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“Education for Sustainability” for, and with, Undergraduate Students: A Community Autoethnography of Teaching and Learning in Mainland China

Mon, April 15, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

Responding to CIES 2019 conference theme, “Education for Sustainability,” the purpose of our roundtable presentation is to share our experiences teaching and learning in an interdisciplinary seminar engaging undergraduate students in education for sustainability at a southeastern university in Mainland China, from the perspectives of both the instructor and the students.

The undergraduate seminar, as an elective general education course, was designed based on the instructor’s research on higher education for sustainable development from the United States to India and now back to China, specifically looking at higher education teaching and learning about sustainable development through different programs and pedagogies. The purpose of the course was to equip undergraduate students from multiple disciplines with knowledge and awareness about United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and how these goals are connected to our everyday life, with particular emphasis on the crucial role of education in promoting these goals. The ultimate goal of the course is to facilitate undergraduate students to develop global perspectives through understanding the global sustainable development goals, cultivate self-awareness in reflecting upon their own education and social responsibilities in promoting sustainable development, and nurture global competence by designing projects and programs to help realize the global goals in their everyday lives and local communities.

A crucial feature of the course is dialogic and participatory. Therefore, the instructor used different pedagogical strategies to facilitate students to participate in discussions and learning by doing group projects. The pedagogical approaches in this course particularly emphasized relational learning and critical thinking, that is, using different pedagogical strategies to facilitate students to learn from each other and build relationships and work with each other, at the same time, to become critical thinkers on different education and sustainable development issues.

Beyond the course, the students in the class were encouraged to join the instructor’s research team to continue as a researcher on their experiences learning about sustainable development in the course and explore any related questions of their interests. The students explored the rural-urban differences in bearing the cost of unsustainable development, living a sustainable life based on traditional wisdom in the rural, and the (im)possibilities of high-tech development for a sustainable future for both the rural and urban. They also explored the relationships between their disciplines and the SDGs and argued that learning about SDGs is for the benefit of humankind, for everyone in their daily lives, and for a sustainable future of the planet.

Our research on the seminar is situated within the growing global call for education for sustainable development in order to realize the SDGs by 2030 (UNESCO, 2017; 2015). As SDG 4 aims, “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development…” (United Nations, 2015). Correspondingly, UNESCO’s Global Action Programme (GAP) has identified five Priority Action Areas, one of which is “empowering and mobilizing youth” (UNESCO, 2018). Universities, through their research, innovation, education and leadership, have a critical role to play in promoting the SDGs (SDSN Australia/Pacific, 2017). While the “first wave” of sustainability initiatives in higher education, which began in the early 1990s in the U.S., focused on university infrastructure and degree programs, the emerging “second wave” centers on the intersections of the curriculum and co-curriculum (Roberts, 2013; Welde, 2015). China seems to still stay in the “first wave”, with few examples of explicit integration of sustainable development into the curriculum. We hope our research in the seminar is a starting point in joining the urgent call from the global community to initiate education for sustainable development through university teaching and learning in China.

To achieve this goal, we use the methodology of community autoethnography (CAE) to document and reflect our experience as the instructor facilitated the undergraduate seminar for, and with, the undergraduate students. Collectively, we systematically analyzed students’ weekly reflective writings throughout the course to identify key themes emerging in their learning experiences in the course. We engaged with this methodology to collaboratively write about our reflections on the shared experience in the seminar from different positionalities as the instructor and the students.

Our research is important because it aims to make a case for universities in China, and around the world, to integrate the global sustainable development goals into university curriculum, in particular, into undergraduate education. As one of the student-researchers, Jenny, stated, “SDGs are goals that are expected to be accomplished by the year 2030, but without education towards university students, how can our government have the confidence to build broad horizon and an overall standing point for us university students, who are going to be the main intellectual force of our society?” Jenny, as well as other students in the course, was eager to “go into the real world which is filled with people in pain, sorrow, and hopelessness. And this is able to give us a better understanding of the word “world”. I intend to know the real world and do what I can do.” To respond to Jenny’s, and many other students’, needs to know the “real world” and be able to do what she can do, it is high time for universities in China to start critically engaging in education for sustainable development for our people and planet. Our course and our research is a step towards that direction.

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