Dr Rebecca Webb and Dr Perpetua Kirby are working on how to balance children’s conformity in schools with possibilities for transformation.
Children currently become successful by acquiring lots of curriculum knowledge and behaving in particular ways. Rebecca and Perpetua’s doctoral studies questioned this approach as the primary focus of effective education in our schools today.
Building on this research, in 2018 they launched TRANSFORM-iN EDUCATION to explore the value of wider purposes of education for the complex demands of the 21st century. They focus on opening-up time and space to engage with uncertainty within everyday practices and pedagogies within and beyond the classroom.
In conversation with teachers, students, researchers, policy makers and others, they explore how we might do more than simply study existing knowledge, so that students and teachers can also critique and creatively challenge taken-for-granted ideas, behaviours and identities: to transform what it is possible to to think, to do and to be within the school.
Their main focus is on sustainability education, including the role of education to support the flourishing of humans and the beyond-human living on a damaged planet.
Their regular blog series explores different aspects of their thinking and work.
For more information visit: www.transformineducation.org
All photos are by Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin
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