Curriculum reform for sustainability in the environmental century

Background/Question/Methods

Ecologists expect climate change and human resource use to have severe consequences for living systems over the coming decades. Higher education has an imperative to produce integrative, holistic critical thinkers, capable of understanding complex tradeoffs among possible solutions to environmental problems. Interdisciplinary programming in higher education is accepted as necessary for effective instructional focus on complex environmental problems. Difficulties in sharing faculty and curricula among disciplinary units, and the need for students to sequentially access information from different disciplines limit the effectiveness of this approach. Many universities are fraught with competition for funding among competing budgetary silos. Review of programs in the US and Canada shows that most are not structured to produce graduates with integrated understanding of environmental problems. Following the flawed model of environmental programs, sustainability programs developed at institutions around the world are often built around the margins of the traditional disciplines and lack the resources for a comprehensive curriculum. Both structural and pedagogical changes are required if higher education is to develop effective programming to address the unfolding crises of this century. 

Results/Conclusions

An approach to improve sustainability programming has been adopted by Unity College through the transdisciplinary framework of sustainability science (sensu U.S. National Academy of Science). Transdisciplinary pedagogy integrates the perspectives of various disciplines in a problem-focused learning process, and it is increasingly being adopted as central to education in sustainability science. Sustainability science focuses on the dynamics of coupled human-natural systems and is defined by the problems that it addresses rather than by the disciplines it employs. Students are empowered to become brokers of knowledge, and faculty perform a curatorial role to provide students with networked resources generally external to the classroom. At Unity College this framework has been effective in upper division courses and also offers significant advantages for introductory and general education curriculum. Classroom time is liberated for experiential engagement and recitation, providing students with experience in knowledge acquisition and problem analysis. Implementation of transdisciplinary pedagogy requires explicit faculty acceptance and emphasis on information literacy. Such pedagogical reform will not be a complete answer to weaknesses in curriculum delivery until institutions also make the structural and resource changes necessary to ensure that sustainability content can be fully integrated across the curriculum.