3 What is education for a sustainable future?

The first definition of sustainability reflects a market-driven perspective. If you take this perspective as a way forward, decisions will need to be made to create industries which solve environmental dilemmas; for example, producing electric cars and renewable energy. These, in turn, create jobs. The changes they are associated with might also damage productivity in other job sectors, such as those that rely on consumption of fossil fuels. This view of the world is in keeping with the human capital view of the purpose of education as it focuses on productivity and humans as workers. Education would need to produce workers with the skills necessary for new forms of employment in this future, flexible enough to transition from one kind of employment to another. You will have heard in the ‘What is sustainability?’ video how there is an unresolved tension between how to achieve economic and environmental goals.

This definition reflects a particular perspective and dilemma. How to put this into practice has been part of the United Nations’ debate leading to the Sustainability Development Goals. The current goals offer a way of bringing together both economic and environmental agendas. The Organisation for Economic, Co-operation and Development (OECD) report The Sustainable Development Goals: An overview of relevant OECD analysis, tools and approaches (2016) summarises the OECD mission statement: ‘People, Planet, Peace, Partnerships and Prosperity’.

The second definition of sustainability calls on all citizens to work in communities to solve problems together, demonstrating a sense of social justice and shared responsibility for well-being. The recently coined term ‘glocalism’ (Globus et locus, n.d.) refers to the idea that to be global citizens we should act locally. A response in keeping with this view of the world would see the purpose of education as to produce citizens with an awareness of the issues challenging them in the world, a sense of responsibility to others and the skills of problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity to address the identified problems. Education for sustainability (EFS), sometimes termed Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), has become a branch of educational thinking and practice.

In association with this second definition, there is a framework which has been developed by the Plymouth University’s Centre for Sustainable Futures (CSF) which summarises the dimensions needed for Education for Sustainability, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2 A butterfly model of Education for Sustainability

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A figure showing the dimensions needed for Education for Sustainability as developed by Plymouth University’s Centre for Sustainable Futures. The image, which uses a photograph of a butterfly as the background, has ‘ESD – active concern for well being’ in its centre, and then lists ‘1. Biosphere dimension, 2. Spatial dimension, 3. Temporal dimension, 4. Critical dimension, 5. Creative dimension, 6. Active learning dimension.’ The first three are indicated by a key as being ‘Holistic relational dimensions’ and the latter three are listed as ‘Pedagogical dimensions’.

Figure 2 A butterfly model of Education for Sustainability

Three relational dimensions to be considered are:

• biosphere
• spatial
• temporal.

Three pedagogical dimensions to accommodate and respond to the relational dimensions are:

• critical
• creative
• active learning.

Optional further study

For further discussion of these dimensions you might like to watch the following video of Dr. Paul Warwick of the CSF talking at the 2014–2015 Open Lectures held at the University of Greenwich. This six-minute extract is taken from the start of his lecture Sustainability Education in HE – towards a pedagogy of hope, challenge and controversy? (Educational Development Unit, 2015). Although his team focus on the application of ideas around EFS/ESD to Higher Education contexts, their ideas are built on practical applications in compulsory school-age settings relevant to this course.

Download this video clip.Video player: ee830_2017j_vwr004-640x360.mp4

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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.

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