ABSTRACT
As we seek to re-orient education to enable humanity to find some kind of dynamic balance with the planet that hosts us and all life in the universe as far as we know, it is good to look ahead and explore emerging forms of learning and innovation, but also to have a sense of history by looking back. First we will look back at two somewhat parallel ‘evolutions’ that share some common characteristics: the evolution from nature conservation education to sustainability education on the one hand, and the evolution within science and higher education from environmental science to sustainability science on the other. We realise that the interpretation of history is somewhat biased as we do so from our own,mostlyWestern, vantage points which blind us from seeing history from a different socio-cultural perspective that might be just as or perhaps even more informative.Nonetheless we hope that readers who come to this Handbook from a different perspective will still find merit in our attempt to make sense of the past and the way we use it to inform possible future orientations of higher education. Let us begin by re-capping in a nutshell the movement from nature conservation education
to sustainability education with environmental education (EE) as a linking pinch between them (Wals 2012). First of all we do not mean to suggest that nature conservation education and what might be considered its younger cousin, biodiversity education, and environmental education are now passé and no longer relevant; on the contrary they are still very much alive but in some cases have been drowned out by the sustainability education movement of the last decade or so. Nature conservation education can be seen as foundational for teaching and learning that seeks to develop a better understanding of the natural world, to develop a better relationship with and appreciation of the natural world, with the ultimate goal of protecting the carrying capacity of the Earth and, indeed, a more respectful and ethically justifiable and morally defensible relationship with the natural world in all its diversity. Nature conservation education was born out of a concern, among scientists, mainly biologists and an urban elite of concerned citizens with a deep appreciation for nature, that natural areas were rapidly disappearing due to urbanisation and industrialisation. Since its early beginnings, well over a century ago, the
learning associated with nature conservation education can be characterised by experiential, affective/emotive, place-based, but also analytical especially when emphasis was placed on the cognitive understanding of the web of life and how nature works. Arguably some strands of nature conservation education were rather anthropocentric with a focus on the importance of nature for the well-being and future prospects of us humans, while others were more ecoand/or biocentric emphasising the intrinsic ‘value’ of nature and all species. Roughly half a century later, in the 1950s, concerns about pollution of water, air and soil,
and the accumulation of toxins in food chains, perhaps best articulated by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 1962), led to the rise of the environmental movement with environmental education as one of its spin-offs (Stapp 1969). Unlike nature conservation education, early EE focused not so much on understanding, appreciating and connecting nature, but rather on educating citizens in becoming environmentally responsible in their behaviour. The environmental crises at the time seemed too urgent for establishing a time-consuming deep connection with the natural world as a foundational stepping stone for such behaviour. Furthermore, most people by now were living in cities far removed from nature which limited the possibilities for such connections. With environmental science as the new science that could somewhat authoritatively inform policy-makers what the most desirable behaviour looked like, there was little doubt about both the urgency and the desired behavioural outcome. It is no surprise that environmental education back then paid much attention to social and behavioural psychology as these fields worked hard on dissecting and modelling human behaviour and understanding the way we might influence or shape behaviour (Hungerford and Volk 1990).Not until the relationship between environmental awareness, attitudes, locus of control, values and behaviour was critiqued and questioned – there did not seem to be a direct causal relation between them as was initially thought or assumed – did environmental educators begin to look at their field from an education and human development perspective rather than from an instrumental environmental behaviour perspective (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). At the international policy-level this seemed to be acknowledged much earlier than within environmental education research as the landmark Tbilisi declaration from 1977 (UNESCO-UNEP 1978) reflects this shift quite well as it explicitly and sometimes more implicitly refers to critical thinking, capacity building and human development. The IUCN’s World Conservation Strategy and shortly thereafter the Brundtland report
