It's Just Research, Season 2 Ep.2: The necessity of unlearning with Dr Sophie Perry

In this episode we talk to Dr Sophie Perry about her research into transformative educational practices and how education must change in order to address growing inequalities and accelerating social and environmental issues.

Dr Perry research interests lie in societal transformation through education and engagement. For Dr Perry, what peaks her interests is the non-traditional methods used to inform learning and how these pedagogies can be used to make meaningful change.

One way that this was practiced was through Dr Perry's involvement in the Heartwood volumes, a project born out of the Environment, Sustainability and the Role of Education module in the MA STEM Education programme. Dr Perry and her co-editors, Dr Melissa Glackin and PhD candidate Shirin Hine, encouraged contributors to ‘unlearn’ some of their academic rules to inform a more personal, emotional and affective response to socio-ecological crises and capture some of the rich discussions from the course that didn’t make it to their academic work.

How might we strive towards a more comprehensive climate education and what are the limitations towards it? From her doctoral research, Dr Perry remarks that although educators have a strong intention to drive change and reimagine their current programmes, it was difficult to deliver on it in practice. She found that the pressure on these educators from institutional structures and norms, and the neoliberal framing of education and educational programmes, such as meeting certain KPIs and making good use of money, was constraining them from protecting the space they wanted to create to put their transformative ideas into practice.

Within this, Dr Perry speaks on the prevalence and problematic nature of ‘grind culture’ in the education sector. Dr Perry challenges the presumption that ‘grind culture’ is the only way to make meaningful change. She talks of the conflict between wanting to push back on the general expected notion of education in the West and modernised existing school structures and being aware that the education field is conducive to a culture of constantly producing work, and more work translating to more reward.

It’s for this reason that Dr Perry’s focuses on the value on unlearning and unthinking. A focus on unlearning and unbinding from strict frameworks can be counter-hegemonic and introduce more transformative pedagogy going forward in environmental education that seeks to create active change.

The 'It's Just Research' podcast is hosted by Liam Cini O'Dwyer and Pippa Sterk. The podcast is executively produced by Sylvie Carlos.