Reconceptualising higher education for sustainability

• In Event: Sustainability and peace

Proposal

Reconceptualising higher education for sustainability

Kerry Shephard

My higher education institution in New Zealand has recently committed itself to nurture a culture of sustainability, within a comprehensive sustainability strategic framework. Also involved is a commitment on behalf of us all to support education for sustainability, to lead by example and to raise awareness of our university’s sustainability transition. The assurances made within our sustainability strategic framework are similar to those in a range of accords, agreements and networks including the international Talloires Declaration (Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, 1994; those who sign commit their institutions to educate for environmentally responsible citizenship, for example) and the USA’s Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Their moral justification appears to be beyond criticism. As our sustainability strategic framework at present involves no measurable targets it is difficult to discover if it is being enacted in any significant way or indeed if those responsible for creating it understand its position in the broad academic discourses of environmental education, education for sustainable development and education for global citizenship.

This conceptual paper asks, even if it were possible for a large group of highly disparate academics to collectively nurture a culture of sustainability, and to agree on what this means and what it entails, is it a reasonable role for higher education to adopt and is it the best contribution that higher education can make to our global sustainability mission?

The paper starts by arguing that objectives such as ‘nurturing a culture of sustainability’ are primarily affective in nature, rather than primarily cognitive; and by emphasising the challenges involved in changing students’ affective attributes, using research from our institution’s education for sustainability research group (Shephard, 2008; Shephard et al., 2015)

The paper goes on to introduce New Zealand’s Education legislation, committing its tertiary institutions to promote intellectual independence, and to explore how the skills and dispositions to think deeply and critically may fundamentally underpin intellectual independence and help our students to develop their own independent perspectives on their contribution to culture and to cultural change (Shephard, 2015).

The paper asks if our developing collective and international commitment to nurture a culture of sustainability is compatible with that to promote intellectual independence and argues that it may not be, depending on how we interpret and enact the roles and responsibilities of higher education. The paper argues that conventional approaches to educate for sustainability, by teaching students to be sustainable and by role modelling sustainability, may weaken our attempts to encourage our students to develop critical dispositions and insight. The latter may, for example, benefit greatly from exposure to, and opportunities to critique, role models who model something other than sustainability. The paper will encourage discussion on alternative conceptualisations of ‘higher education for sustainability’, particularly those involving development of skills and dispositions to think critically; tasks more traditionally accepted by those who teach in higher education, but still likely under explored and inadequately monitored. In adopting these conceptual approaches, this paper also questions the extent to which higher education opens itself to research-based critique and if its relative inability or unwillingness to research its own practices, rather than those of others, has created an environment when it is obliged to promise change that it has limited capacity to deliver and questionable inclination to understand.

Author

• Kerry Shephard, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand