Multiple international policy frameworks relating to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development advocate for protecting the natural environment to build future resilience from individual to societal levels. These include the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (United Nations, 2015), which promotes education as a mechanism for engendering ‘agency’ in young people with regards to building resilience in their communities. Despite this policy recognition of the role of education, recent insights from the field of practice by Benavot et al. (2024) reveal that new approaches are needed to capture the multiplicity of education for resilience initiatives’ (p.1). Another problem is that educational research on the topic of resilience to natural hazards tends to favour an instrumentalisation of education (Säfström, 2022)—i.e. focusing on ‘what’ should be learnt—as opposed to understanding the socialised processes and considerations of ‘how’ (Kitagawa, 2021) and ‘why’ (Biesta, 2025) education should be purposed.

Given the scale and unprecedented nature of recent technological, political, and socio-ecological change, there is a heightened ‘urgency for radical reimaginings of education’ (Yliniva et al., 2024) to inform policy and practice in Europe and beyond. In relation to natural hazards and associated disasters, education will inevitably involve facing new practical challenges of daily life resulting from the alteration of the individualised self relation to socialised forms of self that capture complex social, cultural, affective and cognitive processes (Illeris, 2018). The purpose of this study is to move the debate forwards through fresh understandings of what could constitute as moving towards more meaningful (and possibly transformative) educational approaches for this topic by considering the ‘how ‘and ‘why’ of education, particularly with regards to how socialised forms of education can inspire agency in learners with regards to recent considerations about how to think about community resilience (Stein et al., 2022). In considering these issues and gaps, we hope to promote an expanded educational purpose for this topic beyond standard instrumentalised, knowledge transmission approaches.

As a way to conceptualise other forms of education for this topic the study applies Biesta’s (2013) three distinctions between the functions of education: 1) ‘qualification’ (acquisition of skills and knowledge), 2) ‘socialisation’ (the process of integrating into societal, political and cultural norms and practices), and 3) ‘subjectification’ (appreciation of the subjectivity of the learner. In particular, an emphasis is placed on the ‘socialisation’ and ‘subjectification’ functions to progress ideas of what constitutes as ‘meaningful education.’ We also apply a relationality for educational encounters in the context of social paradigms of disaster through Paul Ricœur’s (1992) ethical philosophy of Oneself as Another as an ontological scaffold for Biesta’s conceptualisation of ‘socialised’ and ‘subjectification’ education domains. Oneself as Another invites an understanding of an ethically oriented and “participatory experience of a Self” when we become other than ourselves (Pellauer & Dauenhauer, 2022), which occurs epistemologically through enacting Ricoeur’s dialectical identity concept of sameness (ipse) and changeability or responsiveness (ipseity).

To summarise, the research seeks to reframe education on this topic through a deeper understanding of an ethically derived contribution to education that can be made by applying a Biesta’s three educational domains and Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another as a relational interpretive heuristic. Informed by Carol Bacchii’s (2016) ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be? approach, our research questions in relation to disaster resilience education consist of:

1. How can socialised and relational education theory and practice contribute to transformative styles of DRE?
2. How can educational design and practice for DRE be oriented through social and ethical frameworks?
3. How is DRE translated for socially transformative resilience across diverse socio-cultural contexts?

This qualitative study represents a deliberative inquiry, informed by a reflexive and interpretive approach identified through a relational onto-epistemology; whereby human interactions and relationality are the axiology. Findings are organised conceptually across individual, collaborative and socially-relational spheres of influence for social change. Three qualitative inquiries were completed: 1. Identifying the educational qualities of socialised and relational education that are relevant to DRE in a social context, 2) A critical review and relational reinterpretation 45 published global DRE school initiatives, and 3) Four Deliberative Discussion (focus) Groups covering five socially transformative best practice education cases with an intercultural focus across Japan, Indonesia, USA and Australia. The aim of our deliberative discussion groups (Rothwell et al., 2016) was to obtain further in-depth data about the social and cultural contextual factors that influenced the design and delivery of the education programmes, identified as being socially and relationally oriented in practice. The discussions included up to eight participants plus the lead facilitator and researcher, which comprises the lead education implementers and case authors as well as additional disaster education, disaster resilience or environmental education independent scholars who could offer additional perspectives that could either validate or counteract the experience of the case author and educational implementers. Data analysis involved a qualitative synthesis comprising a mix of critical interpretive analysis, theoretical concept synthesis (Okoli, 2022), and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). IPA involves the researcher’s own conceptions influence the interpretation process, and this is represented by the ‘double hermeneutic’ (i.e., ‘dual interpretation’) involving dialogue between the research participants’ sense of their lived experiences as well as the researcher’s interpretation of how these participants have made sense of their social world (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Our methodology also introduces an innovative “triple” hermeneutic, represented by an occasional third layer of experience expressed by external experts, which can serve to highlight additional complexity across different contexts through a third layer of independent experience of education. Phenomenological research is predominantly concerned with revealing the ‘essence’ of the meaning of a particular phenomenon or concept (Lim, 2025), which is generated through the fundamental unit of analysis of experience of individuals (Creswell & Poth, 2018).

We found that socialised and relational approaches to education on this topic were understood as more meaningful and influential for promoting social forms of resilience, not only for learners, but also for educators and the wider community. Socialised educational approaches can enable educational outcomes to span beyond school boundaries into the community in an incremental and expansive process – a process we liken to the "Butterfly Effect". The compilation of research findings across the three qualitative deliberative inquiries has resulted in the development of new education models for school-community disaster resilience, which are reflective of: 1) An ethical self intention; 2) A socialised and relational educational praxis, and 3) A socialised Self. The new socialised and relational education models are underpinned by ethical predicates that underpin transformative possibilities of pedagogy when education is geared towards socially oriented and ethical priorities for practice (Hickey & Riddle, 2024). An ethical intention is inherently implied through Ricoeur’s benevolent sentiment of Oneself as Another. In philosophy morality and ethics are often discussed interchangeably, however in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur makes a distinction between the two and prioritises ethics over morals and states. Ethical intention is described as ‘aiming for the good life with and for others, in just institutions’ (p. 172). Ricoeur articulates the ability to live the good life through two main constructs: 1. self-esteem as the capacity to give and receive from others and 2. solicitude as an ethic of care for Other. Our findings support these ideas and are reflected in the new socialised and relational education models that encapsulate a ‘socialised self,’ ‘symmetrical dialogical’ and a ‘socialised mutual action competence’ for future engaged citizens.

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