Admission and Unit Information - Graduate Certificate in Education (Social Ecology)

This unit provides opportunities to examine and apply theories drawn from critical pedagogy, transformative learning and ecological thinking. It challenges students to critically examine the relationships through which personal and social knowledge is constructed and their efficacy in the construction of learning for the future. Inherent in such thinking are questions about the processes of change in education systems that will lead towards equity, inclusiveness, wellbeing, social justice and ecological sustainability.

This unit asks students to reflect upon imagination and its use in research, inquiry, and social action. It challenges students to develop an applied understanding of imagination in the development of creative responses to personal and social concerns. Underlying this exploration is a challenge to students to reflect upon the relationship between form, content and communication, objectivity and subjectivity, arts theory and practice, the writer, performer, artist and educator. The unit considers mediums for expression and communication; imagination as an analytical tool, and imagination as a means for understanding, communicating and enabling intentions and outcomes.

'Sustainability' and the change required to achieve it present numerous challenges. A social-ecological approach to learning for sustainability emphasises learning as a reciprocal process, engaging the self, others and the notion of sustainability itself. Learning, advocacy and future sustainability will be addressed alongside the orientations, goals and outcomes through which such work is valued. Environmental education and advocacy are imagined here as ethically grounded forms of participation in community and ways of enacting responsibilities. Project work in this unit will be structured around personal sustainability, sustainable systems, relationships, institutions and the educational contexts of individual students.

This unit explores leadership for transformational change. In this unit we examine transformational change through valuing change that is positive, social and personally emancipatory. This unit links leadership to students institutional context and explicates leadership strategies that feature collaborative and relationship enhancing approaches to enable purposeful change.

Ecopsychology is concerned with the relationship between human consciousness, human actions and environmental issues. It seeks to understand the sources, both phenomenological and socio-cultural, of the disjuncture between nature and psyche and to develop possibilities for personal and cultural re-connection and healing. Through applying experiential methods, critical inquiry and engagement with ecopsychological writings, students develop their awareness of "self", "nature", "culture" and explore the dynamics between them. The unit incorporates perspectives on ecological identity, ecospirituality and sense of place as ways of re-imagining the human-nature relationship and effecting ecologically-oriented change.

The foundations of social ecology lie in an analysis of relationships. In this regard 'social ecology' describes a field of learning and an approach to learning. The definition of the field lies in its enactment. This is undertaken through research into systemic understandings of change, in the context of change in patterns of ecological relationship. This systemic study is grounded in reference to autopoiesis, self-organisation, transformation, cybernetics, constructivism, holism, complexity and human-ecological relationships. This unit introduces key theorists in these inter-related fields, frames the work and invites students to apply it in their own fields of practice.