Decolonizing Education for Sustainable Futures

This book explores the connections between sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education; conversations that often occur separately, despite their interdependencies. The idea of sustainable futures lies at the heart of contemporary education and development agendas, including UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative, which aims to reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet by equipping learners with diverse ways of being and knowing. Yet, much of the knowledge, values and skills in formal education continues to be Eurocentric, and many education systems maintain colonial legacies of exclusion and violence. Protests, including those led by the Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Indigenous and other anti-colonial, anti-racist social movements, have called for education to be decolonized and for diverse knowledge systems, languages and values to be the basis for realizing equitable and sustainable futures. These demands have become accentuated by multiple crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic. The book looks at the journey towards decolonization and sustainable futures from theoretical and practitioner perspectives: introducing concepts that underpin debates about decolonized futures; bringing to the fore the epistemic injustice in the exclusion and marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems, languages and value systems; and exploring different approaches to praxis in schools, universities and society. It also develops a call for reparative futures, highlighting the need for acknowledgement and repair of past injustice and violence in order to build dignified and inclusive futures for all.