Mapping the future of ESD
John Huckle
Shared Visions and Futures:
ESD across disciplines and cultures
University of Cyprus
November 15 – 17, 2007
My arguments
• That the future of higher education for
sustainable development (HESD) depends on
finding philosophical frameworks to integrate
curriculum knowledge in ways that promote
sustainability literacy;
• That critical realism offers one such framework;
• That those designing curricula should be aware
of contemporary social theory including that
which suggests we are entered a post-ecologist
era characterised by a politics of
unsustainability.
Outline of presentation
• Link interdisciplinarity in HESD to the problems and
opportunities of combining different kinds of knowledge
and knowledge communities (examination of related HE
initiatives in England)
• Make the case for epistemological and values
awareness in HESD (Teaching and Learning at the
Environment-Science-Society Interface project) and
outline the advantages of critical realism as an
integrative framework for the HESD curriculum
• Comment on the future of HESD in an era of postecologism
Knowledge/subject communities or
disciplinary cultures contain:
• Assumptions concerning the nature of ‘reality’,
and the ways in which knowledge can be
produced and validated (epistemological
assumptions);
• Bodies of theoretical knowledge
• Assumptions as to what are the most important
objects of scholarly attention
• Beliefs about the learning process by which
students can graduate to full membership of the
community.
• Value commitments, stated or unstated.
Solving the HESD puzzle
Each of our disciplines
provides insights into how
the social and bio-physical
worlds can continue to coevolve in sustainable ways.
Philosophical considerations
help us to identify each
discipline’s key contributions
and suggest how we might
best combine these in the
HESD curriculum.
Sustainability literacy
Understand the need for
change to a sustainable way
of doing things, individually
and collectively
Have sufficient knowledge
and skills to decide and act
in ways that favour
sustainable development
Be able to recognise and
reward other people’s
decisions and actions that
favour sustainable
development
Sustainable development in higher education
This report summarises the
current state of progress in the
embedding of ESD into many of
the subject disciplines taught
within HE. It also identifies some
of the barriers and offers some
potential solutions.
The significance of this report is
that it is a reflection of the views
of practitioners. While progress
might appear uneven and limited
in some important disciplines, this
research provides evidence of
strong underlying need for more
action in support of the
embedding process.
Sustainability literacy: skills and knowledge
Sustainability literacy: skills and knowledge
continued
An example: ecocriticism in English
Ecocriticism is literary and cultural
criticism from an environmentalist
viewpoint. It asks students to
apply their discussion of literary
texts to other areas of their lives,
such as their leisure activities, the
forms of transport they use, their
career intentions, indeed their
whole pattern of consumption. In
so doing it challenges the
commonly held attitude among
students that literature is there to
provide an escape from serious
problems, and that preferences
are merely personal
3 levels of progress in embedding ESD in
curricula
Most progress
Some progress Little progress
Engineering
English
Geography, earth
and environmental
sciences
Bioscience
Economics
Hospitality
Leisure
Sport and tourism
Philosophy and
religious studies
Information and
computer sciences
Mathematics
Statistics and
operational
research
Dance, drama and
music
Pychology
ESD deals with knowledge that is:
• concerned with the interactions of natural (biophysical) and social systems, which are both
often complex, non-linear, dynamic and
unpredictable;
• used to justify decisions which have profound
social, economic and ecological consequences;
• produced and reproduced within a society of
competing vested interests and contested social
and environmental values
• generally saturated with subjective content
(value laden)
Teaching and Learning at the EnvironmentScience-Society Interface (TALESSI)
• Awareness of epistemological and value
based issues is a prerequisite for critical
thinking in environmental higher
education;
• In so far as ability to think critically across
disciplines enables students to integrate
knowledge produced within different
disciplines, these two kinds of awareness
are also prerequisites for interdisciplinarity.
Alienation from nature
Modern dualism and
academic divisions of labour
that alienate people from
nature.
Reconnecting people with
nature depends partly on a
realistic interdisciplinary
ESD.
Need to find a philosophical
framework for the
curriculum that develops
epistemological and values
awareness.
Epistemology 1: realism
• Theories of knowledge or theories of how we
can know about the world
• Realist approaches – allow the possibility of
purely objective knowledge, knowledge of
external reality which is independent of the
knowing subject and her/his historical and
cultural context. Such knowledge must
necessarily be valid in an absolute or universal
sense. (natural sciences)
• Associated with modern modes of thought
Epistemology 2: constructivism
• All knowledge of external reality (including
scientific knowledge) is at least in part
necessarily subjective or socially constructed.
