From 45 Years as a Sustainability Change-Agent: 40 Ideas and Lessons to Pass on to Students and Perpetual Students: The Biggies: Part One of Three
Over the decades, as both an Adjunct Professor for 31 courses, in several other sectors, with multiple identities, I’ve become aware my approach to sustainability differs from others, both in the classroom and when trying to make change outside of it.
That is:
· While obviously heavily overlapping with the environment, sustainability is not the same thing. It increasingly seeks to bring in the economic and social spheres. And not in a token way. While we’ve seen progress doing this for environmental justice, and certainly there are a number of fields now built around environmental economics, we are far from finished. (At a couple of public hearings I attended last summer on environmental justice, economics was treated by nearly everyone who testified as the enemy. While understandable, it doesn’t have to be.)
· If you’re going to say “Interdisciplinary” (or its variants), you have to practice them. For instance, you can’t just rule out politics as irrelevant or divisive. You have to include and search for ways to make it work. (See this co-written with Ira Feldman.)
· The same is true for other aspects we used to say during the brief heyday of sustainability in the late 1990’s when the field almost made it to the societal/political mainstream: “Sustainability ties to all other problems” (even if those working on these problems don’t seem to know that); and “Sustainability offers a framework and tools for understanding and addressing problems.” That is, it’s not just what you see in the media from time to time, an adjective to occasionally add to a field, such as “Sustainable” in front of architecture or business
· While sustainability somehow missed that moment (again, see the above- reference), the possibility of reaching the everyday mainstream still exists. And we still need it to. So it’s important to keep prodding and being opportunistic to make it so
· In the educational sphere, it is not just about doing projects, although they have their place (and I’ve started including them in courses). Same for skill-building — as obviously important as that is, particularly these days. In my telling, it’s mostly about a way of thinking. But, again, taken seriously
· Further on classroom education (which I pick up again on in Part 3), professors’ messages can be too basic, when students might be capable of understanding more complex ideas. While it’s impossible to target perfectly, from time to time treat freshman and sophomores as upper-classmen and see how it goes. If the ideas overwhelm them, then return to a more basic level. You only have them once, and you don’t know if they’ll ever be exposed to important ideas you exclude
· Making change is about both pursuing small, incremental improvements (AKA, actions or steps) and seeking big, what’s now being called Transformational Societal Change.[1]
I recently finished teaching two fall courses: World Sustainability at Ramapo College; and Science, Technology, & Society (STS) at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). They’re not the same thing, but not too far apart, and recently been somewhat converging. So the majority of what follows applies to both of them, as well as to other sustainability courses, or courses in other fields incorporating sustainability.
As it’s been almost two years since I’ve written in Medium, I thought I would share a much expanded, revised version of the main points given on the last day of class of each course with a larger audience, both within Education and beyond, as my view of “Education” includes the wider society. They could be useful even outside of pure educational contexts for government, business, non-profits because, as I’ve said elsewhere: “We’re going to have to learn our way to sustainability.” (Or at times, “through climate change.”) And that includes those who’ve thought they were long done with school.
I don’t believe most of these are that obvious or necessarily covered, or as emphasized, elsewhere.
I start here with the biggies, and then in two further Parts, offer further “Ideas and Lessons” I hope will helpful for students and educators in higher education, as well as informal educators/perpetual students in any other sector.
Towards the end of the Series, I offer suggestions for teaching sustainability in college courses, including where current efforts (at least mine) fall short.
Here are a few to get things started:
1) We have urgent problems in society, and we’re not close to making sufficient progress in resolving them. Therefore, we need to think differently about them than we’re currently doing. But we can’t just say it; we have to practice it
2) We don’t always have full answers to urgent problems — even if few are saying this, or it seems people speaking or writing about solutions give that impression. Even textbooks don’t always get it right. (It can be useful, and an important meta-lesson, to actually show this, especially when sustainability-deaf statements are made on Page 1 of a text.) Actually getting to solutions can be murky, with no formulas for finding answers that I’ve ever discovered. Hence why we must think them through
3) Regarding that “Urgency,” while that shouldn’t always have to be in everyone’s face, as that has its own drawbacks, the baseline of urgency needs to be established. Challenging the perhaps unaware or unquestioned assumption that we have forever to solve our problems makes too much difference, to too many other things
4) Therefore, for those who want to try, it is important to become better critical thinkers. You won’t often hear that as a typical “Skill for Success.” (Note “Thinking” is not exclusively just cognitive/intellectual. That’s explained in Part 3, Idea 36.)
5) It may be necessary at times for students to challenge themselves in something they don’t want to do or have private doubts about, such as speaking in class, being able to constructively weigh in during classroom conversations. Even if something they say turns out to be wrong (which rarely happens. Much more often they’re part right), or they don’t say it perfectly, it is still valued, even appreciated, and that most likely they will improve with practice
6) Or even in their written work, it is not uncommon for students to do much better during the course of a semester once they better understand the expectations. Sometimes it does take the mini-shock of receiving a lower grade than they might have expected, along with coaching-oriented comments, on the first assignment
7) Sometimes, conventional wisdom and assumptions need to be challenged. (OK. In my world, more than “Sometimes.”) Upon reflection, it/they might hold us back. Examples occur in just about every class. (For example, we re-looked at the potential value of Ignorance, and found a potentially synergistic relationship with further knowledge.)
8) If faced with deeply unpleasant choices on issues, you don’t have to simply accept them. The way they are framed may be overly limiting. Consider other, perhaps broader ways to describe them. Try to invent one or two new options. Hence the under-emphasized importance of creativity outside of the Arts context; and why “Innovation,” often cited by many fields, cannot be allowed to be superficial. (I’ve said elsewhere: “We need to innovate how we innovate.”) As a tip, try to convert “Either”/”Or’s” into “Both”/”Ands.” That is, challenge apparent binaries, “It has to be This or That’s.” These are common, but might not be real. (For instance, “We can only learn with our heads, hearts, or hands-on.” It has to be one or the other. But why does it have to be that way?) Someone’s proposed ideas may be unrealistic/unreasonable/undoable. So what? Even poor ideas, if put forward in the right environment, can generate good ones.
Now that I’ve hopefully established that this is not about “Business-as-usual” Sustainability or Education, we pick up on more “Ideas and Lessons” in Part 2.
[1] There’s one more, but it involves role reversal with the author as a PhD student. The PhD is, in part, a pursuit of truth. The technical definition of a PhD as a Doctor of Philosophy takes the latter seriously. It is not just the narrow pursuit of a credential.
