A Rendezvous with Disaster
For the increasing numbers of those paying attention, the dominoes keep falling. In 2023, multiple record-breaking temperatures were recorded around the world while environmental disasters kept on rolling in, from the Canadian wildfires that filled New York’s skies with thick smoke and an orange glow to the plummeting levels of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice at the Poles. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics was the first to rely entirely on artificial snow. The same year, England saw its highest ever temperatures with parts of the country reaching 40°C, while floods in Pakistan saw a third of the country being under water. In a 2022 address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the Secretary General argued that, on the current trajectory, we have a ‘rendezvous with climate disaster’ without a profound change of course across global society (Guterres, 2022).
Rockström et al (2009) introduced the notion of ‘planetary boundaries’, a framework of Earth system processes such as climate change, ocean acidification and biosphere integrity that collectively produce an environment capable of self-regulation. What these planetary boundaries have thus far provided humanity with is a stable enough climate within which to build and operate the societies of our past and present, a climactic ‘safe zone’ for human activity. The increasing transgressing of these boundaries, however, has led science to even describe a new geological epoch, suggesting that we have moved from the relatively stable operating space of the Holocene to the volatilities, uncertainties, and complexities of the Anthropocene.
Today’s university students study within and face graduating into the Anthropocene, an increasingly uncertain and destabilising world. The workers and the leaders of tomorrow, the next generation of business people, lawyers, engineers, journalists, health professionals, economists and artists will find themselves having to confront these issues, whether they wish to or not, as they live out their lives and careers.
Education in the Anthropocene
Higher Education and sustainability
How best can a higher education institution (HEI) prepare its students for living and working in the volatilities of the Anthropocene?
City’s President has stated that ‘the biggest impact we can make on sustainability is through the way we educate our students’ (Finkelstein, 2022). City’s Sustainability Team ran a survey in 2022 that received 109 responses (78 undergraduate, 31 postgraduate). 88% of respondents indicated that they believed that their ‘place of study should actively incorporate and promote sustainable development’, 80% agreed that sustainable development should be embedded in the higher education curriculum, with 71% agreeing that it should be part of every degree. SOS-UK ‘s survey of 8,500 students showed that a wider 88% believed their ‘place of study should actively incorporate and promote sustainable development’. These two snapshots at quite different scales are two indicators that suggest that students increasingly want to learn about these issues too.
Like many universities, City has been developing parts of its curricular offer in recent years to help students within their disciplines to address some of the global challenges that they will face in their graduate lives. There is a strand that runs throughout the School of Science and Technology’s undergraduate (UG) Engineering programmes on ‘The Engineer in Society’, which takes in topics such as social responsibility, the circular economy, infrastructure for Net Zero, and renewable energy systems. Bayes have elective modules on ‘The Role of Environmental, Social and Governance in Banking and Finance’ and ‘Climate Change and its Impact on the World Economy’ that are available to several UG programmes. In the School of Creativity and Communication, English students can take a module on ‘Concerning Futures: Writing Alternative Worlds’ and Music students can take one on ‘Music, Sound and the Environment’, while the Department for International Politics in the School of Policy and Global Affairs offers a variety of ‘Global Ethics’ modules for both Bachelors and Masters students which have environmentalism and climate change ethics at their core. The School of Health and Psychological Sciences offers an MSc in Food Policy, which is about analysing, researching and informing the future of food policy on a local and global scale (admittedly a full programme rather than just a single module).
As undoubtedly important to their disciplines these modules are, one reading of these examples is to suggest that City doesn’t offer our undergraduate students much in the way of something more systemic and wide-ranging. We have no modules that all students can take that look at the bigger picture. There is nothing that looks at that bigger picture from multiple angles to better help our students with comprehending the scale and breadth of the challenge and to highlight what practical actions they might take themselves. It could easily be argued that providing students with an educational offer on sustainability and the climate crisis that solely stays within the lane of their disciplines doesn’t go quite far enough in preparing them for the world they will graduate into.
Embracing interdisciplinarity
A more rounded offer could embrace interdisciplinarity to broaden the approach and perspectives brought to the table. Interdisciplinary approaches in education can bring many benefits, including increased student motivation, the development of critical thinking and the fostering of transferable skills (Weller and Appleby, 2021). Many other universities are using this ‘big picture, many angles’ approach to offer something bigger for their students. The London School of Economics and Political Science offers ‘LSE100’, a flagship interdisciplinary module for all new undergraduates for ‘engaging with big questions’, including on topics like sustainability and artificial intelligence (AI). At King’s College London, staff and students co-created the ‘KEATS Sustainability & Climate’ online module in 2021, to educate students about sustainability matters and encourage them to take action. With the BASc Arts and Sciences, UCL runs an entire interdisciplinary bachelors programme that links the arts, social sciences and natural sciences. The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), the first new higher education institution granted licence to issues degrees in the UK since the 1960s, is founded on the very principle of using multiple perspectives to look at big contemporary problems, via a problem-based learning methodology.
