1 Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology is simply the study of how humans adapt to social and environmental factors in order to belong, survive and prosper. Basically, belonging is the creation of societal structures to acquire food, make a home, bring up a family and thereby generate a sense of well being. This is the fundamental dynamic of cultural ecology, which is defined by tracing an individual’s relationships with family, neighbours and political governance of spaces and places. Through these interactions we are part of nature in everything we do. No one would deny that culture and its related activities is an ecology, having many links with local development of place. Vibrant, cultural activities give meaning to a place where a community mobilises resources and generates its own socio ecological dynamics. This process can release the creativity of those who live there and make the territory more attractive to residents, visitors or innovators. On the other hand, there are places with low socio ecological flows, because they lack local amenities, such as shops, pubs, cafes, transport links, green spaces and playgrounds. These places have greater inequalities between poor and affluent households. Amongst residents there is widespread grief, concern and despair because the government does not seem to have a plan of action that is dignified and comprehensive and seeks to address the core concerns. These concerns are aggravated in an increasingly complex era of climate crisis, environmental degradation and rising social inequity. Here, new challenges are appearing for building a just and inclusive global society to accommodate the most marginalised and vulnerable. Many of the latter are the historic victims of white supremacy. These so-called developing populations are often the least responsible for ecological risks and threats, but are the most affected by their emergence. In this context, initiatives like the Black Lives Matter movement can be a cry for restorative justice. The question is how can we achieve a just and inclusive global society that contributes to restoring sustainable relationships between culture and ecology, where the ecosystems range from the Brazilian rainforest to the ‘urban jungles’ of Europe and the USA?
2 Guiding principles of inclusivity
People are educated to create “in-groups” and “out-groups,” based on similarities and differences. The more people are taught to perceive someone to be different, the less likely they are to feel comfortable with, or trust, that person. They position the person in their out-group. This kind of categorization of exclusion, while usually unconscious, but reinforced by cultural norms, can do significant social damage. However, there is deep uncertainty about how to create inclusive environments within schools and about how to teach inclusively. Inclusive education was initially focused on providing for students with disabilities in mainstream schools. It now encompasses a much broader definition that refers to all those, black or white, who may have been historically marginalized from meaningful education, who come from poor, varied multicultural and multi-diverse backgrounds, or who are at risk of not achieving their potential as self-regarding individuals.
The Black Lives Matter movement is a powerful, non-violent peace movement that systematically examines injustices that exist at the intersections of race, class, and gender; including mass incarceration, poverty, non-affordable housing, income disparity, homophobia, unfair immigration laws, gender inequality, and poor access to healthcare.
The movement began in 2013 with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teenager Trayvon Martin. The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans: Michael Brown, resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, a city near St. Louis, and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other African Americans by police actions and/or while in police custody. In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter activists became involved in the 2016 United States presidential election. The originators of the hashtag and call to action, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, expanded their project into a national network of over 30 local chapters between 2014 and 2016.
Black Lives Matter is a decentralized network and has no formal hierarchy. The movement returned with global headlines and gained further international attention, promoting restorative justice, during the universal George Floyd protests in 2020, following his killing by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Restorative justice is more a philosophy than a specific method. It offers a non-adversarial, problem-solving process that involves people who have been harmed (victims) with the harmers/offenders and members of the community. The aim is to find solutions through connection, not exclusion. It is understood that the growth and learning that occurs often transforms people, relationships and communities. Contemporary protest movements, like Black Lives Matter are distinguished from historic movements by relying on decentralized leadership. They utilize social media and technology and have a central role in addressing social justice issues. In this context, principles of humanism guide our endeavors to be more civil, fair, and charitable with one another. We are all in this together, regardless of colour, sex, political affiliation, level of wealth, creed, age, or sexual orientation. Coexistence is marked by equitable rapport and reciprocity. Therefore, those who consider themselves humanists, who promote unfettered, egalitarian human welfare; those who desire a humane society and seek to humanize all individuals, need restorative justice as a the only rational educational philosophy
Thirteen Principles for learning to be inclusive emerged in the School Week of Action, mounted by Black Lives Matter, February 3-7, 2020. It was part of the educational theme of Teaching for Change and involved Washington D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice in partnership with educators, and community members. It was built on the momentum of past local weeks of action within the School Week of Action campaign, then taking place in cities across the U.S. The objective was to promote a set of national demands for education based on the Thirteen Black Lives Matter guiding principles that focus on improving the school experience for students of colour..
