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“If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind: an education that takes us into the depth of things” E.F. Schumacher
Making a switch to sustainable development requires deep, structural transformation in our economic, cultural, and technological systems. We need new ways of interpreting, analyzing, and understanding the world, and we need new tools to help us deal with tumultuous changes and an uncertain future. If higher education is to play a meaningful role in this undertaking, then we will need to reshape its institutions, pedagogy, and organization. In the words of educator and author Sir Ken Robinson, this entails nothing less than leaving behind our outdated educational system, “changing the educational paradigm,” and initiating a “learning revolution.”1
Conventional higher education is poorly suited to accommodate this. In our experience, the bulk of today’s learning is based on regurgitation stemming from the assumption that there exists a single correct answer that can be memorized and recited. This narrow view dictates that knowledge is to be learned, not created, by students. But students today face immense uncertainty when it comes to their futures—their employment, livelihood, and even survival. These are fundamental challenges of sustainability, and it is therefore imperative for everyone, including students, to develop skills and acquire knowledge that can help them manage these challenges. Environmental educators Arjen Wals and Bob Jickling write: “Universities should develop in their students the competencies which will enable them to cope with uncertainty, poorly defined situations and conflicting or at least diverging norms, values, interests and reality constructions.”2 If sustainability is truly about future generations, then young people—students—should be given the opportunity to propose, develop, and implement prospective solutions for sustainable development. At present, universities are almost never designed for these ends.
Educator David Orr argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of inadequate and misdirected education.3 It alienates us from life in the name of human domination, causes students to worry about how to make a living before they know who they are, and overemphasizes success and careers. This type of education separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical; it can deaden the sense of wonder for the created world. What if institutions of higher education actually contribute to the problems of unsustainable development more than they do to solutions for sustainable development?
We believe that higher education must undergo a transformational shift away from strict departmentalization and disciplinary boundaries; it must recognize the notion that relevant questions are more important than correct answers; and it must come to terms with the idea that students are not simply subordinate consumers of knowledge, but rather intellectual equals and producers of knowledge.
How should this transformation take place? How can institutions of higher education renew themselves so they better prepare students for an uncertain future? Eight years into the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, we see an increased willingness and capacity for educational institutions to shift their focus toward the issues of sustainable development. However, despite this willingness, not much has happened to general practices over the past seven years.
How can we ignite a learning revolution?
There are a number of extraordinary colleges, such as Antioch University, Evergreen State College, and Schumacher College, that have developed organizational structures and curricula that truly engage students in their own education and future. Not surprisingly, there are far fewer examples of older and more tradition-rich universities doing the same. However, at Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) strives to change the way we teach, meet, and learn. For 20 years, this student-initiated and largely student-run program has, in an otherwise rigid university structure, built and developed a space for interdisciplinary and experimental education focused on sustainable development.
Perhaps the most radical characteristic of CEMUS is the degree to which students are given agency and treated as intellectual equals. Students are hired and made responsible for developing both the content and pedagogy of their education. In close collaboration with teachers, researchers, and practitioners, students plan and coordinate the wide range of courses offered by CEMUS.
Diverse academic and professional lecturers, as well as varied student backgrounds, help to both break down and, in course, rebuild bridges between disciplinary boundaries—boundaries so often cemented in educational institutions. A combination of innovative and recognized pedagogical approaches, such as problem-based and explorative learning, forms an environment that is truly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive.
We believe that education for sustainable development involves more than simply supplementing existing programs with new perspectives or content—more than polishing around the edges. As Wals and Jickling point out, education for sustainable development demands in-depth institutional changes and fundamental challenges to conceptions of how education is best organized around the traditional roles of students and teachers.2
CEMUS Educational ModelOur model puts the student at the center of the educational process and has four important components: Course coordinators Course work group Guest lecturers Management team |
One of the greatest advantages of the model is its inherent flexibility: We can choose the point of departure that best accommodates the educational process without being locked into a fixed array of faculty from a specific department. Instead, a broad group of teachers from different disciplines may be selected because of their important and specific contribution to the course.
This flexibility also extends to the form and content of each course. The will to experiment and a dynamic curriculum are essential components of CEMUS education.