Outside of London, The University of Manchester has an entire college dedicated to crossing such boundaries (University College for Interdisciplinary Learning) and runs a programme on ‘Creating a Sustainable World’, framed around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The University of Edinburgh, via the Edinburgh Futures Institute, runs an MA in Interdisciplinary Futures, and in the same city, Heriot-Watt University has developed ‘Shaping Tomorrow Together’, a year-long multidisciplinary course for hundreds of first year undergraduates from across multiple disciplines. The Heriot-Watt course, run fully online, aims to foreground the climate emergency in the learning experience for all incoming undergraduates. Looking further afield, all students at the University of Barcelona will take a mandatory course on the climate crisis from 2024 after the university bowed to student pressure on this issue. From the academic year 2023/24, all Indian university students will need to study subjects such as climate change and environmental education in order to be able to graduate.
Education for Sustainable Development
If we in higher education are committed to preparing our students for the future, we need to teach them how to reverse current damage and contribute to sustainability, and to learn how to do this ourselves. (Vogel et al, 2023, p.3)
Most of the examples above could be broadly included under the category of Education for Sustainable Development, or ESD. UNESCO describes ESD as an educational approach that ‘gives learners…the knowledge, skills, values and agency to address interconnected global challenges including climate change, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of resources, and inequality.’ A useful category, then, for understanding the kinds of educational approaches needed, looking forward. Helpfully, the UN agency has also produced a volume of learning objectives for learners at all levels that are aligned with the SDGs, to which we will return in the next post.
In 2023, Advance HE published a review into the literature on ESD (Vogel et al, 2023) between the period 2015–2022, essentially looking at the first half of the period that follows the launch of the SDGs. Drawing on a total of 166 publications, the review sought to explore how ESD had been framed within curricula, how ESD principles have been operationalised as learning outcomes, what pedagogies, teaching approaches and assessments have been used, what student perceptions and outcomes have been associated with these practices, and what barriers have been encountered. The resulting findings produced both a series of key insights and a collection of recommendations for educators, for leaders and for researchers that could be utilised by any HEI looking to move more purposefully into ESD and support the rationales for why some of our examples above have chosen interdisciplinary routes over disciplinary ones for addressing global challenges in a meaningful way.
Insights from the review include the following:
- Given the ‘wicked’ nature of sustainability problems, both interdisciplinary (roughly, the integration of different academic fields) and transdisciplinary (between academia and wider society) approaches are needed
- ESD must integrate knowledge, competencies, values and a readiness to act in order to be truly transformative, as well as both confronting and transgressing existing practices and paradigms
- Teaching approaches most associated with developing competencies include project- or problem-based learning, the use of real-world examples, conceptual approaches like environmental justice as well as working with external partners, while those most associated with developing values include critical reflection and self-reflection
- Formal assessment of ESD can be difficult and there is debate over whether some sustainability values should be assessed at all
- The more mature students are or the higher up they are in their levels of study, the more likely they may be to successfully navigate challenging ESD curricular, particularly if they have not had much in the way of prior experience or support to engage with these issues
- In transdisciplinary contexts, more familiar or local settings may feel more meaningful or closer to students’ realities than remote ones (ie apply the global at local levels)
For educators, recommendations included integrating interdisciplinarity to reinforce disciplinary learning, incorporating teaching approaches and learning activities most associated with sustainability competencies, and communicating key concepts and their inter-relationships. They also suggested creating space where students can interpret learning outcomes and assessment criteria together and for critical reflection, facilitating inter/transdisciplinary group and project work, and being prepared for both demographic and disciplinary differences relating to perceptions of appropriacy when handling sustainability dilemmas and problems.
For leaders, recommendations spanned strategically integrating ESD in core degree curricula, establishing ESD as of institutional concern, and offering an institution-wide interdisciplinary course on sustainability that helps reinforce the specialisms of students’ degrees, as well as rewarding interdisciplinarity, resourcing CPD for sustainability educators, and providing capacity building and resourcing for working with external partners. Incentivising dissemination and engaging with resistance were also seen as key roles that leaders can play. Researchers were recommended to carry out large-scale, multi-institutional research as a counterweight to the abundance of case studies that the literature review was based on. Other recommendations for researchers included long-term follow-up studies to gain a better understanding of the link between ESD and later impact and generating instruments and practices such as rubrics to better assess sustainability learning.