3 A curriculum for change
Enshrined in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is the principle that every person should be included in reaping the benefits of prosperity and enjoy minimum standards of well-being. This is captured in the Agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The goals are aimed at freeing all nations and peoples and all segments of society from poverty and hunger to ensure healthy lives and access to education, green energy and information about how to live sustainably. It is recognized that these goals are difficult to achieve without making institutions work for those who are deepest in poverty and most vulnerable to discrimination. Therefore, the Agenda embraces broad targets aimed at promoting the just rule of law, ensuring equal access to justice and broadly fostering inclusive and participatory decision-making. These goals and targets, when effectively translated through education into action and properly benchmarked, represent essential elements of social inclusion learning processes. Therefore, learning to be inclusive in a global context is vital to target and attain sustainable development goals for people of all ages and ethnicity.
So that humanity can reach the 2030 targets there is no better place to start unlearning white supremacy, and begin the social reconstruction of whiteness, than the 13 principles of inclusivity set out by ‘Black Lives Matter’. They were designed for a syllabus in restorative justice encompassing the whole of humanity. The understanding was that the privileges conferred on white people by a racist system are ill-begotten, and that benefiting from others’ oppression is neither a morally acceptable nor a spiritually healthy way to live.
Restorative Justice is the most important of the 13 principles of inclusivity, with universal applicability, into which all others flow. It brings those harmed by crime or conflict and those responsible for the harm, into a coalition enabling everyone affected by a particular incident to play a part in repairing the harm and finding a positive way forward. This is part of a wider field of action called restorative practice. Planning for 2030 sustainability and developing restorative practice go hand in hand.
Restorative justice is different from criminal justice, which focuses on retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. The focus of restorative justice is on reparation to the victim, on reintegration of the victim and offender, and on the victim as the person who was most directly harmed by the offence. We know that if you hurt somebody, you have to help them feel better; you can’t just say, ‘Sorry; and walk away. We also know that it’s important for people to be able to make a better choice another time, and it is everyone’s job to help them make better choices and to give them chances to do that.
Restorative practice can be used anywhere to prevent conflict, build relationships and repair harm by enabling people to communicate effectively and positively. Restorative practice is increasingly being used in schools, children’s services, workplaces, hospitals, communities and the criminal justice system. In this new Black Lives Matter environment, with heightened racial sensitivities and cries for restorative justice, whites and black people may approach each other with some hesitancy and anxiety about not knowing exactly what to say. In this connection, they may want to speak boldly but feel constrained, muzzled or just completely exhausted and therefore choose to instead simply fume on the inside. A shared commitment to restorative justice is the much needed common ground and this is why restorative justice should be the central pillar of school curricula aimed at behaviour change.
Exclusive behaviors are any behaviors that make an individual feel like they are not a part of the group in which they find themselves. The reaction is either to leave the group and become more exclusive or to remain and change behaviour to become more inclusive.
The three big ideas in restorative justice are:
- repair: crime causes harm and justice requires repairing that harm;
- encounter: the best way to determine how to do that is to have the parties come together to decide together;
- and transformation through learning to be inclusive to facilitate fundamental changes in people, relationships and communities.
Education for social justice has implications for what we teach (curriculum) and how we teach (pedagogy).
