Sustainable Learning Environments OR Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies

SuLE/SuRLEc Research Team
Who we are!

Sustainable Learning Environments OR Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies is a research team of academics at the Bloemfontein and Qwaqwa Campuses of the UFS.

The research team uses an academic network approach based on the theories of Nikita Basov, Manuel Castells and Bruno Latour to conduct research aimed at creating sustainable learning environments in schools which spread over the Free State, North-West and KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and beyond where some of these postgraduate students work full time.

Some are school principals or teachers, while others are officials in the Department of Education. The group is collecting/generating a large amount of data on the social and classroom communications among co-researchers (i.e. teachers, learners, government officials, and community members) as they create sustainable learning environments at each school, involving matters of teaching, learning, curriculum, and governance.

The co-researchers are organised into learning communities of practice around each school and are involved through participatory action research (PAR) in planning, implementation, and monitoring of those plans. During the course of the project, there has been a significant improvement in the academic performance of learners and teachers at various schools. The research team has guest edited numerous academic journals in which some of this research is reported. The unifying theme of all SuLE/SuRLEc research is ‘sustainable learning environments’. This theme is an original contribution to knowledge, bringing together two distinct and powerful knowledge traditions in order to formulate a transformatory research framework aimed at enhancing the quality of learning in schools.

One of the traditions of this research team is based on the notion of ‘learning environments’, which is theorised and operationalised by Eric de Corte (University of Louvain, Belgium) and Barry Fraser (Curtin University, Australia) to refer to ways in which classroom contexts are rearranged to enhance learning processes.

This idea enabled the SuLE/SuRLEc research team to develop a theory on how social contexts, including classrooms, impact learning. Another theme of the research team is the ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainable education’ movements, which advocate respect for the environment and other people therein, so that life can be sustained.

This perspective enables the research team/cohort to conceptualise research on learning environments, based on and operationalising the principles of equity, social justice, freedom, peace, and hope. In this field of research, the research team collaborates with colleagues at national and international level.