This question invites us to look deeply at how people’s relationships with the land, water, and one another shape both culture and ecology. It challenges us to reconnect with the knowledge embedded in local practices — to learn how traditional ways of seeing, doing, and being can inform sustainable living in the present.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) can become transformative when grounded in biocultural heritage, the interwoven stories, skills, and ecological knowledge passed through generations. Indigenous ways of knowing reveal how people live in balance with the land, using observation, reciprocity, and respect as guiding principles.

At the same time, ESD can mediate agency and change when we connect curriculum concepts with lived heritage and local ecologies. This presentation explores how indigenous ways of knowing illuminate biocultural landscapes and practical land‑care ethics, and how these insights can strengthen classroom learning sequences and change projects. Drawing on history and heritage practices, ecological science, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and circular economy principles, we show how learners can investigate interdependence in ecosystems (soil food webs, water health, composting), relate these to social‑ecological wellbeing, and co‑design tasks that matter in their communities.

The aim is simple: to use conceptual tools and heritage stories to help students learn to change together — linking inquiry, deliberation, and action in home, school, and community settings.

• Biocultural heritage & living landscapes — reading local places as co-evolving socio-ecological systems.
• Ecology concepts in practice — niches, trophic relations, soil food webs, river health, drought and pollution.
• Circular economy — retaining value, designing out waste, and regenerating nature in community projects.
• SDGs as a lens — connecting food, health, water, and livelihoods across goals in school tasks.

These key conceptual tools help students connect curriculum learning to lived heritage and ecological practice. They provide a shared framework for investigating how cultural stories, ecological understanding, and community actions come together to support sustainable living. In this way, learners engage in heritage-activated education for sustainable development — one that values both scientific and indigenous ways of knowing to strengthen change projects in their local contexts.

These conceptual tools are activated through a classroom pedagogy that helps learners work with heritage, inquiry, and action.

Teachers guide students from:
heritage stories → inquiry questions → concepts → deliberation → try-outs
supporting them to co-design tasks that connect curriculum ideas with local ecological practices and community wellbeing.

Over centuries, southern Africa’s landscapes have evolved through biocultural land-care practices — ways of “taming the land” that balanced ecological health with community wellbeing. These living landscapes now bear both the richness of heritage knowledge and the scars of colonial exclusion and displacement, making their restoration a key challenge for Education for Sustainable Development. Today, participatory resource management and local governance revive these traditions, fostering co-evolving biocultural systems where people and nature can flourish together.

Ecology helps us see how living systems are sustained through patterns of interdependence among plants, animals, and microorganisms. Using examples like composting and soil food webs, learners explore how energy flows, matter is recycled, and every organism plays a role in maintaining the balance of ecosystems that also nurture human wellbeing.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a global framework for understanding the interconnections between social, economic, and environmental wellbeing. When used as a learning lens, the SDGs help students relate local challenges—such as declining community gardens, water scarcity, or health risks—to broader goals like zero hunger, clean water, and good health. By examining these links, learners begin to see sustainability not as separate issues but as an integrated process of caring for people and planet together.

The circular economy promotes a shift from the traditional “take-make-dispose” model toward systems that reuse, repair, and regenerate materials and natural resources. By exploring agroecology and local food systems through this lens, learners see how sustainable design and community practices can close resource loops and reduce waste while supporting livelihoods.

1. Heritage practices as start-up story materials for to uncovering and recovering indigenous knowledge together in school curriculum settings
2. Find-out more together by exploring emerging questions and concepts as tools to expand our understanding of and shared respect for the wisdom in indigenous knowledge practices.
3. Working-out things and deliberating how heritage practices can inform better ways to knowing and doing things together today
4. Trying-out change projects to explore heritage-informed ways of doing things better together

Please watch the video below, which introduces “IK for Today: Indigenous Ways of Knowing” and explores how Indigenous Knowledge continues to guide sustainable living and learning in our world today.