Widening Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education
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Widening Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education Edited by Katarzyna Iwińska, Michael Jones, Magdalena Kraszewska 2018 Warsaw This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Reviewers Professor Daniella Tilbury & Professor Małgorzata Grodzińska-Jurczak Proof-reading Michael Jones, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences SLU (Sweden) Alicja Wiśniewska, [email protected] Technical Editor Marek Gawron, Collegium Civitas (Poland) Cover graphic Ola Jaworowska, [email protected] (Poland) Education for Sustainable Development Icons Inês Gomes (2017) Portugal DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.7034753 e-ISBN 978-83-61067-79-5 | print ISBN 978-83-61067-78-8 The publication is a result of the Erasmus Plus Project (Reference 2015-1-PL01-KA203-016621), funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors’ and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Honorary Patronage Publisher Print Collegium Civitas Elpil 00-901 Warsaw Artyleryjska 11 1 Plac Defilad 08-110 Siedlce, Poland Palace of Culture and Science, 12th floor [email protected] Table of contents Foreword ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… i Preface …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Part I: Introduction Chapter 1: Sustainability: a short introductory note ……..……….………………..…. 9 Chapter 2: Sustainability and social dimensions of planning ……………..……... 17 Chapter 3: Sustainability and an educational perspective: roots in environmental education …………………………………….……… 25 Chapter 4: Sustainability and the teaching context: the role of university educators ……………….…………………..………….. 31 Chapter 5: Sustainability and case-based methodology ……………………..……… 45 Part II: Cases for widening interdisciplinary sustainability education Introduction …………………………………………………………….……………………………… 51 Case 1: The tropical forest: an analysis of social and economic reasons of environmental degradation …………….… 59 Case 2: Deadwood in the Białowieża Forest – the unravelling complexity of biodiversity conservation …….…… 85 Case 3: Sustainable development in the Shinyanga Region, Tanzania …... 97 Case 4: Rural tourism development: the case of Plastiras Lake, Karditsa, Central Greece ……..……….. 111 Case 5: Organic farming and public support in the EU – the Greek case ………………………………………………………………….... 121 Case 6: Remodelling an ancient farm in Portugal …………….…….…..………. 131 Case 7: Transformation of a local production company into a sustainable business ……………………………………….….………. 139 Case 8: Castromil gold mines’ geoethics dilemmas ………….…….......…….. 153 Case 9: Territorial ecological limits to the lignite surface mining in North Bohemia ……………………………………………..……………..….. 163 Case 10: Smog – high concentration of air pollutants in a large city. The Example of Warsaw ……………..………………………………….…….... 181 Case 11: Local referendum about the relocation of the railway station ….. 195 Case 12: Urban greenery – how to include urban green areas in cities that are in desperate need of housing? ………….………………..…..…… 205 Case 13: Sustainable food consumption – mitigating food waste ……….… 221 Part III: WISE partners’ experiences Chapter 6: The Agricultural University of Athens’ experience with the role-playing exercise ……………………………………...……..... 233 Chapter 7: Organic farming testing in Greece, Poland and Sweden ….……… 237 Chapter 8: The experience of the University of Porto with cases of Education for Sustainable Development …….…..…. 241 Chapter 9: The experience with testing the cases at the Masaryk University …………………….….…………….…..…….…… 243 Part IV: Integrating education for sustainable development at the programme level Chapter 10: Lessons learned from a workshop series at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences SLU .…………..... 249 Glossary …….………………………………………………………………………………….……….….. 257 List of Abstracts …………………………………………………..……………….………….….…….. 271 References ………………………………………………………………………………………….…….. 279 Foreword Sustainability is not something that can be taught. This may be an odd statement to start off a foreword to a book that seeks to enhance the capacities of academic teachers and trainers to facilitate interdiscipli- nary education that focuses on sustainability. Ultimately, a more sustainable world calls upon our ability to learn to continuously respond to dynamic global challenges and our willing- ness to engage in such learning. Viewed as such, sustainability is a continuous search with temporary outcomes that, at best, that need to be recalibrated and reconsidered as the world changes. Sustainability is not a destiny that, once we arrive at it, invites us to celebrate and en- joy our achievement. Sustainability is a dynamic concept that from an educational perspective is attractively vague: it is a concept in search for meaning. This meaning is fluid and changes with time and place; it is highly contextual. Those who like crisp, clear definitions and require strict boundaries and distinctions, will find this challenging. Especially the world of science is dominated by people who have mastered the art of drawing boundaries, making distinctions, dissecting wholes into parts, and viewing the world as a three-dimensional clock consisting of variables and causalities whose properties and interactions can some- how be measured with statistical accuracy, which, in the end, will help “us” manage and control reality in a “responsible” way. We can call this way of thinking “positivist”, empirical analytical, reductionist and cybernetic. Leaving aside the undesirable spin-offs of this “engineering mindset”, this genre of thinking has made miraculous innovations pos- sible and, for one, allows me this morning to type this foreword on my computer, before sending it via cyberspace to the editors. i Foreword The problem of today is that sustainability challenges, however ill-defined they may be, are real and urgent, and demand a WISE re- sponse. Such a response cannot be the optimisation of reductionism but rather requires a transition towards, what we might call, mindful holism. Dealing with global systemic dysfunction and making living on the planet lighter and more equitable requires that we get better in crossing bound- aries, seeing connections and building relationships, but also in asking difficult and even disruptive questions like: Why is living unsustainably made so easy? What kinds of values are we teaching and marketing? What routines, mechanisms and structures are in place that make unsustainability the default, the norm? What needs to be done to trans- gress and transform them? What is the moral compass that guides us as we innovate, make choices about what we eat, how we move and use energy, etc.? Education for sustainability or for co-creating a more sustainable world is not about adding new knowledge and information to an already infinite pile. As Edward Osborne Wilson so eloquently put it; “We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom”. In the post-truth era, where alternative facts distract people from engaging in the ques- tions raised above in order to maintain the status quo that benefits the short-term interests of only few, the education we need ought to be critical, responsive, responsible and, indeed, reflexive. As higher education is looking beyond science for impact factors in journals and for ways to address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, this handbook provides an excellent starting point for the kind of boundary crossing that is needed as humanity is looking for ways to live healthily, happily and equitably within planetary boundaries. Higher education in particular has a role in contributing to such a world helping young people learn, unlearn and relearn. Clearly, sustainability education is more than adding another critical issue of new content to an overcrowded curriculum, it is also more than ii Arjen Wals educating for a noble cause, it is, rather, a catalyst for rethinking teach- ing and learning altogether with people and planet in mind. Indeed, this handbook rightfully calls for a widening of sustainability education to allow for critical engagement in the key issues of our time. Such widen- ing does suggest that disciplines need to be connected, which is the main focus of the handbook, but even more so, that we create learning spaces and environments that allow for experimentation, interroga- tion, making change, as well as engagement in ethical issues and moral dilemmas. So let the widening continue and let this kind of transform- ative, transboundary and, indeed, transgressive education become the new norm as we stumble towards a world that is more sustainable than the one currently in prospect. Arjen Wals Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University (Netherlands); UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development; Carl Bennet Guest Professor in Education for Sustainable Development at Gothenburg University (Sweden) iii Preface Katarzyna Iwińska Collegium Civitas (Poland) The final document of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 (Rio+20) starts with the words “The future we want: our common vision”, followed by the commitment to sustainable development, which ensures a sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations. This document reaffirmed and re- newed previous political commitments and declarations of global soci- ety towards sustainable development (SD) (United Nations 2012). In the decades since