Cooperative Higher Education: Embodied System Change for a Climate Future

tonsmann, hannah

Cooperative Higher Education: Embodied System Change for a Climate Future

Persistent URL

https://dspace.allegheny.edu/handle/10456/56674

Author(s)

tonsmann, hannah

Date Issued

April 2023

Abstract

This project questions how to get to a post-capitalist future capable of combating climate change through the education system, and how education can be used at large to create system change. The introduction begins broadly, centering the argument of how capitalism is inherently not capable of supporting a climate future, and continues by showing how the ideologies of capitalism have morphed into neoliberalism, and further trickled down through the education system. It finishes by outlining tactics to disrupt neoliberalism in education, and the importance of doing so in order to systematically address climate change. The rest of the project is more focused, beginning with the rise of neoliberalism and what that looks like as a hegemony, concretely, all around us. Next, it shows what this means structurally and integrally for the education system, from a heavy administrative presence to devaluing systems used to measure student growth. The project continues by asking what it means to model system change, and this is where I suggest a cooperative approach to higher education, where change of habit is integrated into how life is structured- where a transformative education can be practiced in how we live with and relate to one another. By targeting the root of neoliberal education organization, I argue we can disrupt all norms of a status quo society that drive climate change, thus rebuilding systems of value with connectedness at the core, with space to value the space we inhabit, together. Through living in system change, students will be more equipped to replicate it in the world around them post graduation, therefore being the new hegemonic force reorganizing each sphere of life to align with sustainability.

Major

Environmental Science

Honors

Environmental Science and Sustainability, 2023

First Reader(s)

Bethurem, Matt