Mapping the future of ESD

John Huckle

Shared Visions and Futures:ESD across disciplines and cultures

University of CyprusNovember 15 – 17, 2007

My arguments

• That the future of higher education for sustainable development (HESD) depends on finding philosophical frameworks to integrate curriculum knowledge in ways that promote sustainability literacy;

• That critical realism offers one such framework;• That those designing curricula should be aware

of contemporary social theory including that which suggests we are entered a post-ecologist era characterised by a politics of unsustainability.

Outline of presentation

• Link interdisciplinarity in HESD to the problems and opportunities of combining different kinds of knowledge and knowledge communities (examination of related HE initiatives in England)

• Make the case for epistemological and values awareness in HESD (Teaching and Learning at the Environment-Science-Society Interface project) and outline the advantages of critical realism as an integrative framework for the HESD curriculum

• Comment on the future of HESD in an era of post-ecologism

Knowledge/subject communities or disciplinary cultures contain:

• Assumptions concerning the nature of ‘reality’, and the ways in which knowledge can be produced and validated (epistemological assumptions);

• Bodies of theoretical knowledge• Assumptions as to what are the most important

objects of scholarly attention• Beliefs about the learning process by which

students can graduate to full membership of the community.

• Value commitments, stated or unstated.

Solving the HESD puzzle

Each of our disciplines provides insights into how the social and bio-physical worlds can continue to co-evolve in sustainable ways.

Philosophical considerations help us to identify each discipline’s key contributions and suggest how we might best combine these in the HESD curriculum.

Sustainability literacy

Understand the need for change to a sustainable way of doing things, individually and collectivelyHave sufficient knowledge and skills to decide and act in ways that favour sustainable developmentBe able to recognise and reward other people’s decisions and actions that favour sustainable development

Sustainable development in higher education

This report summarises the current state of progress in the embedding of ESD into many of the subject disciplines taught within HE. It also identifies some of the barriers and offers some potential solutions.

The significance of this report is that it is a reflection of the views of practitioners. While progress might appear uneven and limited in some important disciplines, this research provides evidence of strong underlying need for more action in support of the embedding process.

Sustainability literacy: skills and knowledge

Sustainability literacy: skills and knowledge continued

An example: ecocriticism in English

Ecocriticism is literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist viewpoint. It asks students to apply their discussion of literary texts to other areas of their lives, such as their leisure activities, the forms of transport they use, their career intentions, indeed their whole pattern of consumption. In so doing it challenges the commonly held attitude among students that literature is there to provide an escape from serious problems, and that preferences are merely personal

3 levels of progress in embedding ESD in curricula

Most progress Some progress Little progress

Engineering

English

Geography, earth and environmental sciences

Bioscience

Economics

Hospitality

Leisure

Sport and tourism

Philosophy and religious studies

Information and computer sciences

Mathematics

Statistics and operational research

Dance, drama and music

Pychology

ESD deals with knowledge that is:

• concerned with the interactions of natural (bio-physical) and social systems, which are both often complex, non-linear, dynamic and unpredictable;

• used to justify decisions which have profound social, economic and ecological consequences;

• produced and reproduced within a society of competing vested interests and contested social and environmental values

• generally saturated with subjective content (value laden)

Teaching and Learning at the Environment-Science-Society Interface (TALESSI)

• Awareness of epistemological and value based issues is a prerequisite for critical thinking in environmental higher education;

• In so far as ability to think critically across disciplines enables students to integrate knowledge produced within different disciplines, these two kinds of awareness are also prerequisites for interdisciplinarity.

Alienation from nature

Modern dualism and academic divisions of labour that alienate people from nature.Reconnecting people with nature depends partly on a realistic interdisciplinary ESD.Need to find a philosophical framework for the curriculum that develops epistemological and values awareness.

Epistemology 1: realism

• Theories of knowledge or theories of how we can know about the world

• Realist approaches – allow the possibility of purely objective knowledge, knowledge of external reality which is independent of the knowing subject and her/his historical and cultural context. Such knowledge must necessarily be valid in an absolute or universal sense. (natural sciences)

• Associated with modern modes of thought

Epistemology 2: constructivism

• All knowledge of external reality (including scientific knowledge) is at least in part necessarily subjective or socially constructed.