4 Mapping knowledge domains
During the last two decades there has been an explosion in the amount of information available to education and the accessibility of that information due to a vast increase in electronic storage. New techniques of analysis, retrieval, and visualization have been made possible by great increases in processing speed and power of search engines operating on the World Wide Web. In the light of this, the term “mapping knowledge domains” was chosen by Richard M. Shiffrin and Katy Börner to describe a newly evolving interdisciplinary area of science aimed at the process of charting, mining, analyzing and sorting, which enables the navigation and display of knowledge (Fig 1).
Fig 1 Mapping the process of turning data into knowledge
Data, information, concept and knowledge are often used interchangeably, but they are really four different things.
i Data is just facts, which may or may not be useful.
ii Information is a selection of data collected for some meaning or purpose. Within this category, a topic is a unit of information with a title and content, short enough to be specific to a single subject or answer a single question, but long enough to make sense on its own and be authored as a unit.
iii A concept is a cognitive grouping of topics that defines a main idea or a theme.
An example of concept is a book that is focused on satirical poetry..
iv Domain knowledge is a set of concepts defining a specific, specialized discipline or field. People who have domain knowledge, are often considered specialists or experts. A body of knowledge is the complete set of concepts that make up a professional domain, as defined by the relevant learned society or professional association.
v General knowledge is a collection of concepts from everyday life, not all of it has practical use.
The curriculum for learning to be socially inclusive is built around the 13 guiding principles of ‘Black Lives Matter’ The key messages are:
- social exclusion is a multidimensional phenomenon not limited to material deprivation; poverty is an important dimension of exclusion, albeit only one dimension. Accordingly, social inclusion processes involve more than improving access to economic resources.
- social inclusion is defined as the process of improving the terms of participation in society, particularly for people who are disadvantaged, through enhancing opportunities, access to resources, freedom of voice and respect for rights.
- measuring social exclusion is challenging due to its multidimensional nature and the lack of standard data sources across countries and for all social groups at highest risk of being left behind.
While social inclusion is a core aspiration of the 2030 Agenda, conceptual and analytical work on what constitutes inclusion, as well as efforts to improve data availability, are needed.
The goals for learning to be inclusive are to establish a pedagogy and curriculum for changing the mindset of individuals or groups regarding their worldviews, collective views, interpersonal views and their individual views about being someone other. A political model to establish this is ‘steady state socialism’ in a cosmopolitan society, where human needs sit in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them
‘Learning to be Inclusive’ is an experimental multiethnic online pedagogy to support people who wish to become more inclusive in their attitudes to others. It explores ideas of educational blogging being evaluated by ‘International Classrooms On Line. The methodology is to use Google Blogger as an interactive tool for assembling a personal body of knowledge on the theme of restorative justice.
Bloggers trawl the Internet for information and present it as pages and posts using the 13 principles of Black Lives Matter as conceptual place holders. within a knowledge framework comprising five knowledge domains, to display their findings. Their learning objective is to use blogging to explore and develop their own inclusive mindset for avoiding exclusive behaviour (Table 1).
The educational domain to be explored is ‘Belonging Place and Change’ and at the moment there are three themes (three separate blogs).
i ‘The theme of Belonging Place and Change’,
ii ‘Evolution Islands’;
iii ‘Learning to be Inclusive’.
The way it works is that the basic piece of information for a post or page is a website. A piece of text from the site is posted to a particular blog with a picture and the URL, tagged with a title that connects it to one of the topics that is being developed in that blog (Table 1). By this means the blogg becomes a personal body of knowledge.
Table 1 A themed curriculum for place and change.
(Based on a ‘Kid friendly’ version of the 13 guiding principles by Lalena Garcia)
Change is focused on five topics that together define inclusivity as a body of knowledge. namely world views, societal views, interpersonal views and individual views, which are defined as follows;
Topic 1 ‘Worldviews’.
Globalism
Globalism means that we are thinking about all the different people all over the world, and thinking about the ways to keep things fair everywhere.
