Higher Education and Sustainable Development

A model for curriculum renewal

Cheryl Desha, Karlson 'Charlie' Hargroves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134665655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Programmes d'enseignement

Responding to the global and unprecedented challenge of capacity building for twenty-first century life, this book is a practical guide for tertiary education institutions to quickly and effectively renew the curriculum towards education for sustainable development.

The book begins by exploring why curriculum change has been so slow. It then describes a model for rapid curriculum renewal, highlighting the important roles of setting timeframes, formal and informal leadership, and key components and action strategies. The second part of the book provides detailed coverage of six core elements that have been trialled and peer reviewed by institutions around the world:

• raising awareness among staff and students
• mapping graduate attributes
• auditing the curriculum
• developing niche degrees, flagship courses and fully integrated programs
• engaging and catalysing community and student markets
• integrating curriculum with green campus operations.

With input from more than seventy academics and grounded in engineering education experiences, this book will provide academic staff with tools and insights to rapidly align program offerings with the needs of present and future generations of students.

PART 1

A compelling case for rapid curriculum renewal

1

HIGHER EDUCATION IN URGENT AND CHALLENGING TIMES

The higher education sector faces its most significant challenge since emerging in the 12th century: to equip society with knowledge and skills to address unprecedented environmental threats and population pressures. The imminent risk from inaction to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, curb energy demand and adapt to extreme weather patterns and temperature fluctuations means that capacity building is urgently required across all professional disciplines and vocational programs.

In this chapter we briefly overview why these times are ‘urgent’, considering growing pressures on the environment, growing economic impacts of environmental issues, and growing levels of enforcement (from regulation and policy changes, and professional body and accreditation agency requirements). We also discuss why these times are ‘challenging’, considering the scale and complexity of efforts required in a short period of time, alongside an increasing pace of technological innovation. The literature suggests that within the next decade there are likely to be abrupt market, regulatory and institutional shifts responding to global challenges, which will require graduates to be equipped with a range of new knowledge and skills.

While many authors have commented on the slow nature of curriculum for the last half-century, there is a lack of literature addressing how the process may be accelerated. Without such strategic guidance it is not surprising that universities and educational institutions around the world are struggling to update curriculum at a pace that matches societal progress. This is creating a time lag dilemma for the higher education sector where the usual or ‘standard’ timeframe to update curriculum for professional disciplines is too long to meet changing market and regulatory requirements for emerging knowledge and skills.

We conclude that given the current state of affairs, curriculum renewal activities must be accelerated, paying attention to the complexity embedded in producing graduate and postgraduate students within useful timeframes.

As the tertiary education sector transitions to significantly embed sustainability into its offerings over the next decade or so, a range of strategies will be used by higher education institutions. In this chapter we briefly discuss a number of risks and rewards associated with embedding sustainability into the curriculum, and highlight a number of organisations working to assist those who are transitioning their curricula now.

Introduction

With considerable growth and development of higher education over the last century, the effectiveness of preparing professionals to contribute to society would appear to be ‘fait accompli’. The higher education sector has risen to the challenge of times of rapid change and upheaval, such as the industrial revolution and the world wars.¹ The first recognised universities grew out of ‘cathedral schools’ in 12th-century Europe. Devastated by Germanic and Viking invasions, cities demanded trained elites to serve the bureaucracies of the church and fill the emerging professions of the clergy, the law and medicine. The European universities of Oxford and Cambridge actually arose through emulating the successes of the earliest known universities in Paris and Bologna. The British then exported their model of higher education to North American colonies and quickly founded nine colonial colleges before the American Revolution, including Harvard in 1636 and Princeton in 1748.

The industrial revolution, which began in 18th-century Britain, forced universities away from their traditional medieval curricula (which included arts, theology, law and medicine) into a new era of natural, physical and social sciences. Industrial society required the invention of the modern research university and the technical college to teach applied sciences, such as chemistry, biology, engineering and medicine. Towards the end of the 19th century, student numbers had increased all over Europe and dramatically in the United States. During the first half of the 20th century, economic demands influenced the course of university curriculum. For example, in the sciences, as institutions focused on improving their research capacity, the focus shifted to fields that could directly improve industrial production, such as physics and chemistry. By the Second World War in the 1940s, a huge variety of academic disciplines could be found all over the world.

