Pedagogies of Collapse - Ginie Servant-Miklos

On this episode we welcome back Ginie Servant-Miklos, founder and director of the Bildung Climate School in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to check in on how this initiative has evolved and also about her recent book, Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know it. The Bildung Climate School is in its third year and set to receive formal accreditation within Erasmus University Rotterdam, one of the great research universities of Europe. Deeply informed by the vision of "Bildung," the model of human development expressed in the Danish folk high schools, BCS seeks to empowers young people drawn from all sectors of post-secondary education in the Netherlands to "face sustainability challenges with resilience, creativity, and care" in the context of "an interdisciplinary learning community, combining science, hands-on skills, and personal development to prepare the next generation for a just and sustainable world."

Ginie is an experienced experimental educator and a scholar with a broad range of expertise, as well as a passionate practitioner and promoter of martial arts. She pulls no punches in her book and in our conversation about the dire situation we are in as a species and about how challenging it is to be a young person coming of age today. But her message, and the mission of the Bildung Climate School, is ultimately about hope and an embrace of the most profound facets of what it means to be human. Her work and writing is deeply marked by her own life experiences and the ideas of her intellectual heroes, including Simone de Beauvoir, Paulo Freire, Viktor Frankl, and Hannah Arendt, whose work we discuss in this conversation.

Ginie Servant-Miklos is an engaged environmental educator with fifteen years of experience in education practice, research, and advocacy. She currently holds an Associate Professorship with an Education Profile at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research and education work focuses on developing innovative pedagogies for societal impact. She developed the Experimental Pedagogics educational design framework, is the Director of the Bildung Climate School and the author of "Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It". She is a Leadership Fellow of the Comenius Network for educational innovators in the Netherlands. She is the founder and chair of the board of the FairFight Foundation, an organisation that pr