ELIZABETH LANGE Ph.D.

As an environmental and sustainability educator (ESE), Elizabeth's ethical commitment is nurturing a socially just, respectful, and environmentally sustainable society through transformative learning. 

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Key Educator Assumptions: 

Elizabeth's engagement with learners starts from a belief in the general goodness of people, their innate curiosity and desire to learn, and their creative and ethical impulses. The essential task of the educator is to unearth potentialities and help animate them into being.

 

Transformative learning opportunities for adults can foster a deeper sense of relation to self, others, and the living world, beyond the myopia of daily concerns.

 

While educators may enter learning spaces with passion and commitment, it must be grounded in humility, knowing that deep learning and the moral voice often emerges beneath what is planned.

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Together, we can flow into being a life-giving society. 

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Community Leader

Elizabeth was an early initiator of fair trade, non-profit business in the 1980s.
La Lucha Imports supported traditional handcraft artisans around the world by paying a fair price for textile goods and selling them in a not for profit manner.

Elizabeth collaboratively founded Just Christmas: Global Crafts Market in 1984, now called the Just One World Market in Edmonton, Canada (see link).

 

In 1990, she worked to build North/South solidarity through travel seminars/study tours between Canada and El Salvador, which continued for 20 years.

In 1999, Elizabeth co-founded the Fireweed Institute, a non-profit educational institute in Edmonton, dedicated to transforming working and living for a sustainable world. The Fireweed Institute hosted a variety of community workshops, sustainability tours, and community action projects. This is now evolving into the Fireweed Network, a virtual community of transformative educators, still in development.

In 2010, Elizabeth co-founded the Earth and Hearth Collective in Nova Scotia offering workshops and kitchen table dialogues on sustainability topics for all income groups over several years. 

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Elizabeth has sat on many community boards and committees, related to sustainability, social justice, adult learning, climate change, and community development. She continues to consult with community, adult learning, and higher education organizations to meet their education goals .

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Elizabeth is now a co-founder of the Fireweed Foundation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Through transformative learning, the Fireweed Foundation supports a transition toward relational, regenerative ways of being together with our human and Earth kin, contributing to just and lifegiving futures. 

 

Educator
 

Elizabeth Lange has over 40 years of experience as an educator and facilitator of transformative learning. Striving for excellence and innovation in teaching, she has taught in the formal education sector (high school, college and university) as well as in nonformal contexts (community organizations including immigrant organizations, churches, government departments, teacher organizations, and nonprofit organizations). She is currently teaching at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. 

 

Her learner evaluations across three universities have consistently been 4.5/5 for undergraduate courses, 4.9/5 for graduate courses, and "excellent" in other adult learning programs. She has supervised dozens of graduate students, with several students winning significant awards and grants.

 

Elizabeth has offered hundreds of workshops and public speaking engagements to a range of public, private, and nongovernmental organizations over the course of her career.  She has also designed curriculum for and with multiple organizations.

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Elizabeth holds a PhD in International/Intercultural Education – Adult Education from the University of Alberta (Edmonton, CANADA).

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Scholar
 

Dr. Lange, now an Independent Scholar, is currently an Honorary and Adjunct Fellow with the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She served previously as a professor in three Canadian universities—Concordia University of Edmonton, University of Alberta, and St. Francis Xavier University. 

Elizabeth's research has been ranked as "outstanding" by her peers and she was awarded the Graduate Research Award by her North American colleagues at the Adult Education Research Conference in 1996. She has held numerous research contracts and grants from a range of organizations to examine various educational topics and community issues.

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Author

 

The book Transformative Sustainability Education was published early in 2023. This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being. 

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The book The Purposes of Adult Education (3rd Edition, 2014, Thompson Educational Publishing), co-written with Bruce Spencer serves as a Canadian text for graduate studies in adult education and lifelong learning.

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Elizabeth has guest-edited several journal issues with colleagues, related to timely topics: Indigenous Voices and Decolonizing Lifelong Learning; Transformative Sustainability Education; Transnational Migration, Social Inclusion and Adult Education; and Expanding Knowledge Systems in Teacher Education. 

She has over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has served as an Associate or Consulting Editor for key journals in the fields of adult education, transformative learning, and sustainability education. Review this site for links to her publications.