• Knowledge inescapably reflects or is specific to
the historical and cultural conditions under which
it is produced either at the level of individual
scientists and/or at the structural level of society
• Associated with social sciences and humanities
and with postmodern and poststructural modes
of thought
Strong and weak constructivism
• Knowledge is entirely
determined by social
processes and therefore
tells us nothing
whatsoever about
external reality
• Knowledge reflects both
social processes and
external reality.
• Weak constructivism
allows for greater or
lesser degrees of
subjectivity in knowledge
claims, but does not
admit the possibility that
subjectivity can be
eliminated altogether.
Epistemology 3: critical realism
• Scientific truth is not just what passes as such according
to the dominant beliefs, metaphors or hypotheses of
some particular time and place
• At the ‘deep’ or ‘abstract’ level there are the real
objective powers of objects – structures and processes
at work in the bio-physical and social worlds (real
domain)
• At the ‘intermediate’ level are more contingent factors
specific to given historical and social conditions – they
determine whether or not objective powers are realised whether processes cause events (actual domain)
• At the ‘surface’ level are experienced phenomena
which arise out of the combination of objective powers
with contingent factors and can be observed at a given
place and time (empirical domain)
Critical realism and political ecology
• seeks to understand ecological change through
epistemological scepticism combined with ontological
realism (biophysical structures and processes are real
but our knowledge is always to a degree ‘subjective’)
• Assesses the political construction of what is considered
to be ecological and/or an environmental issue
• Rejects the idea that environmental change can be
understood in any final and complete way (naïve
realism) – but suggests that scientific constructions of
the environment and environmental issues can be made
more transparent and more beneficial to people
previously unrepresented in the construction of such
knowledge.
Tim Forsyth, 2001
Critical realism and enquiry in ESD
What forms of democracy or governance
(contingent factors at the intermediate level)
would allow the continued progressive coevolution of human and non-human nature
(nature and society at the deep level) and
allow sustainability to become a lived reality
(at the surface level)?
Values in HESD
• The explicit focus of particular courses e.g.
environmental ethics - acknowledged
• Embedded within the supposedly ‘value free’
natural and social sciences - unacknowledged
• Reside in the hidden curriculum of the university
- unacknowledged
• Often mutually inconsistent
• Students themselves are active agents in the
construction of values
Students need:
• A philosophically and
sociologically informed
appreciation of ideas on the
nature of ‘value’ and the ways
in which texts, practices and
institutions may be said to be
‘value-laden’
• An appreciation of work in
environmental philosophy and
ethics – in order to identify
commitments to specific
environmental values in texts,
practices and institutions.
Dryzek’s 9 discourses
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Looming Tragedy: Survivalism
Growth Forever: The
Promethean Response
Leave it to the Experts:
Adminstrative Rationalism
Leave it to the People:
Democratic Pragmatism*
Leave it to the Market:
Economic Rationalism
Environmentally Benign Growth:
Sustainable Development*
Industrial Society and Beyond:
Ecological Modernization*
Save the World through New
Consciousness: Green
Romanticism
Save the World through New
Politics: Green Rationalism*
Interdisciplinarity via critical realism or
systems theory?
• Chapters by Plant
and Huckle outline
the critical realist
approach
• Chapter by Sterling
outlines the systems
approach.
An era of post-ecologism
The on-going process of
modernisation has taken
western consumer
democracies beyond the
politics of sustainability and
into a realm where the
management of the inability
and unwillingness to
become sustainable has
taken centre ground.
Bluhdorn & Welsh, 2007
1. A reassuring belief in the
compatibility and interdependence of
democratic consumer
capitalism and ecological
sustainability has
become hegemonic.
2. Backed by faith in
technological innovation,
market instruments, and
managerial perfection as
means to sustainability
(ecological
modernisation)
Indicators of post-ecologism:
• The normalisation of the environmental crisis – standard
feature of daily news
• Fixation on economic growth, material accumulation,
consumerism; reinforced by globalisation but radically
incompatible with ecological virtues;
• Former environmental radicals now promote the
greening of capitalism;
• Formerly radical NGOs engage with government and
corporations in ecological modernisation initiatives
• Green parties redefine and reposition themselves
• Nuclear energy rebranded as green energy
HESD and the politics of unsustainability
• Are universities
conspiring in the politics
of unsustainability or
revealing its
contradictions?
• Do our interdisciplinary
courses deal adequately
with cultures of
consumerism and foster
forms of ecological,
environmental and global
citizenship?
http://john.huckle.org.uk