How not what: teaching sustainability as process

Citation: DuPuis E. & Ball T. 2013. How not what: teaching sustainability as process. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 9(1):64-75. Published online Feb 27, 2013. http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol9iss1/1108-025.dupuis.htmlThe Challenge of Teaching Sustainability in the University Context The United Nations declared 2005-2014 to be the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, calling on universities to help create a more sustainable world (UNESCO, 2005). Yet, higher education may not be well prepared to fulfill this goal. Historically, the university has created knowledge with individual experts in siloed disciplines who research and transfer codified knowledge using didactic pedagogies (Jonassen, 1991; Sharp, 2002). Yet, many observers have argued that working toward a sustainable future requires educational models that go beyond teaching codified "what" facts to models that emphasize "how": that train students in the transdisciplinary, collaborative ways of knowing-how that have been recently characterized as "new knowledge production" (Hessels & van Lente, 2008), "post-normal," or "Mode 2" science (Functowitz & Ravetz, 1993; Gibbons et al. 1994; Wiek et al. 2011).In this article, we describe the problems with defining sustainability as codified, stable "whats." We then look at new characterizations of sustainable knowing and learning as a more collaborative, "dialogic" process (Gibbons et al. 1994). These new conceptionalizations of knowledge production separate out codified didactic knowledge--what we call here "know what"--from the more contextual, tacit, and relational knowledge production we emphasize here and refer to as "know how." We then ask, can universities, as centers of codified, disciplinary knowledge, teach students how to practice this new way of knowing? Then, we use one example of an interactive learning activity we have designed to train students to be competent, reflexive producers of sustainable knowledge in collaborative group processes. Through our own collaborative process of designing this learning activity, we found that students practiced three post-normal "modes" of knowing. We describe each of these modes and show how the learning activity evolved to explicitly teach both disciplinary technical learning about sustainability along with these other three transdisciplinary, reflexive process-based "how" modes of knowing. Finally, we briefly show how we are developing ways to assess student acquisition of these process "how" knowledge competencies.Our example comes from a learning activity we have designed and conducted as part of the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design (SEED) consortium, a group experimenting with reflexive pedagogical designs and learner-centered curriculum to train students to work effectively within collaborative group processes (Bacon et al. 2011) to create positive sustainable change.Sustainability as What A focus on sustainable knowledge and practice as simply gathering and imparting to students the right codified information has led to confusion in the classroom. Sustainability knowledge continually slips out from under these codified, standardized, cannonical definitions. This situation has led to a frustrating indeterminacy in which "[s]ustainability appears to be about 'everything' and 'nothing' all at once," (Sherren, 2006) so that "[a]t times, the plurality of angles, concerns, and interests embodied in sustainability debates devolve into a confusing cacophony" (Brand & Karvonen, 2007). The slipperiness of sustainable knowledge means that those attempting to prepare students to make informed contributions are often puzzled "in stipulating what is core to educate in something so amorphous as sustainability" (Sherren, 2006) leaving universities to become caught up in the question (to paraphrase Dave Eggers (2006)): "What is the What?" of sustainability. …