Sustainability and Universities. Re-orienting Higher Education, Re-orienting Teaching

Le résumé fourni par la source

The aim of this paper is to provide a relevant and timely argument in a debate on the role of the university in fostering sustainable development through academic teaching. The paper will relate to the specific learning outcomes defined for the course. It will discuss a specific area of teaching sustainability in higher education, contributing to the educational development by providing a critical overview of the ontological and epistemological challenges of sustainability in a broader context of institutional and structural forces framing the process of academic teaching and learning. It will problematize pedagogical work around sustainability issues, locating it in a macro and mezzo level of current challenges facing by universities all over the world. In particular, it will problematize and discuss the role of the university as well as concrete educational situations in relation to sustainable development. Through the argumentative review, it will examine three statements: (i) Lack of conceptual consensus on what sustainability is; (ii) Contradictory attempts and ideas as to howsuccessfully include sustainability into higher education; (iii) Systemic contradictions between teaching sustainability in higher education and prevailing, a dominant academic culture that produce pedagogical challenges. It will conclude by providing two vignettes of academic practices related to teaching sustainability to demonstrate how pedagogical challenges are embedded in the institutional logic of higher education and cannot be addressed without reforming the system in the first place.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.