The role of public education in governance for resilience in a rapidly changing Arctic

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Education and learning possess powerful potential in affecting future resilience and sustainable states. Here, I focus on unpacking and examining the connections and feedbacks between social-environmental systems (SESs), resilience, and compulsory education. SESs have been problematized as frequently having a poor fit between environmental change and policy solutions. The last few decades have witnessed global recognition of climate change in the Arctic. This has led to discussion and debate over the role of schools in addressing local knowledge, environmental changes, and community priorities. In Alaska, USA, and other Arctic regions, the role of public schools in improving this fit has been largely overlooked. I hypothesize that, as extensions of governments, public schools in the North American Arctic and other locations offer an opportunity to create better linkages between societies and environments through governance. Secondarily, at the individual level, education is a vital component of resilience, but such education must embrace multiple perspectives in its curriculum to honor and access the diversity offered by local and traditional ecological knowledge and Western methods. Lastly, at the societal scale, schools are an untapped resource with which to meet the challenge of bolstering capacity for adaptation in a time of rapid transformation for Arctic societies.

An Integrated Framework to Streamline Resilience in the Context of Urban Climate Risk Assessment

“…Information and knowledge sharing instances (Karki et al, 2011); integration of traditional and scientific knowledge (Haque et al, 2014;Leon et al, 2015); education approaches (Cost, 2015).…”

Prestige and homophily predict network structure for social learning of medicinal plant knowledge

“…A second method is to increase social and institutional support for the value of ecological knowledge. Examples include incorporating ecological knowledge or local languages in formal education curricula, adopting school schedules that accommodate significant social and ecological events, and supporting complimentary use of herbal treatments at hospitals [96][97][98].…”

Challenges in Combining Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge in the Arctic

“…On the one hand, public school and institutional education and learning have significant potential in contributing to sustainability in the Arctic, as it is an indispensable component for its promotion (Lemons 1992). The public school and institutional systems can be detrimental to northern communities or it can offer students a significant potential of becoming resilient to changing environments (Cost 2015). Inclusion of epistemological pluralism, or, in other words, of diverse ways of knowing, and, in particular, of Indigenous knowledge systems into the curricula is indispensable for resilience and well-being of rural communities.…”

“…As for the previous observations on Indigenous approach to learning, anthropological fieldwork and project experiences of non-Indigenous researchers may contribute to the implementation methodologies on how non-Indigenous school personnel could approach to combining different ways of knowing in class. In its turn, it could contribute to decreasing high rural school personnel turnover (Cost 2015).…”