• Knowledge inescapably reflects or is specific to the historical and cultural conditions under which it is produced either at the level of individual scientists and/or at the structural level of society

• Associated with social sciences and humanities and with postmodern and poststructural modes of thought

Strong and weak constructivism

• Knowledge is entirely determined by social processes and therefore tells us nothing whatsoever about external reality

• Knowledge reflects both social processes and external reality.

• Weak constructivism allows for greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity in knowledge claims, but does not admit the possibility that subjectivity can be eliminated altogether.

Epistemology 3: critical realism

• Scientific truth is not just what passes as such according to the dominant beliefs, metaphors or hypotheses of some particular time and place

• At the ‘deep’ or ‘abstract’ level there are the real objective powers of objects – structures and processes at work in the bio-physical and social worlds (real domain)

• At the ‘intermediate’ level are more contingent factors specific to given historical and social conditions – they determine whether or not objective powers are realised - whether processes cause events (actual domain)

• At the ‘surface’ level are experienced phenomena which arise out of the combination of objective powers with contingent factors and can be observed at a given place and time (empirical domain)

Critical realism and political ecology

• seeks to understand ecological change through epistemological scepticism combined with ontological realism (biophysical structures and processes are real but our knowledge is always to a degree ‘subjective’)

• Assesses the political construction of what is considered to be ecological and/or an environmental issue

• Rejects the idea that environmental change can be understood in any final and complete way (naïve realism) – but suggests that scientific constructions of the environment and environmental issues can be made more transparent and more beneficial to people previously unrepresented in the construction of such knowledge.

Tim Forsyth, 2001

Critical realism and enquiry in ESD

What forms of democracy or governance (contingent factors at the intermediate level) would allow the continued progressive co-evolution of human and non-human nature (nature and society at the deep level) and allow sustainability to become a lived reality (at the surface level)?

Values in HESD

• The explicit focus of particular courses e.g. environmental ethics - acknowledged

• Embedded within the supposedly ‘value free’ natural and social sciences - unacknowledged

• Reside in the hidden curriculum of the university - unacknowledged

• Often mutually inconsistent• Students themselves are active agents in the

construction of values

Students need:

• A philosophically and sociologically informed appreciation of ideas on the nature of ‘value’ and the ways in which texts, practices and institutions may be said to be ‘value-laden’

• An appreciation of work in environmental philosophy and ethics – in order to identify commitments to specific environmental values in texts, practices and institutions.

Dryzek’s 9 discourses 1. Looming Tragedy: Survivalism2. Growth Forever: The

Promethean Response3. Leave it to the Experts:

Adminstrative Rationalism4. Leave it to the People:

Democratic Pragmatism*5. Leave it to the Market:

Economic Rationalism6. Environmentally Benign Growth:

Sustainable Development*7. Industrial Society and Beyond:

Ecological Modernization*8. Save the World through New

Consciousness: Green Romanticism

9. Save the World through New Politics: Green Rationalism*

Interdisciplinarity via critical realism or systems theory?

• Chapters by Plant and Huckle outline the critical realist approach

• Chapter by Sterling outlines the systems approach.

An era of post-ecologism

The on-going process of modernisation has taken western consumer democracies beyond the politics of sustainability and into a realm where the management of the inability and unwillingness to become sustainable has taken centre ground.

Bluhdorn & Welsh, 2007

1. A reassuring belief in the compatibility and inter-dependence of democratic consumer capitalism and ecological sustainability has become hegemonic.

2. Backed by faith in technological innovation, market instruments, and managerial perfection as means to sustainability (ecological modernisation)

Indicators of post-ecologism:

• The normalisation of the environmental crisis – standard feature of daily news

• Fixation on economic growth, material accumulation, consumerism; reinforced by globalisation but radically incompatible with ecological virtues;

• Former environmental radicals now promote the greening of capitalism;

• Formerly radical NGOs engage with government and corporations in ecological modernisation initiatives

• Green parties redefine and reposition themselves• Nuclear energy rebranded as green energy

HESD and the politics of unsustainability

• Are universities conspiring in the politics of unsustainability or revealing its contradictions?

• Do our interdisciplinary courses deal adequately with cultures of consumerism and foster forms of ecological, environmental and global citizenship?

http://john.huckle.org.uk