COMMUNITY?
Birthe Lund
ABSTRACT
Sustainable Development Goals are intended to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. This must be transformed into pedagogy in order to influence students’ conception and understanding of common challenges, like poverty, inequality, climate change and justice.
How do we educate students to act and relate constructively and ethically?
Intended behaviour change is linked to environmental programs and sustainability. UNESCO mentions character quality as an educational instrument in Education for Sustainability. Character qualities, interpersonal and soft skills relate to behaviour and understanding of environments: how we make sense and interact with others. The former determine how we behave and engage with complex environments.
The UN stresses that sustainability encompasses promoting the social, economic and political inclusion of all, allowing all citizens to participate in political processes and representing their interests.
I address the concept of sustainability pedagogy from the perspective of pedagogical philosophy and the PPL origin within critical pedagogy in order to discuss how to deal with character quality development in a sustainability curriculum. I draw on Peter Kemp and Lévina´s ideas a out the consideration of “The Other” as well as Klafki`s concepts of categorical formation, about students’ understanding of their relationship to society and the world, and how to act on the basis of this understanding.
I argue that the traditional foundation of knowledge creation and scientific processes is challenged and a new political and ethical understanding requires co-construction and inclusive collaboration, which must be reflected in a conceptualisation of a sustainability pedagogy.
KEYWORDS: sustainability, ethics, character formation, pedagogical philosophy TYPE OF CONTRIBUTION: Extended scientific abstract
PRESENTATION FORMAT: Roundtable discussion
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
The Sustainable Development Goals are intended to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.
They address the global challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. This must be transformed into pedagogy in order to influence students
#conception and understanding of common challenges.
The Brundtland report's formulation of sustainability as a development that meets current needs without jeopardising future generations' ability to do the same, advocates for the use of ethics as a moral compass (Brundtland Commission (1987). Meeting such a sustainability requirement in a University setting requires pedagogical innovation, and it is emphasised that the realisation of both sustainability and pedagogy is a complex task, as the emphasis on common values, collaboration and inclusion challenge current political and ethical conceptions.
Character quality plays an integral part in intended behaviour change aimed at being more sustainable and to develop sustainability. Action competence has been a key concept in educational circles in Denmark since the 1980s, an educational ideal referring to the German notion of ‘Bildung’ (Lund, B. (2020). (Klafki, 2011 ) It is advocated that education for sustainability should be integrated into the formal curricula of all university programs, something which has proved difficult within the existing curricula in many cases (Lehtonen, A. et al (2018) (SY Chen, SY Liu (2020).
Literature studies indicate that action competence is developed best when students obtain insight into environmental problems by inter-disciplinary inquiry through working on projects, but this does not necessarily take into account ethical aspects or character formation: in short, Bildung. Consequently, in this paper, I address the subject from the perspective of pedagogical philosophy to address these shortcomings.
Research question:
How do we educate students in a PBL setting to act and relate constructively and ethically in complex collaborative change processes to deal with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)?
Within a PBL settings we intend to empower students to make changes and to solve authentic problems.
(Lund, B. (2020). Students are expected to act on and engage with problems independently, but how might we guide their actions with an ethical perspective in mind, if they should become able to judge a situation and develop ownership in the individual sense, when the enactment of empowerment must be collective.
Which values might best help guide and develop appropriate and ethical actions for this purpose as part of character?
This paper is a conceptual work based upon review documents addressing SD in a concept employed to address any pedagogical challenges regarding formation and SD. The complexity in understanding sustainability and implementing action in higher education is widely recognised, but few articles discuss this issue specifically within higher education (Chi-Yen Chen (2020)
Intended behaviour change is linked to international environmental programs and sustainability: UNESCO mentions character quality as an educational instrument in Education for Sustainability (Hughes, C (2020)).
Character qualities, interpersonal and soft skills relate to behaviour and understanding of environments: how we make sense and interact with others (Garcia Alvarez, Maria (2020).
The UN policies emphasise that sustainability encompasses promoting the social, economic and political inclusion of all, allowing all citizens to participate in political processes and representing their interests equally. (United Nation (2015))
I address the concept of sustainability pedagogy from the perspective of pedagogical philosophy and its PPL origin within critical pedagogy. I draw on Peter Kemp and Lévina*s ideas about the consideration of “the other” as well as Klafki`s concept of categorical formation, about students’ understanding of their relationship to society and the world, and how to act on the basis of this understanding.
The Danish philosopher Peter Kemp (Kemp, P. (2005) regards sustainability as an ethical issue. Ethics is not just about what I need but about what we all need, and what the coming generations will need. This leads to the idea of social sustainability and justice, which include sharing and creating equal access to resources.
Ethics is a notion of the good life that we ourselves help to create through the lifestyle we choose by which we evaluate each other’s actions. Our ethics guide us, telling us that we must not destroy conditions for the good life for the coming generation. Hence, a need to be concerned for the Other, put forth by the French philosopher Lévina, who’s work revolves around the ethics of the Other. Kemp claimed that a sustainability pedagogy must teach students to treat the Other as valuable and to treat nature similarly, as an Other - that is to say, as irreplaceable. This fundamental ethical appeal is an absolutely essential aspect of the conceptualisation of sustainability and therefore the development of a pedagogy for sustainability.
CLAMES:
The educational system address climate change related behavioural change as a moral issue as these challenges continue to grow. Global challenges then begins to impact pedagogical formation theories.
In order to be sustainable a new political and ethical understanding, which better allows for co- construction and inclusive collaboration at universities, may be required. This must be reflected in a sustainability
pedagogy in order to implement and translate the UN#s Sustainable Development Goals. This discursive framework for sustainability pedagogy as a whole is addressing key issues – such as equality and justice - which should be reflected in new knowledge production processes, to allow a more democratic and inclusive problem definition if (SDG) are to be met.
Consequently, pedagogical conditions for the development of an ethical action competence that enable participation in socio-political processes are a prerequisite for moving society towards a more sustainable future. Previous research has documented that Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning (PBL) can be an innovative pedagogy for sustainability education, but the ethical issues have so far been neglected or at least less reflected on than the strictly technical aspects of presented problems.
REFERENCES
Brundtland Commission (1987) Our Common Future. Oxford University Press
Garcia Alvarez, Maria (2020) Character Qualities in Educating for Sustainability January 2020 DOI:
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Hughes, Conrad (2020) The Universal Learning Programme: educating future-ready citizens. UNESCO International Bureau of Education [12127] No.34 IBE/2020/WP/CD/34 REV IBE$
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A. Kolmos, M. Winther, & J. Chen (Eds.), Educate for the future: PBL, Sustainability and Digitalisation 2020 (1 ed., pp. 45-55). Aalborg Universitetsforlag
SY Chen, SY Liu (2020) Developing Students' Action Competence for a Sustainable Future: A Review of Educational Research. Sustainability 2020, 12, 1374 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041374.
United Nation (2015): Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. October 2015 Xiangyun Du a,1, Liya Su b,2 , Jingling Liu b,(2013) Developing sustainability curricula using the PBL method in a Chinese context. Journal of Cleaner Production.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Birthe Lund, bl@hum.aau.dk, Denmark, Institute for Cultur and Learning, Aalborg University (corresponding author)