Bob Jickling

“Sustainability” in higher education: from doublethink and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning

It is higher educations responsibility continuously to challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio-scientific disputes. The ill-defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability—its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it—pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This article explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.

Globalization and environmental education: looking beyond sustainable development

This study contends that environmental education is being significantly altered by globalizing forces, witnessing the effort to convert environmental education into education for sustainable development. This internationally propagated conversion can be challenged from many vantage points. This study identifies anomalies that have arisen as international organizations such as UNESCO have championed this conversion, and discusses issues arising from these anomalies in light of the nature and purposes of education. This study presents a heuristic that has helped one to support a better understanding of the relationships between sustainable development, environmental thought, democracy, and education.

Sustainability in Higher Education : Orwell's Cautionary Tale

It is higher education’s responsibility to continuously challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio‐scientific disputes. The ill‐defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability – its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it – pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This paper explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.

Education for the Environment: a critique

Summary This paper acknowledges that, in many contexts, the term ‘education for the environment’ has generated powerful images which have resonated with educators seeking empowerment for themselves and their students. We also acknowledge that it has enabled inquiry into socio‐political dimensions of environmental issues. However, we propose that this term has become a slogan and, as such, its use has been insufficiently problematised. We identify anomalies and inconsistencies associated with the use of ‘education for the environment.’ Further, we argue that the term is conceptually and linguistically flawed and that we may not need, or want, the structures that it imposes. In challenging, rather than casually accepting, this terminology, we seek to regenerate a fundamental dimension of the discourse within environmental education.

Environmental Education and Environmental Advocacy: Revisited

Abstract Environmental education and environmental advocacy have a contentious relationship. In this article, the author argues that there will always be uncertainty about educationally appropriate responses to controversial issues. Although uncertainty is inherent in this task, the choices are not dichotomous. The author also argues that education suggests a fluidity of meaning that shifts across a range of contexts, and what needs to be done will be found on a case-by-case and context-by-context basis in a mediated and negotiated third space. Some tentative guide-posts are offered.

Sustainable Development in a Globalizing World: A Few Cautions

This article takes the view that in a globalizing context the concept of ‘sustainable development’ should not be assumed uncritically. Further, tensions arise when education is constructed as an instrument for the implementation of this concept, as manifest in the term ‘education for sustainable development’. With critical concern about sustainable development and the tensions arising out of an agenda of educational determinism, this article presents a series of cautions about education for sustainable development. While much good work is being done by educators who work under the label ‘sustainable development’, I argue in the end that education should provide the capacity to transcend this particular conception – to reach outside and beyond sustainable development.

Debating Education for Sustainable Development 20 Years after Rio A Conversation between Bob Jickling and Arjen Wals

In this dialogue between two friends and colleagues with different takes on education for sustainability, Canadian environmental education scholar Bob Jickling argues that education for any cause is not true education, which should strive to prepare minds to create new ideas, not follow a doctrine. Since we don’t have solutions to sustainability, we should prepare students to create them. Wageningen University professor and UNESCO’s global report coordinator for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, Arjen Wals, argues that education is only useful when we reflect on what kind of education and for what purpose. Otherwise, as David Orr pointed out, more education will only ‘equip people to become more effective vandals of the Earth’.

Environmental education research: to what ends?

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions exist at the intersection of ‘education’ and ‘ethics’, and that they point to an area of research that deserves more attention. In describing the intersecting nature of these ideas, I show that how education is conceived in turn shapes interpretations of ethics, and vice versa. Seen this way, I also show how ethics inquiry in an educational context can be conceived as a means to explore controversy, dissonance, unconventional ideas, and to imagine new possibilities. Finally, I argue that research at this intersection of education and ethics can provide insights that can enable us to teach, inquire, and ultimately live as if the world mattered.

Normalizing catastrophe: an educational response

Processes of normalizing assumptions and values have been the subjects of theoretical framing and critique for several decades now. Critique has often been tied to issues of environmental sustainability and social justice. Now, in an era of global warming, there is a rising concern that the results of normalizing of present values could be catastrophic. Often, when such concerns arise, education is invoked as a remedial tool, a solution to a crisis and a way of imposing change. However, education is a much-used, yet complicated and sometimes paradoxical, term. Appropriate educational responses to ‘catastrophes’ are contentious, messy and inherently interdisciplinary. This paper will explore intersections of educational philosophy, environmental ethics and social theory to provide some considerations for framing educational responses to the ‘normalizing of catastrophe’.

Losing Traction and the Art of Slip-Sliding Away: Or, Getting over Education for Sustainable Development.

ABSTRACT This response problematizes Stefan Bengtssons (2016) defense of education for sustainable development. He argues that sustainable development and education for sustainable development are not globalizing and hegemonic discourses, as some have claimed, and uses case-study analysis of Vietnamese policy documents to support his claims. He observes contestation and dissensus within these documents, and that, for him, is at odds with his conceptions of hegemony and paradigmatic status. He also suggests that this dissensus provides openings for opposition and resistance. I argue, on the contrary, that disagreement, dissent, anomalies, and counter-hegemonic forces have always been part of hegemonic struggles and paradigmatic states—and shifts. Bengtsson and I do agree about the importance of dissensus and resistance; however, important choices remain to be made about what concepts and contexts of dissensus are most educationally valuable. For example, I show that Bengtssons Vietnamese policy data suggests that although dissensus exists, sustainable development and education for sustainable development have had little impact in generating counter-hegemonic discourse, resistance, anomalous responses, or creative alternatives in the environmental and social policy. Based on the data, sustainable development does not seem to have much traction. I argue that a useful approach would be to focus on understandings currently absent or underrepresented in contemporary education. Particularly important are the understandings required to think differently and to become different beings. Throughout, attention has been given to developing educational experiences that arise that shift the way learners carry themselves in the world, enact their etiquette, and broaden their ontological positioning, and commensurate understandings.