![]()
Chapter 1
Introduction
John Blewitt
At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, education was identified as one of the key forces central to the processes of sustainable development during the 21st century. Some years later, the goal of sustainability and the need for education in all of its forms in order to seriously engage with this imperative remain as significant as ever – possibly more so, as many of us are directly experiencing the risks, uncertainties and pressures of working and living within a globalized, weightless knowledge economy. As wealth increases for some, global poverty, insecurity and inequality are an obdurate reminder that economic development is far from even and far from fair. Higher education (HE) is implicated in all of this, for it is no longer in the privileged position of simply observing, criticizing and evaluating what goes on beyond the seminar room or campus. It, too, is a global player imbricated in both the production of knowledge and wealth and the maintenance of poverty and insecurity through its growing role as servant to the global economy. Higher education therefore helps to shape the material reality we all experience and the ways in which we attempt to understand, reflect on and, perhaps, even change it.
Sustainable development and the goal of sustainability are slowly permeating the values, policies and practices of government, business and education. For many people this permeation seems to be occurring in geological rather than human time. This book explores just one aspect of HE’s engagement with the sustainability agenda, focusing largely on where the sector is currently positioned and how it might, and arguably should, evolve in the future. For good or ill, universities are notoriously conservative creatures despite their apparent liking for internal restructuring. The dominance of disciplinarity remains important in the intellectual organization of teaching, learning (the cultural reproduction of knowledge) and, perhaps, also research funding. As new areas of learning and research emerge, as universities become increasingly ‘relevant’, disciplinarity remains the locus of attention and the intellectual axis for comprehending contemporary developments. New ‘disciplines’ such as media studies, informatics or environmental science are emerging as the global tendency (or ‘real world’ demand) is increasingly towards transdisciplinarity and the social distribution of knowledge and knowledge production. Significant higher learning, including research, now takes place in private and government think tanks, corporate research laboratories and even in the public media. Knowledge, as opposed to mere information, is becoming increasingly rooted in specific contexts of application that go beyond the rules and perspectives of single subject disciplines. Indeed, universities are increasingly urged by governments to become more effectively involved in knowledge and technology transfer. Gibbons et al (1994) identify four features of this ‘Mode 2’ transdisciplinary knowledge, which is additionally characterized by its heterogeneity, social accountability and reflexivity. It is not hierarchical or fixed but subject to change and alteration:
- It develops a distinct but evolving framework to guide problem-solving efforts.
- Solutions involve movements in many directions, and theoretical and empirical work.
- The diffusion and dissemination of new knowledge to participants takes place through, rather than after, the process.
- It is dynamic and constantly evolving.
The skills and experiences that people bring to this enterprise are heterogeneous, and despite all the critical semantic arguments about the conceptual fluidity or vagueness of sustainability and sustainable development, their practical realization will be an aspect of this Mode 2 transdiciplinarity. Sustainability is complex and complicated, with no single discipline definitively addressing either the problems or the solutions: it incorporates technological, philosophical, economic, social, ecological, political and scientific dimensions. This may be illustrated through an examination of real-world issues or projects that are motivated by concerns over sustainability – for example, in Green architecture, eco-design, gender and development; integrated and sustainable transport; global citizenship; and lifelong learning.