Since the first course, Humanity and Nature, was initiated at CEMUS in 1992, many courses have been added to the curriculum (Urban Agriculture, Climate Change Leadership, and Sustainable Design being some of the latest additions). Daytime courses and evening courses (for students who are working or have other classes during the day) are complemented with distance learning. A majority of the 700-800 CEMUS students have a parallel course of study, but, because of student demand, CEMUS has recently started offering full-time studies.
The key characteristics of CEMUS education, and what we believe to be important elements of successful education for sustainable development, are:
1) Transcending boundaries
Crossing and eliminating boundaries is an essential building block of the CEMUS educational model. From its very inception, CEMUS has focused on integrating environment and development issues. Many institutions that offer courses or degrees in sustainable development have a disciplinary basis in the social sciences, the natural sciences, or, in a few cases, the humanities. This often leads to a bias toward one of these disciplinary perspectives.4 By helping students develop the ability to critically evaluate and critique different perspectives on environment and development issues, CEMUS attempts to work against such bias. In the longer and more advanced courses this entails a deep investigation of the values, worldviews, power relations, and ethics at the root of our human predicaments.5
Transcending boundaries is not only evidenced in the content of course work, but also in the learning environment itself, where conventional hierarchy between learners and teachers is replaced with reciprocity. The collaboration and mutual exchange between students and senior academics confounds the old notion of researcher as teacher and examiner.
2) Students at the core
At CEMUS, we guide students to see themselves as producers of knowledge as much as they are consumers. Through continuous discussion and collaboration with classmates, students are encouraged to become active and engaged in not only the acquisition of knowledge, but also the teaching and application of what they have learned. The organizational structure, with a lack of clear didactic authority, encourages an active involvement from the students. They are in control, and to a large extent responsible, for their learning process.
Without the driving force of students, CEMUS would not be what it is today. Student leadership is fundamental to the program’s success. At the same time, it is important to recognize that students hired to run courses do not have unlimited freedom.4 The course syllabus and learning outcomes guide coordinators’ choices and decisions, which are anchored in earlier experiences and researched pedagogical methods. This is ensured by constant dialogue and collaboration between students, faculty, and administration, as well as by the basic structure of the educational model.
3) Critical thinking
The term “critical thinking” is commonly used, often so generally as to devalue the concept. Educator Richard Paul has pointed out that critical thinking involves not only being able to think well and fair-mindedly about your own beliefs and viewpoints but also about those that are diametrically opposed to your own.6 In fact, critical thinking entails a desire to seek out opposing viewpoints or to construct them if they don’t exist—hardly a characteristic of our current educational system.
The ambition to explore alternative and radically unconventional ideas and points of view, as well as space for students to critically question their own deeply held assumptions and values, is at the heart of the CEMUS model. The result of this process is often a refreshing divergence, a flowering, of ideas and perspectives. (It is, admittedly, important to note that this critical thinking tends to work from the presumption that many ecological and social trends are unsustainable.)
This culture provides students the opportunity and space to make mistakes and realize the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a correct answer. All answers are partly wrong and most solutions carry with them associated problems. Instead of seeking silver bullets, students must come to terms with the fact that there are many workable solutions to the challenges we face, and that each of these deserves critical analysis. This approach shifts the focus away from coming up with “best practices” and allows different cultural and natural contexts, as well as place-based knowledge, to play a central role in student inquiry.
4) Creative and reflective action
One of the driving forces behind CEMUS is the willingness to change and contribute to a more sustainable world. Considering the seriousness of the global crisis, the courses are not only for generating new theoretical knowledge and insights, but equally for helping students gain applicable skills and the courage to take action. If students develop proficiency in systems and creative thinking, innovative processes, heterogeneous methods for analyzing, structuring, and solving problems, debating techniques, communication skills, and project management tools, then they will hopefully be better equipped for creative and reflective action in their lives and in their work.
5) A revolutionary learning process
One may think that learning for sustainability is a process of learning more, of acquiring more knowledge, skills, and tools. We believe, however, that learning for sustainability is as much a process of unlearning and reevaluating knowledge already acquired. Educator Kevin Kumashiro concludes that education cannot be a process where students are never forced to look within, to look back, or to contradict their own worldviews. The process of reaffirming our beliefs tells us that we are smart and good. True learning, Kumashiro writes, can often be a very discomforting process, especially when we realize that the way we think and do things is wrong and potentially harmful.7
Student-run education for sustainable development is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before reaching its fullest potential. As French philosopher Jacques Rancière points out in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster - Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, this kind of evolution requires debunking the pedagogical myth of explication—the tenet that knowledge is necessary to teach and explication is needed to learn. However, this may not be possible, or even desirable, within institutional contexts.8 Still, the unorthodox and student-centered educational environment at CEMUS could provide unique institutional circumstances to realize an emancipatory approach to learning that brings out the genius in every individual. One of the most exciting aspects of this type of education is that students can start questioning, challenging, and transforming other learning and work situations in which they find themselves.
