Gary P. Hampson & Matthew Rich-Tolsma
Abstract: In this position paper the worldview from which climate change continues to occur is identified as late modernism. This worldview is critiqued as being unduly economistic, reductive, mechanistic, and fragmented. There is a clear requirement for an inclusive and transcending transformation of this worldview toward one substantively more able to meet the challenges that climate change presents, as well as an understanding of the processes that facilitate such a transformation. This paper foregrounds transformative learning as a generic process that might well be key to this transformation. The paper addresses transformative learning both as an active process and as a feature of a regenerated worldview, identified here with respect to Griffin’s reconstructive postmodernism, which goes beyond deconstructive postmodernism in its proto-integral orientation. Transformative learning is exemplified by the seminal approach of Mezirow as well as Scharmer’s Theory U. The discussion of worldview is vertically differentiated in terms of principles, worldview perspectives, and sectoral practice with reference to the depth ontology of Inayallatulah’s Causal Layered Analysis. Principles addresses the regeneration of the philosophy of science, and explores the critical contrast between atomism acting as attractor for modernism, and complex integration acting as attractor for reconstructive postmodernism / the ecological worldview; it indicates the fecundity of Bhaskar’s critical realism for aptly addressing climate change. Sectoral practice is represented by higher education, specifically addressing andragogy, heutagogy, the transformative learner, and the transformative educator. Climate change is a complex, big-picture issue, one that requires a complex, integrative epistemology and transdisciplinary orientation.
Tags: ecological worldview, worldview., Matthew Rich-Tolsma, transformative learning., transdisciplinarity, Gary P. Hampson, Climate change, sustainability., Causal layered analysis, complex integration
