Input – on education, democracy, sustainability, and care
David Fopp, davidfopp@outlook.com, 0737581542
June 2022
The challenge: How can we provide our students at all universities, especially those who will work with children or students, an education that conveys knowledge about the ecological and climate crisis and its causes as well as the way out of them? How to teach about about sustainability and a democratic and caring approach to each other and nature?
Today, it is possible at almost all schools and universities to become a teacher, sociologist, economist or psychologist without understanding the scale of the crisis, and its causes in nature and in social and economic interactions. It is therefore possible to finish one’s studies without having acquired general as well as specific competences and knowledge about the way into a sustainable, prosperous just society.
But our students are the ones who are supposed to contribute to the sustainability of our societies in a very short time, perhaps ten years – while deepening democracy. This knowledge is hardly available today; not among those responsible for teaching and research, and not among the students.
Stockholm University for example stands for “sustainability and democracy”, and therefore it is particularly important to understand and explore the relationship precisely between the democratic and the sustainable: a key role plays the dimension of “care”.
That is what this project is about: an input of lectures and suggestions on how to change our education and create a university that lives up to the democratic mission so that our students feel safe and curious to understand the crisis, its causes and ways out of it.
1 The first series of lectures presents ideas on how the very concepts of “democracy”, “sustainability” and “care” can be related and how we can teach “about” and “with” them:
Part 1: “Democracy, sustainability, care”: https://vimeo.com/684956169 (44 min.)
Part 2: “How to teach (about) democracy, sustainability, and care”: https://vimeo.com/685210718 (61 min.)
[Part 3/4: Aesthetics, ethics – democracy and care. The two lectures here are more “bonus” material to clarify what the project of “creating an integrity material” means – which is the dimension that links democracy, care and sustainability:
Part 3: https://vimeo.com/687454756 (50 min.)
Part 4: https://vimeo.com/400269525 (46 min)]
2 The second series of lectures is about a specific dimension that can be considered as the practical centre of what links democracy and sustainability: being in a “caring relationship/connectedness” with each other, oneself and the world around us
Part A: “Contact/connectedness” as a dimension in relation to sustainability: https://vimeo.com/656230061 (9 min.)
Part B: “Contact/connectedness” as a bodily-social aesthetic movement dimension (Introduction to Alexander Technique): https://vimeo.com/656275275 (12 min.)
Part C: Caring, connection and the aesthetic dimension: https://vimeo.com/656326856 (22 min.)
The third series of lectures (micor-macro-democracy) focuses on the relation between what happens in the ”small” regarding democracy, sustainability and care (the intersubjective, the classroom, etc.) and what happens in the big dimension (the economy, politics, the global):
Part 1: Lecture on the concept of democracy (small and large) in relation to care and sustainability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heuGyax7m_o (34 min.) (at “Researchers Desk”)
Part 2: On social relations and the classroom – in relation to care, sustainability and democratic leadership: existing recorded lecture in the course “social relations” at BUV (60 min.)
Part 3: Lecture on caring, sustainability and democracy linked to health (at Karolinska Institutet): https://vimeo.com/666885727 (52 min.)
Part 4: Overview lecture from the dual perspective: children and global justice in relation to democracy, sustainability and care (as pdf):
and beginning as a video lecture: https://vimeo.com/414473667 (31 min.)
Part 5: On intersectionality as a basic dimension: https://medium.com/@davidfopp/how-to-meet-and-get-out-of-the-crises-by-understanding-intersectionality-16-steps-b588952b23eb
The fourth lecture series is about the question how we can implement all that together: how we can change our universities, regarding 1. curricula/content, 2. didactics and 3. research ethics:
Part 1: How can we redesign our universities in relation to democracy, sustainability and care: https://vimeo.com/576515965 (25 min.)
Part 2: Second part of the same lecture: https://vimeo.com/576519026 (25 min.)
(Part 3: See also Karolinska Institutet lecture again: https://vimeo.com/666885727)
David Fopp
Stockholm, March 2022
Climate activism, sustainability and science 