.Diversity
Different people do different things and have different feelings. It is important that we have lots of different kinds of people in our community and that everyone feels safe.
Topic 2 ‘Societal views’.
Families
There are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is people who take care of each other. It’s important to make sure that all families feel welcome.
Villages and Neighbourhoods
There are many different kinds of families; what makes a family is people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when it is lots of families together, it can be called a village. Neighbourhood is generally defined spatially as a specific geographic area and functionally as a set of social networks. It is a spatial unit in which face-to-face social interactions occur; these are the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realise common values, socialise youth, and maintain effective social control.
Collective value
Everybody is important, and has the right to be safe and happy
Topic 3 ‘Interpersonal views’.
Empathy
It is important to think about how other people feel, because different people have different feelings. Sometimes it helps to think about how you would feel if the same thing that happened to your friend happened to you.
Loving engagement
It is important to make sure that we are always trying to be fair and peaceful, and to engage with other people (treat other people) with love. We have to keep practicing this so that we can get better and better at it
Intergenerational inclusivity
It is important that we have spaces where people of different ages can come together and learn from each other. Another way to say that is intergenerational.
Thinking genealogically about place
Genealogy, in short, is first and foremost a way of thinking, and thinking genealogically is one of the distinctive characteristics of human cognition. Because they are the very objects of our genealogical imagination, ancestors and relatives deserve a prominent place among the foundational pillars of being.
Topic 4 ‘Individual views’.
Gender
There are some people who think that women are less Important than men. We know that all people are important and have the right to be safe and talk about their feelings
Transgender
Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.
Being queer
Everybody has the right to choose who they love and the kind of family they want by listening to their own heart and mind.
Being unapologetically yourself
There are lots of different kinds of people that vary in the colour of their skin, But all share a common biochemical heritage with other living beings. So It’s important to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, and that’s why people all over the world, white as well black, are part of the Black Lives Matter movement.’
5 Concepts for learning to be inclusive
1795
Humankind classified according to ethnicity
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
The idea that there are independent human ethnic groups can be traced to the late 1700s, when German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach attempted to classify humans, largely by how they looked and where they called home.
His final classification of 1795 divided all humans into five groups, defined both by geography and appearance: the Caucasian variety, for the light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and Africa; the Mongolian variety, for most other inhabitants of Asia, including China and Japan; the Ethiopian variety, for the dark-skinned people of Africa; the American variety, for most native populations of the New World; and the Malay variety, for the Polynesians and Melanesians of the Pacific and for the aborigines of Australia.
He not only used geography and skin colour but, notably, the size and shape of skulls to explore what he called the “varieties of mankind.” but held that all races and peoples were equal and stated that the “many varieties of humankind as are at present known to be one and the same species. Later, unscientific thinking by Europeans, that one race is superior to another, has led, historically, to some of the worst of human behavior; colonization, slavery, apartheid and genocide.
1945-50
Unesco and the (One) World of Julian Huxley.
As a discipline, biology had been at the heart of modern cultural and political debates about the nature of human diversity and its significance since the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1930s, as fascist European political parties brutally claimed scientific legitimacy for their regimes, biologists such as Julian Huxley emphasized the diversity of humanity was a minor outcome of evolution.
The social unity of humankind expressed in cosmopolitanism and internationalism, were crucial ideological contexts for the creation of Unesco, and the shape that Julian Huxley, Unesco’s first Director-General, gave to that organization. In the history of Unesco’s early years, Huxley is often depicted as its hero, charting ‘the broad course to which the organization became committed’, and granted the natural sciences, and scientists, a central place in the shaping of Unesco’s internationally-targeted cultural and educational programs.
1963
James Baldwin
“Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change”
1996
Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann:
In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice-whether through “color-blind” policies or through affirmative action provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the inclusion of race in politics and in our moral lives. Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that “race” has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various “essences” to them.
Appiah, a British Ghanaian philosopher, argues that, while people of colour may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.