CEMUS has ambitions to incorporate aspects of this form of anti-oppressive education into courses. The constant identifying and questioning of power structures, as well as a general strategy to make students critically examine their own worldviews and values, sometimes puts students in mild crisis. Uncomfortable as that may be, we believe that this is one of the reasons why our educational model has the potential to revolutionize what we know and believe about sustainability.
Of course, to believe that student-run education automatically delivers critical and creative thinking simply because students are given greater room to maneuver is naïve. There are many obstacles: Students’ ambitions and goals for their studies are not always aligned with our own, and many students feel confused and lost when a clear didactic authority or mentor is lacking. One needs look no further than the papers written, the results on exams, or the questions asked during lectures to realize that some students relate to our courses with passivity and conformity. Many of CEMUS’s strategies have proven successful, but the need for pedagogical creativity never slackens.
6) Changing the world through collaboration and cocreation
By collaborating with organizations and actors outside of academia, a university can be a catalyst of change, an incubator for local and global innovation that contributes to sustainability. The CEMUS Forum, a subunit within the organization, serves as a meeting place for students, teachers, researchers, and the wider community—a place where theory and practice merge in discussion and projects that, if successful, result in tangible and positive contributions to the world. The Forum also works as an outlet and concrete platform where students can implement ideas that might, for one reason or another, not be applicable within CEMUS coursework.
So, does CEMUS really live up to all of its claims? Based on the many evaluations, comments, and reflections that we get from students, the courses provide some of the most meaningful and relevant education that they have experienced. Sadly, this may be just as much an indication of the inadequacy and low quality of other education at the university as it is evidence of CEMUS’s success. What can be said, however, is that most students do not go through a CEMUS course unchanged; many students mention that they have gained a much deeper and broader understanding of the issues of sustainable development, and become moved and inspired to take action.
How, then, do we create educational environments that bring out the best in people? There is a need for organizations that see beyond the reigning paradigm and formulate new possibilities. Innovative environments—both within academia and elsewhere—that encourage creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration across disciplines will play a key role in the work toward sustainable development.
Diversity, conversation, playfulness, mobility, capital, and, above all, structural instability tend to be the traits that lead to unusual creativity and genuine change, according to economic geographer Gunnar Törnquist. A dynamic balance between playfulness and discipline, as well as between structure and chaos, makes it possible to find new connections and solutions, and to implement them.9
This is easier said than done. It is difficult to consciously design creative environments; it is comparatively easy to destroy one by introducing strict regulations and control. As sustainable development expands as an academic field and CEMUS grows as an organization, it is important to maintain the freedom, unrestrained creativity, and open communication that distinguish the organization and have taken us to where we are today.10
Over the past 20 years, CEMUS has emerged dynamically as a cry for renewal, a cry embedded in existing departments at Uppsala’s two universities. Although unique in its nature, it is only one of many existing and yet undiscovered ways to organize higher education for bringing the ideal of sustainability closer. Our hope is that CEMUS can serve as an inspiring case study to be scrutinized and learned from and that our experiences will be useful in new and evolving contexts.
How CEMUS is changing how we teach, meet, and learnCan the experiences gained at CEMUS somehow be converted to expand ongoing debates? Can these experiences be shared and spread to universities in other parts of the world? How should the university be changed? What is education for? How will CEMUS continue to contribute to a sustainable and just society? An anthology written by students, researchers, and teachers aims to answer, in some ways, the questions raised above. It also serves as a source of inspiration and motivation for teachers, university management, administrators, the public, and other actors with an interest in education for sustainable development. The book, Transcending Boundaries – How CEMUS is Changing How we Teach, Meet and Learn, can be downloaded at: www.csduppsala.uu.se/publications |
http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1171
BOOK.transcending.bounderies.CEMUS.pdf
by Alex Doherty, Jacob Mukherjee
Demand the Impossible! is a new project aimed at helping young people learn about and get involved in radical politics and political activism. It debuted this summer at Goldsmiths College, where twenty 16-19 year olds came for a week-long summer school led by Jacob Mukherjee and Ed Lewis, one of the co-editors of NLP. Jacob spoke to Alex Doherty about the project.
