Transcript

PAUL WARWICK:

I think finding a starting point is a really key issue around sustainability and around all members of staff feeling that sustainable environment is an area that they can connect to. And it isn’t just seen to be of interest to certain faculties. This is a definition of sustainability that’s been around for many a year now and that is still regularly referred to.

But again, I just want to show you this model. And I’ve got a copy of this slide, if anyone thinks this is of interest. But we’re using this as our framing of education for sustainable development. And again, you might want to come back and have some discussions around this, further down the line.

Because one of the things that we’re trying to do is, trying to make explicit that there is a value dimension to sustainability and that what sustainable development, I think, in an exciting way can be framed around is these notions of care and compassion and there being an active concern for well-being. And us thinking as educators, or us thinking as students, how we can engage in our disciplinary areas in ways that are thinking along these lines of, how can we make a positive contribution to well-being? How can we show care and compassion through our studies and through our learning?

And what sustainability, I’m presenting to you now, is – I think what sustainability does is stretches, in the twenty-first century, our consideration of what we mean by an active concern for well-being, along three dimensions. And that’s represented by this wing on the left, here. And so what sustainability argues and suggests we need to consider in today’s world is an active concern for well-being along the biosphere dimension, recognising the interconnectivity of human life and the natural environment, the natural world. So not just thinking about social justice, but thinking about environmental issues, and thinking about the interconnections across those two spheres.

Another dimension that sustainability encourages us to think about is the spatial, and recognising that we need to have an active concern for well-being that is able to stretch from the local to the global and from the global back into the local dimension. And I would argue that sustainable development requires us to engage with the temporal dimension, in the twenty-first century, and to think about not just present but future generations.

I’ve just had a meeting with an ethnographer who’d been doing some research with an indigenous community out in North America. And he said – he provided a really interesting example of that temporal dimension being enacted, where he said that the village, the Indian village that he was living in, they would have weekly village meetings and that there was a deliberate scaffolding and landscaping of that gathering in a circle. But in the middle of the circle they would always place a candle, and that candle would be lit. And that candle was to represent the voice of the seventh generation into the future. So whatever decision they were considering and weighing up, what they were reminded constantly of: what would our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children say about this decision, say about the action, the resource use, the choices we are making here? And what sustainability requires of us to try and encourage our students and our staff to do is to think that long-term, to think around not just probable futures but preferable futures and what we need to be doing in the here-and-now in order to reach those.

So that represents the first wing of my model. And then, on the back of that, the second wing is exploring this idea of what that means educationally and in terms of our pedagogy. And this is a theme that hopefully we’ll touch base on again shortly. But it’s this idea that universities, I think, are excellent at encouraging us to be critical thinkers and developing that critical dimension. And that’s something that sustainability certainly requires us to do.

But, just as importantly, what sustainable development argues for is that we need to really mine the depths of our students’ creative dimensions and to think about how we can incorporate creativity into our pedagogical practice much more. And I think the most challenging thing – I used to work in schools and with children in care homes and who’d been involved in offending behaviour, and so I’ve been involved in a variety of different settings, and I think universities, this is the most challenging area – is the sixth dimension, where what we’ve got to do is actually engage in educational classes and endeavours beyond rooms like this and to actually be engaged in active learning opportunities for students. Because sustainable development is very much based in the experiential and learning through doing and learning through trial and error, of being out in the real world, so to speak, and trying to make practical actions happen.

So this is a model that we’ve been using at Plymouth, again to engage staff and students. And we’ve found that it’s provided a hook for a number of people to be able to connect to.