Do We Know What We Are Doing? Reflections on Learning, Knowledge, Economics, Community and Sustainability

Do We Know What We Are Doing? Reflections on Learning, Knowledge, Economics, Community and Sustainability
Author: Rolf Jucker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1443869864

The discourse of education for sustainability has been severely limited by the fact that it largely refuses to acknowledge important insights from other fields of learning and knowledge. This reluctance to engage with central insights regarding how the world and, more specifically, how human interactions with both the human and non-human world work, ensures that it has remained a largely self-centred discourse. It is tangled up with reflections on education without contextualising them in the...

Can We Cope with the Complexity of Reality? Why Craving Easy Answers Is at the Root of our Problems

Can We Cope with the Complexity of Reality? Why Craving Easy Answers Is at the Root of our Problems
Author: Rolf Jucker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1527549496

Education for a viable future has never been more important than in our era of climate change, fake news, self-illusions, and political upheaval. Whether humanity will have a dignified future hangs in the balance. The urgency of finding sound solutions to a number of complex problems is obvious. We can’t really allow ourselves to get it wrong, but the temptation to fall for easy, convenient answers is considerable. This book focuses on emerging insights from various fields which allow us to collectively build evidence-based and wise solutions. This requires us to clarify how to arrive at a sound understanding of reality, which belief-systems and ideologies impede this understanding, and which issues need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. We cannot solve the climate crisis or any other pressing problems besetting humanity by using mental models which are demonstrably flawed. We ignore important findings and insights in fields unfamiliar to us at our peril. Whatever our professional field, we need to self-critically reflect on the conclusions presented in this book in order to increase the quality and efficacy of our educational interventions for a better world.

Education for Sustainable Development in Further Education

Education for Sustainable Development in Further Education
Author: Denise Summers
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2016-08-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137519118

This book will enable teachers and managers in the post-compulsory sector to consider a range of approaches to embed Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in their practice in the post-compulsory sector. There will be the opportunity to consider key debates, useful links and suggested reading to encourage further investigation and development of practice. Fundamentally, this book aims to empower teachers to critically analyse ESD through their own subject specialisms, engage in the debate and learn with their students. Democratic and participative approaches introduced will help readers to question traditional transmissive styles of teaching and learning and move on to the radical and transformative approaches required to embrace ESD. Therefore this book, whilst including illustrative examples, will encourage the reader to look at their own subject specialisms, practice, interests and those of their students to co-construct a curriculum that embeds ESD.

Educational and Cultural Challenges of the European Sustainability Model

Educational and Cultural Challenges of the European Sustainability Model
Author: María Dolores Sánchez Galera
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-03-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 303038716X

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the European Sustainability Model which cannot be properly understood without taking into account the global governance trends surrounding the topic. The author offers a fresh analysis of both theory and praxis of sustainable development in the open-ended process of EU integration by shedding new light on the often-overlooked role that law and legal science should have within the educational and cultural domains. The monograph explores the necessity of new conceptual and methodological approaches in order to understand the emerging educational and cultural challenges when it comes to their integration and intersection with sustainability in today’s society, which desperately claims systemic transformations.

The Sustainable Manifesto

The Sustainable Manifesto
Author: Kersten Reich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2022-02-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000581578

In The Sustainable Manifesto, Kersten Reich describes in a concise and memorable way the necessary actions that humans need to take to live sustainably and combat climate change. Are we sufficiently capable of changing our behaviour towards sustainability? What do we have to do in a more sustainable way, and how? The Sustainable Manifesto considers questions around behaviour-change and action for sustainability and connects this thinking to current research in both the natural and human sciences. Reich begins by addressing the most important risks to sustainability and looks in particular at climate change, biodiversity, land use and global phosphorus and nitrogen cycles. He goes on to identify the main causes that have led to the current crisis: specifically the human desire for expansion, growth in all areas, progress and competitive advantages that have forced consideration of the common good into the background. In this vein, the author highlights how economics and politics are two driving forces for which sustainability is difficult to comprehend, going against their basic principles of a liberal and now neo-liberal expansion of all markets. Finally, Reich demonstrates how sustainability could be possible if we reprioritize our life goals and face the reality of an ecological crisis and the necessary transformation of society in order to save our planet. Innovative and accessible, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of sustainability, theories of learning, human behaviour, as well as those who are looking for answers on how to fight for a sustainable future.

Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level

Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Development at University Level
Author: Walter Leal Filho
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319106902

This book documents and compares the experiences of a wide range of universities across the five continents with regard to sustainable development, making it of special interest to sustainability researchers and practitioners. By showcasing how integrative approaches to sustainable development at the university level can be successfully employed to bridge the gaps between disciplines, the book provides a timely contribution to the literature on sustainability and offers a valuable resource for all those interested in sustainability in a higher education context.

Schooling for Sustainable Development in Europe

Schooling for Sustainable Development in Europe
Author: Rolf Jucker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2014-10-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319095498

This book examines the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programs in schools across Europe. It describes and analyzes how individual countries and the region as a whole have established teaching and learning methods to help students develop the competencies needed to be part of a sustainable society. Featuring chapters written by experts throughout Europe, the book first provides a general overview of ESD in various contexts, including the state-of-the-art of ESD theory and conceptual development; political and social analysis; the various concepts of ESD competencies; and teacher training. Next, the book details how ESD has been implemented in different European countries and regions, including: Sweden, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Catalonia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Flanders, France, Cyprus, UK and the Netherlands. In recognition of education as a motor of change, the United Nations General Assembly declared a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014), calling for the integration of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning. Inside this book, readers will find details on what has been done, as well as assessments of what more could be done, across Europe. It will help readers gain valuable insights into how to help students develop the knowledge, skills and values needed to shape a sustainable future.

Intergenerational Education for Adolescents towards Liveable Futures

Intergenerational Education for Adolescents towards Liveable Futures
Author: David Lloyd
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-06-13
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1527535991

This volume will provide eco-socially-oriented science and environmental educators with a diverse set of examples of how science and environmental learning for students and their co-learner teachers can be enacted in ways which contribute to their understanding of, commitment to and capabilities towards, living for a more eco-socially just and, therefore, more sustainable world. Science and environmental learning is set within a challenging framework, one that entails critical, transdisciplinary learning and acting, and values all the human and other-than-human beings sharing Earth’s rich, but finite, resources. The text asserts that ethical contemporary science and environmental education, which practitioners might find within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), will have at centre-stage not merely more factual knowledge, but also the development of learners’ affect and behaviour towards acting for eco-social justice. This will demand that learners more fully appreciate not only the necessity to transition swiftly to living within planetary boundaries, but also the requirements of ethical living—that humans share health and well-being more equally with their own and all other species. Further, the book proposes that eco-socially responsible science and environmental education must be set within a transdisciplinary and integral framework, one in which curriculum and pedagogy are embedded in everyday practice. In this transition project from unsustainable inequities to eco-social justice, teachers and community leaders need to work with their students/citizens in envisioning preferable futures, and developing shared knowledge, values, dispositions, courage and capabilities to work towards such futures, and in genuine attempts at affecting them.