Although sustainability and sustainable development certainly require a transdiciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to teaching, learning and research, disciplinarity is still an inviolable fact of university life, particularly in the more research-led traditional institutions in the UK. The disciplines are unlikely to disappear or to lose their significance as ways of comprehending (or not comprehending) the contemporary world. Their apprehension of sustainability issues, processes and imperatives therefore becomes of key significance for many students who study them. The humanities and social sciences enable us to reflect upon our worlds in ways that are not tied to performance criteria, executive summaries, business plans, scientific logic, trade laws or government regulations. The reflective and, indeed, reflexive nature of the disciplines allows the formation of new understandings of self and others and their relationship to the natural world. The recent emergence of eco-criticism within literature studies (Bate, 2000) and counter-intuitive rather than revisionist interpretations of social relationships and new technology in history (Sale, 1996) offer opportunities for all of us to stop to think, see, listen and learn. The collective message from the contributors in this volume is that the co-evolution of the disciplines and sustainability is sometimes uneven, sometimes profound, but always signalling an, as yet, unrealized potential that may in the future herald a radical transformation of learning, knowledge and understanding. The role of disciplinarity is often unrecognized or even summarily dismissed in conversations about education for sustainability. This is a pity, for all of us still have a lot to learn. Interestingly, even students on new programmes focusing specifically on sustainability, such as the BA/BSc in Sustainable Development at the University of Wales at Bangor, offer multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary learning opportunities as well as practice-based educational experience. Reflexivity remains the key to personal growth and social learning and, as such, is a key element, together with detraditionalization, of our late modern age:
The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character. . . In all cultures, social practices are routinely altered in the light of ongoing discoveries which feed into them. But only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention radicalized to apply (in principle) to all aspects of human life, including technological intervention in the material world. (Giddens, 1990, pp38–39)
Lifelong learners in further, higher and adult education should be, and are, increasingly encouraged to be reflexive and reflective if a more just and sustainable world is to be fashioned.
The current issues of disciplinary change, curriculum development, capacity-building and the nurturing of a critical environmental literacy can only be realized in the process of changing our relationship with time, the natural world and the traditions of our own thinking. As Foster (2001, 2002) says, we need to recapture a view of education as being an end in itself since it is through our learning that we collectively and individually recreate ourselves, our understanding of the world and, in the long run, the world itself. Additionally, without the capacity to make (‘deep sustainability’) judgements for tomorrow, the social intelligence necessary to create a culturally mature and institutionally sophisticated learning society may not develop. This social intelligence requires the flourishing of the humanities, social sciences and ‘meta-scientific modes of understanding’. A learning society, Foster (2002, p39) writes, ‘lives by the fullest exploration of experience imaginatively alert to all its complexities’. As a corollary, Stables and Scott's (2002) discussion of critical environmental literacy presents the need to move beyond ‘humanism and the discourses of modernity’ while avoiding the partial and sometimes incompatible nature of other literacies – scientific, technological, economic and so on. As Bowers (2001) has shown, the language and, particularly, the metaphors we use in our sense-making activities can limit (perhaps even to the point of preventing) the proper development of an ecological understanding of the human–nature relationship. Our language is littered with anthropocentric, industrial, mechanistic and computational metaphors, whereas at the root of a ‘deep sustainability’ consciousness and conscience, ecology should be understood as encompassing the interdependency of social, cultural and biotic activities and relationships. The concepts of restoration, preservation and conservation, Bowers (2001) argues, should be borrowed from the ecological sciences and re-articulated to accommodate social relationships and practices. In this way, the critical environmental literacy that Stables and Scott (1999) advocate could, effectively:
- Restore our amazement at the unknowability and finitude of life, which transcends our own material desires and rationality.
- Provide an understanding of the historically and culturally situated nature of scientific knowledge, technology and creative art.
- Ensure that when we attempt to act sustainably we do so from a belief in its moral value and with a willingness to learn from it.
Sometimes it seems that reason and rationality, whether in scientific guise or not, is the primary enemy of sustainable development. But it should be recalled that just as many people wish to renew humanity's spiritual, affective and intuitive capabilities. Reason remains a key element in the generation of any critical literacy, knowledge, understanding or practice. Universities are places that, hopefully, still offer cultural and intellectual space where critical reason may develop, be discussed and questioned. Reason is possibly a prerequisite for a form of learning that will enable us to better look after ourselves and our environment. As Field (2000, p154) concludes in his analysis of lifelong learning:
An ever more greedy capitalism needs rational, humanistic and knowledgeable critics as a prerequisite for human survival. Is the learning society amenable to change?
In some ways HE has been prescient in outlining an agenda for sustainable learning and institutional change. In 1990, under the auspices of President Jean Meyer of Tufts University, 22 presidents, rectors and vice chancellors from universities across the world issued a ten-point action plan to engage HE in the quest for a sustainable future. The first three action points of the Talloires Declaration read:
- Increase awareness of environmentally sustainable development: use every opportunity to raise public, government, industry, foundation and university awareness by openly addressing the urgent need to move towards an environmentally sustainable future.
