Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is working its way towards the top of the higher education agenda. HEFCE recently published a consultation paper on sustainable development (1) and has funded a Higher Education Academy initiative to promote and enhance ESD across the disciplines.
ESD isn’t just an issue for those teaching in disciplines such as geography, environmental studies, biology and engineering. Although there are many and various definitions of sustainable development, the most widely used is the one developed in the Brundtland report Our Common Future:
Sustainable Development is ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (2).
This definition stresses the concept of intergenerational justice. We have no right to degrade our planet to prevent future generations living as we do. Most definitions also recognise the social dimension of SD as well as the economic and environmental ones.
What is meant, then, by ‘Education for Sustainable Development’? Although both the term itself and the notion behind it have been criticised for their underpinning ideological assumptions, there is consensus about the main elements in ESD:
ESD enables people to develop the knowledge, values and skills to participate in decisions about the way we do things individually and collectively, both locally and globally, that will improve the quality of life now without damaging the planet for the future.(3)
ESD is a vision of education that seeks to balance human and economic well-being with cultural traditions and respect for the earth’s natural resources. ESD applies transdisciplinary educational methods and approaches to develop an ethic for lifelong learning; fosters respect for human needs that are compatible with sustainable use of natural resources and the needs of the planet; and nurtures a sense of global solidarity.(4)
It will be apparent that English can relate easily and fruitfully to ESD as defined in these ways. Students of English are intellectually habituated into sensitivity towards encounters with ‘the other’, be this in terms of culture, spaces or materiality. There is a vibrant strand within English literary studies of concern with the relation between cultural texts and environment, and since the early 1980s this has given rise to ‘eco-criticism’. There is a thriving association for the study of literature and the environment (ASLE-UK http://asle.co.uk/) chaired by Dr Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University College. Several UK programmes contain units in this field, and more broadly on writing and landscape.5 More generally, ‘green’ approaches have influenced the curriculum in many areas, often leading to the reframing of classic texts. Students can be encouraged to ask questions about how far humanity is represented as part of, or apart from, the rest of nature in a particular work, or how the idealisation of the pastoral in the Romantic period or the construction of science fiction informs our understanding of how we relate to our physical environment. Such approaches, with their emphasis on respect for the environment, on mutuality, and on the habitats in which cultural reproduction takes place, have major implications not just for the content of the curriculum but for forms of pedagogic interaction.
The English Subject Centre, in collaboration with Dr Greg Garrard and Dr Richard Kerridge at Bath Spa University College, is conducting an initial study of the scope and nature of teaching related to the environment, ecology and sustainability on English literature, language and creative writing degree programmes.
Firstly, we are trying to map the extent of teaching within English that relates to the environment, ecology and sustainability in their broadest sense.We are aware that although there are directly relevant modules such as those on eco-criticism, there are also modules focussed on themes, periods or theory that consider the relationship between man and the environment in other ways. These may be modules on travel writing, landscape, nature writing, science fiction or pastoral for example.
With the help of colleagues from ASLE, Greg and Richard have been undertaking a wider audit of the relations between English and ESD: reviewing current practice in ESD in the discipline, considering how the discipline relates to the SD agenda and the related skills and attitudes acquired by our graduates. Their report is now available and it identifies how the Subject Centre can best develop work in this area. If you would like to find our more about this project, please contact me (jane.gawthrope@rhul.ac.uk)
References
1. ‘Sustainable Development in Higher Education: Consultation on a Support Strategy and Action Plan’, HEFCE 2005/01 (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2005/05_01/).
2. ‘Gro Harlem Brundtland (chairman), Our Common Future (Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), p. 43.
3. Sustainable Development Education Panel: First Annual Report (1998), p. 30.
4. ‘Education for Sustainable Development’, UNESCO (http://www.unesco.org/education/desd/).
5. Cf. also the article by Jonathan Gibson in this newsletter .
