Education Sciences is preparing an issue on “Education for Social Transformation: Initiatives and Challenges in the Contexts of Globalization and the Sustainable Development Goals”, and we would like to
invite you to consider submitting a research article to this issue.
Guest Editor: Richard Maclure, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa (Canada)
rmaclure@uottawa.ca
https://education.uottawa.ca/en/people/maclure-richard
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 June 2018
Submission of Full Papers: 15 October 2018
Issue Information:
In response to the imperative of nurturing the capacity of children and young people to fully understand and effectively address the multi-faceted dilemmas of globalization, the notion of education for social transformation (EST) has become an integral feature of the policy-making discourse of governments and international organizations, and figures in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), notably Goal # 4 (“To ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”). Conceptually EST consists of two prominent strands: the social justice strand which focuses on goals such as equity, inclusiveness, human rights, global citizenship, and participatory democracy; and the environmental strand that aims to generate active support for environmental protection and the attainment of a more sustainable balance between human activity and the natural ecology. Pedagogical initiatives such as student-centered inquiry, place-based learning, and classrooms as communities of learning exemplify efforts to foster and expand the practice of EST. Yet EST is not without considerable challenges. As social transformation is commonly regarded as necessitating struggle against prevailing power structures, EST is a learning-by-doing process which, especially for children and young people, depends substantially on the power as well as the guidance of educators, family members and other adults. It must likewise contend with the difficulty of reconciling the ethos of learning as a basis for progressive action and social change with the prevalence of education policies and structures that reinforce many of the values and practices that EST challenges. This special edition of Education Sciences will consist of studies that critically examine the promise as well as the limitations of child- and youth-oriented EST, thereby contributing to the theory of EST and its further development in practice.
/Education Sciences/ (ISSN 2227-7102) is an international and open
access journal, which is double-blind peer-reviewed. It is published by
MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland. The official website can be reached at
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/education