COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH PAPER

Comprehensive Research paper

Comprehensive Research paper

Introduction

A recent issue of the USA's The Chronicle of Higher Education focused on the sustainable university (20 October 2006) and produced a wealth of information on institutional attempts to promote environmental awareness, social responsibility, and sound economic stewardship. In the UK, the sector's key funding body Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, 2006a, b) has developed its own sustainability strategy and seeks buy-in by the HE sector. The Australian Government may be particularly committed to help ensure that the needs of education for sustainability across Australia are being met, as evidenced most strongly through their influential AIRES (2006) research agenda. Higher education institutions from around the world are involved in various ways in promoting sustainability. By any measure, the range of higher education-based initiatives accomplished in the name of sustainability is truly remarkable.

Learning, Teaching, and Leading as the Educator Endeavors

Central to all of these developments is the core concept recently restated by University of Florida's President J. B. Machen “I graduate 15,000 students a year. If I could turn out half of them with sensitivity to sustainability and turn them loose on the world, that's a hell of a contribution” (Carlson, 2006). Perhaps, higher education has a particular and specific function, to graduate influential citizens who value their environment and appreciate that they have a responsibility to help to sustain it. To achieve this, Machen and other leaders in this higher-education-led transformation appear to be seeking far-reaching curriculum and institutional changes of the order identified by the Talloires Declaration and exemplified by Toyne's (1996) greening of the curriculum approaches of the 1990s in the UK. More recently Tilbury et al. (2005, p. 15) have emphasised that “Curriculum change offers the opportunity to embed the principles of learning for sustainability such that all students can address sustainability.”

But what are these principles of learning for sustainability and how do these projects relate to students' learning outcomes and educational theory? How effectively do they impact on student learning? What curriculum changes are envisaged, what do they attempt to achieve and in what way might they be different from what has come before? Is there an existing educational theoretical framework within which Tilbury et al.'s need for all students to address sustainability, and Machen's aim for at least half of them to be sensitive to sustainability, can be addressed?

It is possible to separate what students learn about sustainability during their experience of higher education, from what they learn to value during this same period. Relevant theory separates affective learning from cognitive learning. Affective learning relates to values, attitudes and behaviours and involves the learner emotionally. Cognitive learning relates more to knowledge and its application. It is possible to construct an argument that the essence of education for sustainability is a quest for affective outcomes. This paper constructs this argument and identifies how interpreting aspects of education for sustainability as education in the affective domain will allow educators to categorise the multiplicity of sustainability projects, determine their limitations ...