ABSTRACT
Schools and education can play an important role in humanity’s unlearning of unsustainable, fossil-fuel-dependent human activities, which threaten to make the planet uninhabitable for humans and other species. From the perspective of research on learning and instruction, the urgently needed transition to sustainable ways of living can be approached as a process of learning among individuals, communities and societies. However, this cannot be achieved without a critical revision of our understanding of how our approaches and methodologies in educational research allow us, and the participants in our research settings, to envision new futures and horizons of possibility that can challenge the status quo. This chapter explores theoretical and methodological foundations in research on learning and instruction for addressing the interconnected ecological, political and social crises, associating these with humanity’s (in)ability to imagine alternatives to the current status quo. In particular, the chapter elaborates on utopian methodologies, which refer to a mode of inquiry for designing, implementing and sustaining institutional innovations as intermediate steps towards the realisation of and commitment to long-term utopian goals.
