Sustainability Education

Sustainability education is a dimension to learning rather than a traditional subject discipline.

Sustainability education is significantly different to other areas of the curriculum. There is no established body of knowledge to master, the boundaries are difficult to define and progression and attainment are hard to identify.

What unites sustainability education is a commitment to understanding more about how best to sustain life on Earth in all its different dimensions. This means that sustainability education straddles established subject boundaries rather than fitting within them. It also raises questions about the extent to which education should be drawn into the political arena.

Sustainability education favours participatory approaches to learning as opposed to knowledge transmission. Working co-operatively with other, helps students to develop personal and social skills and to understand that sustainability problems have many dimensions.

The simplest approach is for learners to incorporate new learning within their existing intellectual structures but higher level responses involve greater criticality and new perspectives. Critical engagement helps to guard against tokenism and bias whilst creative engagement has a key role in harnessing motivation.

When they are combined, criticality and creativity have the potential to create a positive synergy in which new ideas are likely to flourish (Figure 1). This is important because the alternative - gloom and despair - is a mindset which is educationally bankrupt.

Figure 1 Links between sustainability literacy, well-being and employability in a business context

After Tan, Y. E. (2013) The Futures Initiative: The first two years p 21 www.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability

Things to do now

1) Read these extracts which express different concerns about environmental education. Do you agree with them?

Read these extracts »

Critical debate

Bob Jickling argues we should be educating children about sustainable development rather than for sustainable development.

I would like my children to know about the arguments which support (sustainable development) and attempt to clarify it. But, I would also like them to know that sustainable development is being criticized, and I want them to be able to evaluate that criticism and participate in it if they perceive a need. I want them to realize that there is a debate going on between a variety of stances, between adherents of an ecocentric worldview and those who adhere to an anthropocentric worldview. I want my children to be able to participate intelligently in that debate. To do so they will need to be taught that these various positions also constitute logical arguments of greater or less merit, and they will need to be taught to use philosophical techniques to aid their understanding and evaluation of them. They will need to be well educated to do this. For us the task is not to educate for sustainable development. In a rapidly changing world we must enable students to debate, evaluate, and judge for themselves the relative merits of contesting positions. There is a world of difference between these two possibilities. The latter approach is about education; the former is not.

Jickling, B. (1992) ‘Why I Don't Want my Children to be Educated for Sustainable Development: Sustainable Belief’ Journal of Environmental Education , 23 (4) 5-8

Social engineering

Frank Furedi contends that the desire to create a better world which permeates the sustainability agenda amounts to social engineering.

There is a crucial difference between socialization and social engineering. Socialization does not merely involve the transmission of values to the younger generation: it proceeds by communicating values which are already held widely by the older generations in society. In contrast, social engineering is devoted to promoting values that are as yet weak, but which its proponents believe are necessary for society to move forward. This approach is sometimes inspired and justified by the conviction that children should be instructed in more enlightened values to create a better world. (p120)

Over the past two decades, schools have become the target of competing groups of policy-makers, moral entrepreneurs and advocacy organisations who wish to use the curriculum as a vehicle for promoting their ideals and values. As a result pedagogic issues are continually confused with political ones. (p128)

Furedi, F (2009) Wasted: Why education isn’t educating , London: Continuum

Academic freedom

Peter Knight, a university vice chancellor, criticises the strategy for sustainable development proposed by Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) as an assault on academic freedom.

It is one of the most dangerous and pernicious circulars ever to be issued. It represents the final assault on the last remaining freedoms of universities... The issue here is not whether sustainable development is a good or bad idea. It is about the basic rights and responsibilities of universities, and the need to safeguard academic freedom. It is not the job of universities to promote a particular orthodoxy; it is their role to educate students to examine critically policies, ideas, concepts and systems, then make up their own minds.

Knight, P. (2005) ‘Unsustainable Developmnents’, The Guardian , 8 February

2) Find out why Ken Robinson thinks there is a need for a new educational paradigm. Discuss how the criticisms which Ken Robinson levels against formal education apply to teaching and learning about sustainability.

Different Voices

"Historians are often seen as trapped behind piles of dusty books. We wanted to work with our students to develop skills for their future careers."

Professor in Early Modern History explaining her vision for a community engagement project

"Talking gets you to say things you didn’t know you knew."

Student reflecting on participatory learning

"I wanted to create learning experiences that are meaningful and have significant value to students’ personal and professional lives. I also wanted to build on my own earlier experience of implementing enquiry-based learning and education for sustainable development projects."

Business School tutor's rationale for new course

Discussion

a) Do you think education always has to be 'relevant'?

b) What types of teaching do you find help you to learn best?

Readings

Scoffham, S (2019) ‘How Can We Learn to Live Within Planetary Limits?’ in Hammond, S. and Sangster, M. (eds.) Perspectives on Educational Practice Around the World, London: Bloomsbury

Worldwatch Institute (2017) EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet, Washington: Island Press (see especially Chapter 1 by Erik Assadourian)

Values »