Education for Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems

From Theory to Practice

Will Focht, Michael A. Reiter, Paul A. Barresi, Richard C. Smardon, Will Focht, Michael A. Reiter, Paul A. Barresi, Richard C. Smardon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351171588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

The goal of Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems (SHES) education is to prepare students to facilitate social learning in communities that builds knowledge of, capacity for, and commitment to sustainability to facilitate the emergence of sustainable societies.

The SHES approach to sustainability education relies on complexity-based systems thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the SHES approach, including its rationale and theoretical foundation, its pedagogy and practical applications in curricula, and ways to support the approach through institutional administration.

This book will be of great interest to academics and students of education, environmental sciences and studies, sustainability and sustainable development, natural resource management, conservation, environmental policy, environmental planning, and related fields in higher education. Educators can use this book as a guide to SHES pedagogy, curriculum design, sustainability, environmental studies, sustainable development, and sustainable well-being. Administrators will find the book useful in establishing, evaluating, staffing, and promoting programs based on the SHES approach.

Part I

Foundations

Will Focht, Part I Editor

In this first of three parts, we provide an overview of SHES approach, including its theoretical foundations and the rationale for its holistic, supradisciplinary, complexity-based, systems-centered education. It explores the importance of spatiotemporal scale, systemic resolution, social value diversity, human and natural system regime viability, and social learning in preparing students to gain knowledge of, capacity for, and commitment to facilitating the emergence of societies that enhance and sustain indefinitely the well-being of their citizens, communities, and environments.

Chapter 1, “Why education for sustainable human and environmental systems?” presents an argument for reading the book and the problem that the book is addressing. Elucidation of what is to be sustained is central to the SHES approach and will be addressed. Another topic introduced here includes holism and the systems approach to the study of sustainability, briefly touching on supersystem, system complexity, and system viability. In a consideration of various disciplinary constructions, existing uses of these terms are recognized and deviations from them are justified. In this consideration, we argue that supradisciplinary education should be the goal of sustainability education. An alternative depiction of the relationship between well-being and resource, resilience, and regulatory systems is also included.

Chapter 2, “Sustainability: systems thinking in complex situations,” expands on our conception of systems thinking in the SHES approach, incorporating complexity science and soft systems methodology to better understand the behavior of dynamic systems and their interactions – including, most importantly, the interaction between human and environmental systems as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Here we make the case that unidisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to sustainability education, and continuing our thinking about threats to sustainability as complicated problems instead of complex problems, fall short of achieving the understanding of complex systems that is required.

In Chapter 3, “Viability of complex systems: a holistic conceptual framework,” the concept of complex system viability is thoroughly considered, including dimensions of feasibility and desirability. Soft Systems Methodology and Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model are offered as frameworks for viability assessment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the questions that must be answered in assessing functional and operational viability, feasibility, and desirability that can be used to assess the sustainability of the human-environment supersystem as well as its component systems and subsystems.

Chapter 4, “The social learning challenge,” argues that learning about complex systems, which involve social constructions, uncertainty, dynamism, as well as disagreements about well-being, valuation, sustainability visioning, and sustainability intervention alternatives, necessarily requires stakeholder engagement in ongoing processes of learning about human and environmental systems and their interactions, as well as values and preferences of others in their societies. The chapter provides a review of several modes of social learning styles, including loop learning, situated learning, transformational learning, collaborative learning, and deliberative democracy. It concludes with a discussion of how societies can make the shift to social learning in a systems context, and poses questions that should be addressed in social learning using the SHES approach to sustainability education.

In Chapter 5, “The SHES approach to sustainability education,” we present the Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems Approach to Sustainability Education. It begins with articulations of the SHES vision, mission, and goal. Next, the three stages (complexity framing, viability assessment, and social learning) involved in implementation of the SHES approach are explained. This is followed by a discussion of the social learning challenge: the emergence of sustainable societies, based on consideration of five principles that underlie the SHES goal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the utility of the SHES approach to sustainable societies.

Chapter 6, the last chapter in this part, is entitled “Ethical analysis in revealing complexity.” It uses several ethical analyses, including intrinsic value versus instrumentalization, restorative justice, and an axiological system, across varying spatiotemporal scale dimensions of the same system using the SHES approach. The effect of scale variation on ethical analysis is demonstrated using a case study.

1 Why education for sustainable human and environmental systems?

Will Focht and David V. J. Bell

The call for sustainability education

This book is part of an ongoing discussion about the future prospects for human life on this planet. Around the globe there is an increasing awareness that the current development trajectory for humankind will not lead to a sustainable future. According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (2010), an organization whose members comprise more than two dozen of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet, by 2050 meeting the resource, energy, and waste needs of our current development path (if we stay on it) will require approximately 2.3 additional planets Earth.¹ We must clearly change direction and shift from business as usual to sustainable development. Ban Ki-Moon expressed it well in a speech to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Conference in Japan in November 2014: “There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B” (Ki-Moon 2016). To ensure the continued existence of our species, we humans need to learn to live more sustainably on this planet.

