Professional learning for planetary sustainability : thinking through country

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, scientists and governments alike acknowledge the urgency of addressing escalating planetary problems. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has moved on from providing evidence that global warming is a serious international issue to addressing how we might respond to the disasters that will inevitably result (IPCC 2012). In this chapter, I explore the question of how to prepare professional practitioners for their ethical responsibilities to planetary sustainability. I set the chapter in the time of the Anthropocene, the new geological age of human-induced changes to planetary processes, and ask: How can we re-think professional learning in relation to our responsibilities to the planet, and to the more-than-human world? I outline my own professional learning to ‘think through country’ from my collaborative research with Australian Aboriginal researcher Chrissiejoy Marshall as a possible framework for planetary sustainability. This framework is used as a lens to examine a series of projects about teacher education and teacher professional learning designed to develop new curriculum and pedagogies through participatory action research, and in community discussions about professional learning needs. These projects have drawn on professional networks of educators and sustainability practitioners in order to map what is currently a new and unexplored field of research.