Stephen Gough

Sustainable Development and Learning: Framing the Issues

1. Framing the Issues: Complexity, Uncertainty, Risk and Necessity 2. The Policy Context 3. Language and Meaning 4. Learning and Sustainable Development: Making the Linkages 5. Humans and Nature: Tensions and Interdependence 6. Theory and Practice: Ideology and Practice 7. Management of Learning: Issues in Curriculum Design 8. Curriculum and Pedagogy 9. Measuring Learning: Aspects of Assessment 10. Measuring Effectiveness: Monitoring and Evaluation 11. Building Capacity, Developing Agency: Evolving a Theory of Change 12. Economic Behaviour: Value and Values 13. Globalisation and Fragmentation: Science and Self 14. What Happens Next?

Key issues in sustainable development and learning: A critical review

1. Framing the Issues: Complexity, Uncertainty, Risk and Necessity 2. The Policy Context 3. Language and Meaning 4. Learning and Sustainable Development: Making the Linkages 5. Humans and Nature: Tensions and Interdependence 6. Theory and Practice: Ideology and Philosophy 7. Management of Learning: Issues in Curriculum Design 8. Curriculum and Pedagogy 9. Measuring Learning: Aspects of Assessment 10. Measuring Effectiveness: Monitoring and Evaluation 11. Building Capacity, Developing Agency: Evolving a Theory of Change 12. Economic Behaviour: Value and Values 13. Globalisation and Fragmentation: Science and Self 14. What Happens Next?

Exploring the Purposes of Qualitative Data Coding in Educational Enquiry: Insights from recent research

A number of questions are raised concerning the purposes of data coding in qualitative research. It is suggested that in some cases these purposes may usefully be organised into two broad categories, each of which requires a separate coding response. A research project is briefly described in which it was found useful to employ two distinct, though connected, phases of data coding along the lines proposed.

Significant Life Experiences (SLE) Research: a view from somewhere

Summary Significant life experiences (SLE) research has been the focus of two special issues of Environmental Education Research (EER). This article offers a possible overview of this debate, as seen front a particular academic vantage point.

Guidelines for Reporting and Evaluating Qualitative Research: What are the alternatives?

There is more to guidelines for qualitative research reports than that proposed in Smith-Sebasto (2000). Our response to the article illustrates a range of alternatives to the position and criteria outlined by Smith-Sebasto. We draw on examples from across the wider literature to explore themes and issues regarding the purpose(s) of guidelines, their content and how they are structured. Our core argument is that deliberations on the process and product of judging the quality of qualitative research in environmental education research require the recognition of two points regularly contested within the literature on guidelines. Firstly, the existence of a wide variety of types, genres and forms of qualitative research; and secondly, the proposition that criteria for judging research quality contain within them, implicitly or explicitly, a defining view of what research is, and perhaps more contentiously, what it should be.

Sustainable Development within UK Higher Education: Revealing Tendencies and Tensions

In response to the various calls for sustainable development, a range of activities has been initiated by central and local government, business, NGOs and other institutions. In this paper, the authors focus on the important learning context of higher education. They review the agenda established at Rio and, through a critical examination of developments within the UK, comment on issues and challenges facing the sector.

Education and sustainable development: a political analysis

This paper examines the inter‐relationships between ‘education’ and ‘sustainable development’ as these are played out in the political arena. Each of these two important areas of policy is prioritized by the UK government: education for over a 150 years, but emphatically so since 1997; sustainable development since at least 1992 when the Rio Earth Summit brought the issue to political (if not) public attention, and when this (and other) governments entered into treaty obligations to advance sustainable development through the policy process—obligations which were reinforced during the Rio + 10 Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. We have written, with others, about the rise of interest in educations role in sustainable development in the period since Rio (Reid et al., Geography, 87(3), pp. 247–255) and this paper does not go over this ground. Instead, we examine a range of contrasting perspectives that have been taken on these issues, ask what they reveal and what they do not, and further ask what we can and cannot say about politics, education and sustainable development. Finally, we argue that if sustainable development is to be promoted through education this requires that we learn to re‐think our thinking about politics.

Curriculum Development and Sustainable Development: practices, institutions and literacies

In many countries government policy on both is to some degree entwined. Some organisations and individual practitioners are explicitly concerned with both. Both are subject to fundamental intellectual challenge at a conceptual level. Practitioners in each field have been influenced by a number of similar ideas relating to uncertainty and change. Such practitioners continue to grapple, from their different perspectives, with the problem of whether thought and appropriate action should properly be based on technical or practical considerations.

Universities and sustainable development: the necessity for barriers to change

Taylor and Francis PSP_A_261245. gm 10.1080/13 03100701613947 Perspectives 360-3108 (pri t)/1460-7018 (online) p2 07 & Francis 1 40 002007 Wil iamScott cree@bath.ac.uk International background Over the last thirty years, the idea of sustainable development has come to be seen in policy circles across the globe (eg UN agencies, national governments and international non-governmental organisations [NGOs]) as a necessary and urgent response to a range of social and environmental issues that threaten both the integrity of the biosphere, and human wellbeing (eg IUCN 1980, WCED 1987, 1993, Hopkins et al. 1996, UNCED 2002). Increasingly, education, and particularly higher education, is seen to have a key role in sustainable development and there is a growing literature exploring this, eg Cortese (1999), Howard et al. (2000), Sterling (2003, 2004), Jucker (2002), Scott & Gough (2003, 2004a, 2004b), House of Commons (2003), Blewitt & Cullingford (2004), Corcoran & Wals (2004), HEPS (2004a, 2004b), HEA (2005), Gough & Scott (in press). Whilst there are numerous definitions of sustainable development, the most widely quoted is that of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987): ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Whilst open to considerable criticism, the popularity of this definition is probably due to its clear referencing of the inter-generational issue which is at the heart of models of resource consumption and socioeconomic development. The significance of the higher education context is exemplified by the following quotation from the 1991 Halifax Consultation, which was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, the Canadian Consortium for Sustainable Development Research, and the UN University:

Developing sustainable development within the higher education curriculum: observations on the HEFCE strategic review

This paper explores a particular contemporary instance of the implementation of central government policy linking higher education and sustainable development. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s strategic plan for 2006–2011 (HEFCE 2006) includes a commitment to establish a baseline assessment of the contribution of the higher education sector to sustainable development by 2008 and to make progress in this respect by 2011. Research in respect of teaching/learning commissioned and conducted in consequence is reported.