What kinds of “new learning” are required and how can education contribute to its attainment? This book attempts to answer these questions with special reference to higher education. It is the product of ongoing conversations carried on by a small group of academics in a series of face-to-face Roundtable sessions conducted over the course of nearly a decade. The sessions aimed to develop consensus on key assumptions and concepts while still encouraging each participant to bring to the discussions their own perspective, expertise, and experience. We share a broad view of education that encompasses but goes beyond formal education. Thus we endorse the approach to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) adopted by the United Nations more than two decades ago and outlined in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 (United Nations 1992) which juxtaposed alongside (formal) education, training (also termed non-formal education), and awareness (informal education).

We contend however that institutions of higher education play a pivotal role in all three of these forms of education. Not only do these institutions provide students with the third phase of their formal education but they also train the professionals who become primary and secondary teachers, and the employees, policy makers, and entrepreneurs who staff and lead both the private and public sector institutions and dominate communications, the media and advertising. Together with social media, these institutional forces shape the culture. They must therefore be mobilized if that culture is to be transformed to embody sustainability and the new learning that will allow humankind to continue to live successfully.

Building a culture of sustainability through education has profound implications for both what is taught and learned (curriculum) and how that learning takes place (pedagogy). But of course everything is connected to everything else. At the post-secondary level, curriculum and pedagogy connect to:

• Institutional design

• Hiring and career advancement

• Administrative structures, policy, and practices

• Student recruitment and degree requirements

• Use of information technology

• Research infrastructure and support

Since sustainability is a global challenge, it is not surprising that ESD has been a global project, spearheaded by UNESCO. Following the Earth Summit in Rio and the adoption of Agenda 21 (United Nations 1992),² UNESCO was made the “task manager” for Chapter 36 on “Education, Training and Awareness.” Ten years later at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, a UN Decade on ESD was proposed and later established in 2005. At the conclusion of the Decade in 2014, UNESCO launched the Global Action Plan to build on and extend the accomplishments of the Decade.

Less than a year later, the UN approved a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals that had been in place from 2000–2015. Unlike the Millennium Development Goals, which applied almost exclusively to Less Developed Nations, the SDGs, like Sustainable Development itself, apply to all countries, including the wealthiest. Given the broad scope of the SDGs, it was apparent that education “in its broadest sense including training and capacity building, communication and creating public awareness” (Sarabhai 2015, 122) would play a key role in their successful implementation. Goal 4 focuses directly on Education and Target 4.7 explicitly references ESD (United Nations 2015):

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and nonviolence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

This book addresses two equally important ESD challenges:

• Adjusting institutions that are designed vertically and therefore often function as “solitudes, silos, and stovepipes” (Dale 2001) to the reality that most big problems are relentlessly horizontal and require a systems perspective to grasp and respond to them adequately

• Reorienting pedagogical styles that rely on the transmission of information to students-as-passive recipients to the twenty-first century reality that information that was “owned” by the teacher is now instantly accessible to engaged learners in many regions at the touch of a smart device screen

The SHES approach embraces a strong commitment to praxis, i.e., a belief that knowledge about sustainability should not remain theoretical but should instead be put into practice in the service of holistic adaptive system management to maintain (or at least not impair) the well-being of humans and the biosphere. “Do no harm” should be part of the oath of sustainability practitioners.³ Whether this lofty goal can be attained is of course controversial and problematic. Tradeoffs are inevitable and would require guidance from an appropriate set of premises and principles.

Note the analogous challenge faced by economists who define sustainability in terms of “capital theory.” The overarching definition from this perspective holds that sustainability means passing on to future generations an equal or enhanced stock of natural, built, financial, and human capital and requires that we live off the interest of that stock (and renewable flows, of course). This seemingly straightforward approach raises all sorts of controversies and disagreements between those who allow for tradeoffs among these various forms of capital as long as the total sum or stock is constant or growing and the “greener” proponents who insist that the stock of natural capital must never be depleted under any circumstances.⁴

We adopt an anthropocentric approach that privileges human well-being; however, we recognize that human well-being depends on the viability of both human and non-human systems, which are necessarily interdependent. This is the basis for our reliance on systems theory as a basis for the SHES approach (see Chapters 2 and 3, this volume). We agree that a fundamental axiom of sustainability is “the concept that humans must live within the constraints imposed by natural systems and that, therefore, they must understand their relationship to those systems” (Reiter et al. 2012). In keeping with these assumptions, the Roundtable has identified a “vision,” i.e., the ultimate outcome toward which humanity should strive; a mission for how the vision can be realized, and a pedagogical goal outlining the kind of policies and practices required to move toward that outcome (see Chapter 5, this volume).

Previous work on sustainability education

A number of high-quality treatments have been published on the subject of sustainability education. Some have anticipated the SHES approach that is presented in this volume. Three deserve special mention.

O’Brien (2016) offers a compelling vision for the transformation of educational institutions, administrators, researchers, instructors, and students to achieve “well-being for all, sustainably.” This vision emphasizes the importance of ethical leader character, new pedagogies for deep learning, and collaboration across cultures, generations, locations, disciplines, and economic sectors. Consistent with the principles of the Earth Charter, transforming education requires competency-based over content-based approaches that have historically dominated educational curricula. In particular, tying education to real-world problem solving and working in collaboration with external communities is essential. As such, this book is particularly relevant to the social learning aspects of the SHES a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface: innovation of the SHES approach
• Acknowledgments
• List of acronyms
• PART I: Foundations
• PART II: Pedagogy
• PART III: Administration
• Glossary
• Index