others and the world.

López examines how wildfires forced local schools in Chile to respond in new ways to their traumatised communities, becoming sites for resilience, solidarity, dignity and inclusion. Climate crises became catalysts that demand locally transformative pedagogies. Through the critical anti-colonial framework of epistemologies of the South, López traces subjugation, abjection and in/exclusion through 2 Chilean schools’ narratives of response, gradual recovery and the eventual reassertion of centralised managerialism. Powell turns to early childhood to consider the arts as a mode of creative and ethical engagement with more-than-human worlds. A self-directed spontaneous moment of creativity, relationality, and responsibility where a young child composes and records a song about trees, breath and human complicity is explored through Indigenous ontologies from Chile and Australia. The figure of a cobweb of existence evokes interconnection and interdependence of the singing body and all elements of earthly existence, suggesting new approaches to sustainability education.

Prasad and Raman expand early childhood interventions to a national scale by contrasting two Early Childhood Development Programmes (ECDP) in India, which differ significantly in coordination and quality. The nationwide Integrated Child Development Service evidences a top-down, centralised system, while at the local level, community creches in Odisha show a bottom-up and community-led approach. ECDPs, regardless of being either state-run or community-led, acknowledge the need for early childhood well-being, developmental needs and health in a country with more than 100 million children and precarious, low-resource settings with inequitable access. The state-run ECDP depicts a structural and highly centralised management that prevents community participation and ownership, while the non-state-run ECDPs are women-run, triggering communities’ reflexivity, dialogue and social action. This creates safe, respectful, and open spaces that privilege communities’ existing knowledge, which is often accepted and sometimes contested, with the ultimate goal of capacity building and participatory action. Prasad and Raman conclude that in a country with such a large child population, one of the challenges is to strengthen ECDPs as programs that go beyond child nutrition and focus on early stimulation, child development and health care; programs in which culture, science and power intersect to promote the rights of very young children.

Macias Díaz and Salazar share a story of citizenship participation in which young activists across Antarctic gateway cities came together to foster the protection of their natural and cultural legacy. The Antarctic Youth Coalition works for the mitigation of climate change by adapting and reducing its effects on communities, and exercises youth participation in Antarctic-related issues as a way of promoting a sense of custodianship towards the Global South and Antarctica. The initial insecurities of a young teacher without scientific training intertwine with the shared experiences of other young people, showing how an organisation that promotes the protection of Antarctica has transformed and inspired other cities. The narrative shows how young and diverse voices from civil society become a bridge that opens and strengthens new forms of relationships between the southern cities and the Antarctic continent. There exists an understanding that Antarctica is not a topic that concerns only scientists, but it encompasses social, cultural, educational and global climate dimensions. United by an interest in Antarctica and with a focus on female leadership, diversity, inclusion, environmental protection and transformative education, this passionate team of young people act as agents of change in the construction of an Antarctic identity within communities.

Condie and Cole also examine opportunities for young people to develop activist dispositions and skills. They reflect on how bottom-up approaches to curriculum development can transform university culture to create spaces that challenge and resist capitalist colonialism. Their interest is in collective spaces in which people can experiment, collaborate, think and act beyond the formal structures of education. They explore the annual “Festival of Action” as an initiative in which students and staff partner to take local action on accelerating climate change. Everyday practices such as reuse, recycle, swap and repair provide openings into global activism. This strategy upends conventional curriculum, moving beyond abstract content delivery to shared knowledge and skills to resist neoliberal practices.

Parada and Díaz rethink higher education research, attempting to explore strategies to democratise knowledge production and embrace methodological pluralism. They question linguistic and cultural hegemony in academia; call for multilingual and culturally inclusive research that breaks down elitist barriers in academia; and seek to include the voices of those who are often marginalised in mainstream research. The authors propose the within/between/extended cohort model of support as a framework to democratise doctoral education and encourage greater diversity, equity and inclusion. This implies embracing complexity and ambiguity in research and engaging with the economic and political sectors and the civil society to offer solutions and innovation to complex problems. It also means exploring alternative frameworks for decolonising and democratising research practices and strategies to navigate the global trend of standardisation in contexts that have significant diversity and social specificities.

Together, these chapters illuminate the transformative power of education when it is rooted in justice, inclusion and democratisation. By foregrounding local knowledge, collective agency, ecological consciousness and cultural responsiveness, they offer a compelling vision of pedagogies that resist dominant paradigms and cultivate more equitable, promising and sustainable futures. This section invites educators, policymakers and communities to reimagine education as a deeply interconnected, holistic and justice-oriented practice – one that nurtures belonging, fosters resilience, affirms diverse ways of knowing and learning, and empowers individuals and communities to critically engage with the world and actively participate in its reimagining.

Author Note

Claudio Díaz https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2378

Susanne Gannon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2182-3615

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Claudio Díaz. Email: claudiodiaz@udec.cl.

Cite This Chapter

Díaz, C., & Gannon, S. (2026). Part III: Regenerative education, sustainability and global futures. In L. Naidoo, S. Gannon, C. Woodrow, C. H. Díaz, V. Lopez, & J. F. Salazar (Eds.), Sur-Sur Southern knowledges: Education, sustainability and social transformation. Western Open Books. https://doi.org/10.61588/HGMT4758

Attribution

Except where otherwise noted, this work by Claudio Díaz and Susanne Gannon is licensed under CC BY 4.0.