I read two papers before Christmas on higher education and what is known as the sustainability problematique. One was in review and so there is little I can say about it, except that it was very clearly put together with little jargon. It was written to communicate to a wide-ranging audience, although the title was too convoluted for its own good.
The other was about rethinking higher education pedagogy "in times of systemic global dysfunction". Here's an extract ...
The transformative, transgressive forms of learning described all require engaged forms of pedagogy that involve multi-voiced engagement with multiple actors. They also have an emphasis on co-learning, cognitive justice, and the formation and development of individual and systemic agency. Their focus is the public and the personal good. In such pedagogical processes, knowledge co-production is positioned under scientifically new or ‘post-normal’ conditions. At the core is also the emergence of a form of disruptive competence in and for higher education. Paraskeva suggests that considering aspects such as broader forms of knowledge co-production, decolonisation of thinking, and disruptive competence and agency in and through curriculum, provides opportunities for a radical, itinerant curriculum process that can allow an understanding of ‘how reality can explode in and change the real.’ Such forms of pedagogy and learning are only beginning to emerge in higher education, mainly under the banner of engaged research, transdisciplinarity and/or transgressive decolonising pedagogies. In concluding, we argue that if we are to fully expand the ‘learning modes’ needed for responding to and engaging the wicked problems of sustainability, via pedagogies that are not constrained by current use of conservative and maladaptive concepts (e.g. the resilience concept), or by disciplinary decadence as outlined by Gordon, then there is need for more exploratory, transgressive forms of learning in our institutions. Ultimately these will require an integration of sustainability-oriented higher education teaching, research and community engagement processes into possibilities for learning that allows for the emergence of agency and lived experience in transformative praxis contexts. Such transformations in pedagogical set-up, must also teleologically suspend disciplines in transgressing taken-for-granted norms, existing ethical and epistemological imperialism in society and higher education, and provide possibilities for engaged, lived experience of transformative praxis for all of our students; to be seen as learning capability necessary for encountering the future."
I said that the first paper was written to communicate to its audience; in short, to be read. The second clearly wasn't; rather, I think it was written to be admired. I'm not saying that there's nothing here to note or value – far from it – just that its tone is horribly narcissistic where the look-how-smart-we-are language gets in the way of meaning. I blame the editors who were clear asleep on the job.
If you're determined, here are the details:
Lotz-Sisitka H, Wals AEJ, Kronlid D, McGarry D (2015) Transformative, transgressive social learning: rethinking higher education pedagogy in times of systemic global dysfunction Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 16 73–80
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