Now at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, higher education is entering urgent and challenging times where compelling evidence suggests that the imperative is now to rapidly and effectively incorporate education for sustainability (EfS) across all education programs. Despite successes in incorporating the digital wave of innovation into programs over the last two decades, signals clearly suggest that higher education has been slow to move to incorporate sustainability, and is generally poorly prepared to do so.²

New forces are transforming higher education at a speed that could not have been foreseen 10 years ago … Higher education institutions play a strategic role in finding solutions to today’s leading challenges in the fields of health, science, education, renewable energy, water management, food security and the environment … We need higher education institutions to train teachers in the conduct of pedagogical research and develop relevant curricula that integrates the values of sustainable development.

Mr Walter Erdelen, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences, UNESCO³

David Orr, one of the world’s leading environmental educators, has argued for decades that the planetary crisis we face is a crisis of education.⁴ Sustainability, or sustainable development, poses educators the significant task of renewing programs to provide knowledge and skills in a range of relatively new areas across industry, government and society, in both developed and developing countries. Ian O’Connor, Vice Chancellor of Griffith University, spoke about this challenge at the Green Cross International 2006 Earth Dialogues forum (chaired by President Gorbachev), concluding,

Higher education is beginning to recognise the need to reflect the reality that humanity is affecting the environment in ways which are historically unprecedented and which are potentially devastating for both natural ecosystems and ourselves. Like the wider community, higher education understands that urgent actions are needed to address these fundamental problems and reverse the trends … The urgent challenge for higher education now is to include ecological literacy as a core competency for all graduates, whether they are in law, engineering or business.⁵

A number of studies have since been undertaken in various parts of Europe, the United States and Australia in particular, to understand the state of higher education in providing education for sustainability opportunities for students. Typical of these is the 2007 UK Higher Education Funding Council for England study, which found that sustainable development education was disparate and widely dispersed across higher education institutions.⁶ For the most part this comprised ‘education about sustainable development’ including awareness lessons or theoretical discussions, rather than education for sustainable development, which increases the capacity of individuals, groups or organisations to act, through developing knowledge and skills.

Such findings are supported by our work in Australia on energy efficiency education over the last six years,⁷ where we have found significant mismatches in what industry expects should be taught, what faculty think they are teaching, and what students think they are learning. We have found actual knowledge and skill development to be ad hoc and highly dependent on the expertise and interests of individual champions. Often this has no foundation in the overall program design, instead being ‘bolt-on’ attempts to embed sustainability within the curriculum.

Living in ‘urgent’ times

As ‘Generation X’ authors with engineering training, we are self-professed problem solvers and keen to get into the solution space of ‘how to’ engage in capacity building that makes a difference! However — following our own advice to others in ‘whole system thinking’ — we realise the importance of first appreciating the full extent and context of the problem. With this in mind, we use the following several pages to reflect on the question, ‘what are the issues with 21st-century living that are so urgent to address?’

Growing pressures on the environment

As a result of the impact of the first 200 years of the industrial revolution, the second and third decades of the 21st century are shaping up to be characterised as the time in human history when the impact from ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Barry Grear
• Foreword by Professor Goolam Mohamedbhai
• Foreword by Professor Walter Leal Filho
• Foreword by Dr Tony Marjoram
• Our one-minute pitch
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Introduction by Professor Stephen Sterling
• Introduction by Dr Debra Rowe
• Introduction by Emeritus Professor Robin W. King
• PART 1 A compelling case for rapid curriculum renewal
• PART 2 Strategic transformation through rapid curriculum renewal
• PART 3 Key considerations for each element of curriculum renewal
• Appendix: Staging the curriculum renewal strategy
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index