Elizabeth Lange
As a young Canadian educator on a Peruvian study tour, Elizabeth Lange experienced a profound transformation. A liberation theologian urged her group to go back home, admonishing them to study and challenge “the belly of the beast” in North America. The call to action deeply shaped Lange’s professional and scholarly trajectory. She reoriented herself from a high school teacher to an educator in community-based adult and continuing education. Lange went on to profile marginalized voices, critique structural inequalities, and pursue socioeconomic and ecological justice through a career that has woven adult education with social action for more than four decades.
A socially committed scholar, Lange is particularly known for work that is both groundbreaking and accessible. She created a body of critical scholarship questioning the Western intellectual inheritance and dominant societal form. This culminated in a new thematic area known as transformative sustainability education, which she helped introduce into the fields of adult and lifelong education, and environmental and sustainability education. Works in this vein explore pressing issues ranging from climate change and biodiversity to just and sustainable societies. From this vantage, she has offered fascinating new insights about transformative learning. Lange also has been instrumental in helping to introduce the concept of relationality, a new understanding of reality and existence, into the adult and continuing education field.
Of Lange’s works, her standout book Transformative Sustainability Education: Reimagining Our Future (2023) is a singular contribution to the field. The volume offers critical analyses of the evolution of environmental thinking in an engaging and educational style. Reviewers have heralded the book as ambitious and bold, and as a groundbreaking contribution to the fields of adult, environmental, and sustainability education.
Lange currently is a visiting professor at Athabasca University in Canada and an honorary and adjunct fellow with the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She previously served as a professor with three Canadian universities—Concordia University of Edmonton, University of Alberta, and St. Francis Xavier University. Her engaging and accessible style of scholarship carried over to the classroom, where she has been a popular teacher known for her creativity, sensitivity, and responsiveness.
Lange’s other contributions include her coauthored book The Purposes of Adult Education, which serves as a Canadian text for graduate studies. She has had more than fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters published and has served as an associate or consulting editor for key journals in the fields of adult education, transformative learning, and sustainability education. She has coedited five special journal issues to profile important voices not often heard, including Indigenous women, Indigenous scholars on decolonizing adult and lifelong learning, immigrants and newcomers on transnational migration and education, and voices on diverse knowledge systems as well as transformative sustainability education.
In addition to her work in adult education over the past forty years, Lange created four nonprofit organizations dedicated to sustainability education, climate action, forest conservation, and fair trade for global artisans. She has also provided workshops and curricular assistance to many community organizations of Indigenous educators and scholars, newcomer and refugee service groups, as well as a range of governments, social services, and nonprofits. She holds a PhD in international/intercultural education from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.