ABSTRACT
Environment and sustainable development are recognized for: their significance for the future of South Africa’s well-being; their complex, transversal nature; and their associated ‘newness’ within South African education and training systems. In a sector with relatively new occupations without clear learning pathways into jobs and where occupational contexts are rapidly changing with evolving skill needs, the chapter explores a critical realist dialectical view of learning pathways across systems of work and learning. It highlights the need to develop more sophisticated understandings of learning pathways, and the way in which work, education and training systems interface to support the transitions needed for particular forms of work and learning. The chapter also explores how critical realist dialectics can help to explain more fully the absence of intermediate pathways in the environment and sustainable development ‘sector’ in South Africa. It highlights the absences within the post-school provisioning system and through this analysis raises the patterns of emergence that characterize environmental learning pathways. This then advances an educational critique that assists in the development of deeper knowledge of the object of the study (elements constituting learning pathways) in order to understand possibilities for change and to present opportunities for creating more seamless environmental learning pathways into green jobs, enhancing social justice potential and public good concerns.
