Educating for Sustainability

Principles and Practices for Teachers

Victor Nolet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317962557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Educating for Sustainability presents fundamental principles, theoretical foundations, and practical suggestions for integrating education for sustainability into existing schoolwide systems and programs, organized in three sections: Principles of Education for Sustainability; Fostering a Sustainability Worldview; Learning and Thinking for Sustainability.

Designed for teachers and teachers-to-be at all grade levels and across the content areas, the focus is on professional practices and pedagogical approaches rather than specific topics often associated with sustainability. Each chapter includes a number of supports to help readers monitor and improve their own professional practice and to deepen their own sustainability wordview, including textboxes in most chapters that provide more detailed or specialized information and a range of application exercises. All chapters include several "Consider This" activities and an "Extend Your Professional Knowledge" feature. Directly grounded in K-12 classroom practice, this book presents useful and realistic information for teachers looking to reorient their work toward sustainability and help their students develop new thinking and problem-solving abilities.

1
Introduction

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest V.i.184–187

For many people, the phrase “brave new world” evokes images of Aldous Huxley’s (1932) novel that portrays a future world where a powerful government protects individuals from the perils of overpopulation and excessive violence through a highly regulated caste system and state-mandated use of birth control and sedative drugs. Of course, Huxley borrowed the term “brave new world” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Shakespeare used the word “brave” to refer to something splendid, bold, and exciting. For Shakespeare’s Miranda, a 15-year-old girl in love, the “brave new world” is full of promise, optimism, and beauty. Indeed, this is also the way the character John in Huxley’s novel views the world, at least until he realizes his own values are in direct conflict with the reality of the world in which he finds himself. For John, the notion of a bright and shining brave new world becomes a bitter irony.

Today, life on our planet often seems like something out of science fiction where multiple realities exist in the same time and space. On one hand, billions of people around the world experience an existence that would be immediately recognizable to the characters of the most pessimistic of dystopian fiction. These are the people who live under the repression of fundamentalist theocracies, dysfunctional kleptocracies, or military police states. These are the people for whom even the most rudimentary health care is nonexistent and survival involves a daily struggle for food, water, and safety. The people who live in this reality have limited opportunities to realize their full potential and diminished hopes for a positive future. Of course the most vulnerable, the most at risk in this version of reality are children. Consider that every 40 seconds, someplace on the planet, a child under the age of five dies from a diarrheal disease simply because she or he lacks access to clean water and the most basic health care (UNICEF, 2015).

At the same time, billions of other people around the world live an existence that just a few generations ago would have been imagined only as a futuristic utopian fantasy. These are the people who live in the developed areas of the world, where ready access to clean water is taken for granted, famine is largely unknown, education is nearly universal, and state-of-the-art health care is widely available (albeit for a price). Many of these well-fed, clothed, and sheltered people are in nearly constant contact with sophisticated and powerful technology devices, including smart mobile phones; miniature entertainment devices; televisions that can access hundreds of channels; and, of course, sophisticated portable computers connected to an ever-expanding Internet. Again, though, those most directly affected by life in this reality are children. For example, a recent study funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010) found that children in the United States spend as much as 6.5 hours each day interacting with some form of media; during that time they consume the equivalent of over eight hours of content. The word “content” here does not necessarily mean that they are being exposed to healthy or useful information. Often the content of the media with which these children interact perpetuates damaging stereotypes and is violent, racist, sexually charged, or highly commercialized. Meanwhile, the diseases of excess, including childhood obesity, heart disease, Type II diabetes, and addiction, are endemic in many areas in the developed world.

O brave new world that has such people in it! How can one planet sustain these parallel realities—these very different versions of a brave new world?

The answer to this question is “It cannot!”

Planet Earth simply does not have the capacity to provide enough breathable air, potable water, food, energy, and shelter for everyone on the planet to experience the standard of living enjoyed by those in the developed areas of the world (Global Footprint Network, 2015). Consider that since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been a nearly fivefold increase in the human population of the planet; as our population has grown, so has our impact on the planetary systems upon which we and all future generations must depend for our existence. Human behaviors have altered the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the entire planet, and most of that impact has been the result of overconsumption in the wealthy, developed regions of the world. Yet today, one sixth of the world populations still lives in extreme poverty. The unimaginable deprivations experienced by billions of people around the world creates a drag on the overall human prospect that is economically, ecologically, and morally untenable. Neither the dystopian nor utopian reality can be sustained. Unless we change our behaviors, the future of our own species and the future of many other species with whom we share this planet are in very real jeopardy.

The good news is that, unlike the characters in a play, we have the ability to write a different plot for our story. It is within our ability to stop perpetuating the dystopian existence that so many people around the world experience today and to ensure that future generations are able to take care of their needs. However, we also should not expect to create a utopia. For now, we should set our sights on creating a more positive future—one that includes more of what’s better and less of what’s worse. Quite simply, our collective goal today must be to create the conditions that foster the health and well-being of all…forever. Accomplishing this goal is the focus of a worldwide movement that has coalesced around sustainability.