As Vogel et al (ibid, p. 4) state, ‘ESD recognises that education in its current form…requires radical change (towards a goal of) large-scale collective transformation of a profound nature’ and that ‘universities are uniquely placed to bring this about, as collectivities of learners and researchers in a range of disciplines with a civic concern that connects them with their local communities and the world of work’. Put that way, this report feels a little like a roadmap towards ‘How to introduce an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability and climate change at your institution’. Which is what we turn to next.
Enter ‘City 2030’
What, then, can we do to educate and empower City’s students for a building a sustainable world in a changing climate? Since Summer 2022, myself and colleagues in City’s Sustainability Team have been working on developing an interdisciplinary undergraduate module on sustainability and the climate crisis. This module, currently dubbed ‘City 2030’, aims to support students to develop the necessary skills and understandings for contributing to a sustainable and just society in a time of climate change. Academic colleagues have been invited to contribute their own disciplinary expertise to the module as well as gaining new perspectives from other fields that, in turn, can act to inform or cross-pollinate their own disciplinary work.
Why 2030? There are many points of alignment for labelling the module with this particular milestone. City’s current Vision and Strategy extends to this point. Like many universities, City has committed itself to reaching a Net Zero target (by 2040, in our case). Our strategy towards 2030 includes integrating sustainability in all programmes and building on our graduate attributes to enable graduates to contribute towards global environmental progress. The UN’s SDGs currently extend to 2030, as are several of the climate-related goals that emerged from COP26, the Glasgow Climate Change Conference. These include the Glasgow Climate Pact to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 55% relative to 2010, over 100 countries pledging to reverse deforestation, and India drawing half of its energy requirements from renewable sources. 2030 gives a point on the horizon for all to aspire towards, which helps with taking action.
So far, we have run a workshop for staff at Develop At City to explore the potential for the ‘City 2030’ idea, held a series of further consultations with senior academic colleagues, built a working group with academic representation from each of City’s six schools, conducted an audit of City’s existing environmentally-focused curricular offer, and held a development workshop at the 2023 Learning At City conference to explore potential learning objectives and options for a syllabus outline.
The initial consultations focused around four key questions:
- Why should students take part in this module?
- What topics should the module include?
- How should the module be assessed?
- How do we make this module happen at City?
Colleagues felt that the relevance of the topic will provide intrinsic motivation for students to want to take part. Interdisciplinary work with students across differing programmes and schools would have benefits both for improving social connections and a sense of belonging as well as providing transferable and employability skills. It was agreed that the module should present real-world problems, both as this is most likely to develop students’ transferable and wide-ranging skills as well as being the most effective way to engage students in the module. Feedback unanimously emphasised small groups of students across disciplines, investigating and collaborating to create solutions to climate-related problems as being the primary method of completing activities and assessment within the module.
Colleagues agreed that module should be championed at the executive level and be designed and run by an interdisciplinary team with experts from across the university. The module also needed to be created as a cohesive whole, not just as a series of otherwise unrelated individual expert lectures. It is encouraging to see that there are several points of overlap between the recommendations that we were able to gather and those that emerged in the Advance HE ESD literature review.
The Learning at City workshop brought together both staff and students to collaborate on ideas for the design of this module. The next post recounts and reflects on that workshop.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Eleanor Simes, Arthur Shearlaw and Miranda Melcher for contributions to the work that went into this post.
References
Guterres, A (2022). Secretary-General’s Address to the General Assembly. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2022-09-20/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly-trilingual-delivered-follows-scroll-further-down-for-all-english-and-all-french [retrieved 31/03/23].
Finkelstein, A (2022). Comment at President’s Forum Event. https://staffhub.city.ac.uk/senior-leadership-team-blog/2022/presidents-staff-forum-28-september [retrieved 31/03/23].
Rockström, J, Steffen, W, Noone, K. et al (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475. https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a
Vogel, M, Parker, L, Porter, J, O’Hara, M, Tebbs, E, Gard, R, He, X, Gallimore, J-B (2023). Education for Sustainable Development: a review of the literature 2015–2022. King’s College London, published by Advance HE. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/education-sustainable-development-review-literature-2015-202 2 [retrieved 05/01/24].
Weller, M; Appleby, M (2021). What are the benefits of interdisciplinary study? https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/what-are-the-benefits-interdisciplinary-study [retrieved 31/03/23].
Originally published at https://blogs.city.ac.uk.