- Create an institutional culture of sustainability: encourage all universities to engage in education, research, policy formation and information exchange on population, environment and development to move towards global sustainability.
- Educate for environmentally responsible citizenship: establish programmes to produce expertise in environmental management, sustainable economic development, population and related fields to ensure that all university graduates are environmentally literate and have the awareness and understanding to be ecologically responsible citizens.
Three years later the group of European universities that had formed COPERNICUS (Cooperation Programme in Europe for Research on Nature and Industry through Coordinated University Studies) launched its University Charter for Sustainable Development. The central concerns of COPERNICUS include interdisciplinarity, lifelong learning, sustainable production and consumption, partnerships and networking, teacher education and the creation of virtual learning environments.
At the turn of the millennium, in 2000, following some years of discussion and financial support from the Dutch government, ‘the unfinished business of Rio’ was finally completed with the publication of the Earth Charter (2000). This charter sets out 16 principles and an ethical framework that falls into four major areas:
- respect and care for the community of life;
- ecological integrity;
- social and economic justice and democracy;
- non-violence and peace.
The charter aims to foster a more sustainable way of life by persuading educational institutions and learners to transcend our human-centred approach to knowledge, understanding and action. Some progress is already being made in some universities (Clugston, Calder and Corcoran, 2002; Calder and Clugston, 2002); but not all observers are confident that HE is capable of more than piecemeal change. Bosselmann (2001) argues that administrative structures are alien to staff and students alike and are only responsive to instrumental demands to use resources more efficiently. Faculties and disciplines are incapable of interdisciplinary cooperation, while the university, as a whole, ‘has no ethos or collective conscience for sustainability’. Progress in the UK during the decade following the Toyne Report (Toyne, 1993) adds substance to this pessimistic assessment, as do some contributors to this volume.
Although declarations of principle are important signposts, the everyday reality of educational administration, management, funding, career development, teaching and learning in its various forms offer more than a ‘challenge’ to champions of education for sustainability (EFS) within the university sector. These champions – leaders at all levels – need to seek methods by which others may adapt themselves, endorse and then promote the required shifts in teaching, learning, curriculum, research, institutional management, policy and practice that will build a more sustainable world. Adaptive leadership – mobilizing people to address new problems through new learning – is, as Heifitz (1994) shows, the most appropriate strategy for effecting major and lasting, if not paradigmatic, change. Although this book does not specifically address issues of educational leadership for sustainability, what is implicit in the Earth Charter (2000), the Talloires Declaration and similar initiatives is the recognition that sustainability is not something that can be imposed from above or secured exclusively by action below – it needs both. The processes of sustainable development require leadership, participation and commitment in all areas of the academy. If one of the principal purposes of universities remains the generation of new knowledge or the re-articulation of existing knowledge, then work within and between the disciplines is of primary significance for all our futures. Universities are no longer the ivory towers of popular imagination; but neither are they (yet) exemplars of good sustainable practice or, as Sterling (2001) has it, ‘sustainability education’.
Universities should act as exemplars; but too often progress in this area is dependent upon a relatively few committed and invariably overworked individuals. But then there's nothing wrong with being a pioneer.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The purpose of this book is to offer some scrutiny of current HE practice by looking at disciplinary study, some developmental projects, lifelong learning and the nature and purpose of HE itself. Not all of the disciplines can be covered in one volume and the sciences have been consciously omitted. A great deal of criticism has been levelled at many aspects of scientific activity (Ho, 2000), and to examine science, sustainability and HE is something that is best explored in a separate volume.
Part 1 starts with Cullingford's overview of the purpose of the university at a time that is characterized by change and threat. Cullingford argues that sustainability should become the centre of debate that engages all of us in a fundamental rethink about the nature of HE and its wider responsibilities. One danger Cullingford perceives is that ‘sustainability’ could become a cliché devoid of any significant intellectual purchase if universities fail in their moral duty to penetrate the masks and veils of media spin, political rhetoric and its own instrumental rationality....