His focus is on the long-term political and economic development of nations according to the Western capitalist/ democratic model, an approach that relies on continued growth in the “marketplace” that is the capital-driven modern world.
When capitalism is introduced and it does not “take off” as in the Western world, the livelihood of the peoples involved is at stake. Thus, the ethical questions involved are certainly complex. He says it is not up to “us” to save the poor and starving, but up to their own governments. Nation-states must assume responsibility for their citizens, and a cosmopolitan’s role is to appeal to “our own” government to ensure that these nation-states respect, provide for, and protect their citizens.
If they will not, “we” are obliged to change their minds; if they cannot, “we” are obliged to provide assistance, but only our “fair share,” that is, not at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those “nearest and dearest” to us. From this position he views organisations such as UNICEF and Oxfam in two lights: on the one hand he seems to appreciate the immediate action these organisations provide while on the other he points out their long-term futility.
Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being colour blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice.
2000
Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks
Proponents of the model known as the ‘‘human revolution’’ claim that modern human behaviors arise suddenly, and nearly simultaneously, throughout the Old World ca. 40–50 ka. This fundamental behavioral shift is purported to signal a cognitive advance, a possible reorganization of the brain, and the origin of language. Because the earliest modern human fossils, Homo sapiens sensu stricto, are found in Africa and the adjacent region of the Levant at >100 ka, the ‘‘human revolution’’ model creates a time lag between the appearance of anatomical modernity and perceived behavioral modernity, and creates the impression that the earliest modern Africans were behaviorally primitive. This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record.
2002
Slavery and the Roots of Racism
Lance Selfa
Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism developed, which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed. But these are both different forms of the same ideology, of white supremacy and division of the world into “superior” and “inferior” races that had their origins in slavery. What does this discussion mean for us today? First, racism is not part of some unchanging human nature. It was literally invented. And so it can be torn down. Second, despite the overwhelming ideological hold of white supremacy, people always resisted it, from the slaves themselves to white anti-racists. Understanding racism in this way informs the strategy that we use to combat racism.
Antiracist education is essential, but it is not enough. Because it treats racism only as a question of “bad ideas” it does not address the underlying material conditions that give rise to the acceptance of racism among large sections of whites. To thoroughly undermine the hold of racism on large sections of white people requires three conditions:
- first, a broader class fightback that unites workers across racial lines;
- second, attacking the conditions (bad jobs, housing, education, etc.) that give rise to the appeal of racism among large sections of workers;
- and third, the conscious intervention of antiracists to oppose racism in all its manifestations and to win support for interracial class solidarity.
Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can’t have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish the source of racism, capitalism, and build a new socialist society. The hold of racism at the base of capitalism breaks down when the class struggle against the bosses forces workers to seek solidarity across racial lines. Socialists believe that such class unity is possible because white workers have an objective interest in fighting racism. The Influence of racism on white workers is a question of their consciousness, not a question of some material bribe from the system they receive. Struggle creates conditions by which racism can be challenged and defeated.
2020:
The Black Lives Matter movement is a powerful, non-violent peace movement that systematically examines injustices that exist at the intersections of race, class, and gender; including mass incarceration, poverty, non-affordable housing, income disparity, homophobia, unfair immigration laws, gender inequality, and poor access to healthcare.
The goal of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action was to spark an ongoing movement of critical reflection and honest conversations in school communities for people of all ages and ethnicities to engage with critical issues of social justice. It is the duty of educators and community members to civically engage students and build their empathy, collaboration, and agency so they are able to thrive. Students must learn to examine, address, and grapple with issues of racism and discrimination that persist in their lives and communities.
2020
‘Place & Change’ is a project on the theme of humanistic geography, promoted by International Classrooms Online. Its aim is to evaluate the use of Google Blogger to create pages and posts on themes of place and change. One such theme is ‘Learning to be Inclusive’.
This is a theme within the concept of ‘Place and Change’. Learning to be inclusive is a lesson for everyone.