Today, the noun sustainability, and its adjectival form sustainable, along with their close cousin, the sometimes verb–sometimes adjective green, can be found attached to hundreds of products, processes, policies, organizations, programs, and businesses. Even a cursory search of the Internet reveals dozens of putatively authoritative definitions of sustainability; if you enter the word in a library search engine, you will find thousands of articles, books, and reports focusing on a broad range of topics and ideas associated with sustainability in the popular and scholarly press. Indeed, the popularity of sustainability in recent years led John Engelman to write in the introduction to the Worldwatch Institute’s 2013 State of the World Report, “We live today in an age of sustainababble, a cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool” (p. 3). There is no question that sustainability is a popular idea that has been commercialized and often co-opted. However, sustainability is far more than just another popular buzzword. Sustainability is popular because the goal of achieving sustainability is the defining idea of our era, while the consequences of not achieving sustainability are unthinkable.

A Popular but Complex Idea

The goal of this book is to help you understand what sustainability means so that you can begin to incorporate the values and ideas associated with sustainability into your professional practice as a teacher as well as your own day-to-day life. In the chapters that follow, you will have many opportunities to explore the ideas, values, and processes associated with sustainability. As you will discover, sustainability is a complex and multifaceted idea that defies simple definition. For example, descriptions of sustainability in the scholarly literature often characterize sustainability as an emergent paradigm that:

1. Considers environmental, economic, social, and political systems as interconnected systems rather than discrete entities;
2. Involves transformation of values and belief systems as well as technological, market, or policy approaches to problem solving;
3. Views social and economic justice and intergenerational equity as inextricable from environmental stewardship; and
4. Emphasizes personal and collective practices consistent with responsible global citizenship (Nolet, 2007, pp. 415–416).

The most common definition of sustainability was developed in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED): Sustainability means “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 42).We will explore the origins and implications of this definition in Chapter 3. This conception of sustainability is based on an ecological perspective. Ecologists often refer to the capacity of an ecosystem to sustain interdependent forms of life by balancing the rate of resource removal with the rate of resource regeneration. In the broader context in which the term is used today, sustainability often refers to a balance among various human systems that influence and are influenced by the natural environment. In this context, sustainability represents an ideal that will be achieved when human-caused environmental degradation has been reversed and overconsumption and gross economic injustices that deprive future generations of the ability to meet their needs are eliminated.

While it is easy to embrace what sustainability stands for, it can be more difficult to understand all that it implies. This is because sustainability is a multidimensional construct—an abstract idea that cannot be observed directly or easily defined. Constructs allow us to refer to complicated phenomena such as “intelligence,” “freedom,” or “beauty” in everyday conversation without having to explicitly explain all of the underlying processes involved. Imagine how much less romantic the world would be if song writers and poets had to include detailed explanations of various physiological, psychological, and emotional phenomena every time they wanted express the sentiments embodied in the word “love”!

A construct label serves as a stand-in for a set of underlying processes or ideas called dimensions (Messick, 1989). We infer the presence of a construct by looking for evidence of its underlying dimensions. No single dimension is sufficient, but neither do all of the underlying dimensions need to be observed at any given time. Also, it is not unusual for some of the underlying dimensions to also act as constructs that require further description. So when we use the construct label “sustainability,” we actually are referring to a broad range of ideas, values, beliefs, processes, principles, and outcomes. We make inferences about the presence of the construct “sustainability” by looking for evidence of its underlying dimensions.

For example, if we are interested in evaluating the extent to which a community development project would be considered “sustainable,” we might look for indicators related to a variety of dimensions, such as the energy efficiency of the various buildings; the extent to which historically marginalized members of the community are involved in the planning process; the likely needs of future residents of the community, availability of green spaces for use by children, and strategies for ensuring economic equality within the community; availability of affordable, healthy food; preservation of various cultures and languages present in the community; health and safety issues; and so on. No single dimension alone would likely be enough to validate the “sustainability” of the community, but we might not need to see evidence of all the dimensions to make the claim of sustainability.

One of essential elements of the WCED definition of sustainability is the idea of “needs.”

In the second half of the 20th century, our ideas about human needs were influenced greatly by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy (1943; 1970) that eventually included eight needs:

1. Physiological
2. Safety
3. Belonging and love
4. Self-esteem
5. Cognitive
6. Aesthetic
7. Self-actualization
8. Transcendence

In Maslow’s hierarchy, basic or physiological and psychological needs must be met before an individual is able to move on to higher-level needs. This hierarchical view of needs often led to the assumption that some needs (e.g., physiological and safety) are far more important than others (e.g., self-actualization and transcendence) and that it might be acceptable if some people never have needs at the top of the pyramid met, particularly if resources are scarce. For example, Maslow’s hierarchy has often been portrayed as a pyramid with physiological and basic needs at the bottom and self-actualization and transcendence at the top, occupying the smallest area. A hierarchical interpretation of “making sure that the current generation can meet its needs” might be interpreted as simpl...