(WCED 1987), leading up to the UNCED or Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, enters notions of sustainable development which typically call for taking into account the socio-economic, environmental and ecological implications of all that we do bearing in mind future generations (granted with a bias towards future human generations) and people living not just near where we live but elsewhere as well. Agenda 21 and Local Agenda 21 (United Nations 1992) emphasise the role of education and communication in engaging people in finding ways to balance peopleplanet-profit/prosperity without compromising the lives of others here and elsewhere, now and in the future. There has been an assumption, at least in the beginning of the sustainable development era, that these different dimensions and interspatial and inter-temporal interests can somehow be balanced in good harmony and that there is some kind of optimum that allows everyone, everywhere to prosper and develop forever. More recently we are seeing discourses emerge that argue that such an assumption is inherently flawed at best and at worst represents a distraction from a more fundamental transition towards a new world order based on radically different principles and values than the one represented by hegemonic growth-oriented models. It can be argued that early Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) worked from the
same premise as early EE in that there was an assumption that there is some consensus about the desired behavioural outcomes. In other words, there was a general idea of what sustainable
development requires and what it meant to live sustainably and that we need to educate, communicate and train people so that they can become sustainable citizens. Just like in the development of EE the second phase of ESD – sometimes referred to as ‘Mode 2 ESD’ (Scott and Gough 2003) – more or less abandoned this deterministic and instrumental position (Mode 1 ESD) to make room for a more emancipatory and human development perspective. The latter perspective addresses early criticism of ESD by emancipatory environmental educators who argued that the concept of sustainable development was flawed and ESD was too prescriptive and lacked grounding in local contexts (Jickling 1992; Jickling and Wals 2008). Mode 2 ESD on the other hand centres around the notion that sustainability above all requires reflexivity and the ability to continuously experiment, test, recalibrate and question one’s actions, individually and collaboratively and that there will always uncertainty, confusion and controversy around what sustainability is. This recalibrating should be done against criteria for sustainability that are not frozen in time and place but established with the knowledge of today with the full understanding that this knowledge will change and that the context in which these actions are tested and recalibrated affects what knowledge is relevant. Now let us turn to higher education. The evolution to date of sustainability and sustainable
development – two related but not identical concepts (Hampson 2012) – in higher education has been described (Wals and Blewitt 2010) as a three-staged process consisting of: 1) the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s which led to environmental engineering, environmental studies, environmental law, etc. as a part of university education and research; 2) the greening of the ivory tower with a focus on universities’ own environmental impact and management in the 1990s and 2000s; and 3) the emergence of sustainability science representing holistic, systemic, integrative and ‘post-normal’ approaches and methodologies linking education, research and outreach. The latter perspective questions deeply ingrained methodological, organisational and educational routines which lead to the commodification of education and research for serving economic interests rather than people and the planet. Instead it promotes ontological and epistemological pluralism and transformative forms of interconnected research and education that improve our knowing, doing, being and our ability to make change. Sometimes the concept of a ‘whole-institution approach to sustainability’ is used to refer to such a perspective although this concept does not always include a rethinking of ontological and epistemological assumptions. In a recent review of three edited volumes focusing on sustainability in higher education
rooted in highlyWestern-contexts (USA, UK and Australia) Bill Scott makes a helpful distinction between loose and tight conceptual framings of sustainability within universities (Scott 2014). The former refers to an institution that takes sustainability seriously in what it does, ‘without having in place values, dispositions and orientations, and an appropriate conceptually grounded vision’. Whereas the latter refers to an institution that ‘embodies a vision, values and values-informed practices that have been shifted to fit a particular conceptualization of sustainability which gives meaning, not just to what that institution does, but also to what it is trying to become’ (ibid.: 1). He argues:
(i) that the essential distinction here is between that of doing sustainability, and a shift to being sustainable as a whole institution; (ii) that any developmental journey to a tight framing would need to be a deliberate one; (iii) that changes to curriculum, management, leadership and governance would need to be in place before this can start; and (iv) that an important step on the journey will involve institution-wide deliberations on the conceptual framing(s) to adopt.