Can you explain to us what the aims of the Demand the Impossible! summer school were, what the course consisted of and why it was targeted at teenagers in particular?
Our stated aim was to "create a network of critically minded young activists." By "critical", we meant two things. First, we wanted our participants to question commonsense, ideological assumptions about the world. Secondly, we wanted them to be able to evaluate the various alternative or "Left" positions on how the world is now, how it should be, and how to get there. On top of this, we wanted the young people on the course to see the value and importance of activism: to be inspired by past and present examples of activism, and to be motivated to take action themselves.
The spine of the course consisted of interactive sessions run by Ed and I which sought to take the participants on a journey from a critique of society as it is, to a consideration of how things should be, to a examination of different strategic approaches on how to get there. We tried where possible to do this using an eclectic mix of real-life case studies, such as the struggle of the Ogoni people in Nigeria, the Visteon factory occupations of 2009, the boycott workfare campaign and many more. Alongside our input, a number of expert speakers addressed the young people on issues related to the themes I've outlined. Mark Fisher spoke on ideology, Tom Dale gave an account of the Egyptian Revolution, Maeve McKeown ran a session on feminism, Feyzi Ismail took us through the student movement against the increase in tuition fees and Mel Evans spoke about using art in environmental activism. As well as taking part in these sessions, the participants got to experience activism first hand. Some leafleted and petitioned against the arms trade and the depiction of women in "lads' mags", others tried to sign up members of the public to an organisation committed to the abolition of capitalism, and one group took part in a direct action protest to highlight Sainsbury's refusal to pay the London Living Wage. This "taste of activism" was designed facilitate the development of practical knowledge and to demonstrate the emotional impact that involvement in activism can have on those participating. It also fed into a discussion about the value of different strategic approaches. On top of all this, we arranged two evening excursions: to Firebox in Camden for a talk on Palestine by Camden Abu-Dis Friendship Association, and to East London for an Alternative Olympics walking tour. I know of no other educational events organised by Left groups with aims as wide-ranging and ambitious as ours.
Demand the Impossible! was also unique in terms of the participants invited. They were, in a nutshell, ordinary teenagers from working class backgrounds. Very few had any experience of activism and even fewer would have described themselves as leftwing. Some, nevertheless, had been mobilised by the student protests against the increase in tuition fees and the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. We wanted to engage this group precisely because they are generally neglected by the Left. The week was also something of an experiment in this sense: we wanted to see if it was possible to introduce the complex ideas associated with radical politics to people who had experienced neither the relative intellectual freedom of university nor the frustrations of full time work.
Tell us about your political backgrounds and what led you to create this project.
Demand the Impossible! was organised by Ed Lewis and myself, with the involvement of other activists. We are both teachers and NUT activists who met through the anti-war movement at university in 2001. We were both very active in that movement and became radicalised in the process. Ed has been active in alternative media both with NLP and openDemocracy, as well as with Shake!, a youth project about arts and activism initiated by Platform, which was part of the inspiration for the course. I previously co-authored a blog called Left Luggage and organised students and staff against education cuts at the college where I work. We were assisted greatly throughout the week by an activist and aspiring teacher, Holly Rigby (who is now helping to organise Cuts Cafe London), and two "senior participants" - Samia Aziz and Ikram Musa - who are slightly older and more experienced that the other participants. None of us is a member of any political party and the summer school is independent of any party or other organisation.
Demand the Impossible! utilised our skills as secondary school teachers and our interest in developing a more self-critical and pluralistic culture on the Left. Ed suggested the idea of a radical politics summer school aimed at teenagers to me back in January. Since then, we've somehow managed to create a course we're extremely proud of, despite having no resources and relatively little experience of organising an event of this kind.
As I understand it most of the participants came to the course with some interest in activism, but were not already activists in their own right. Is there a danger that such a group could feel that they are being lectured at? How did you encourage independent participation and opinion?
For me, the most pleasing aspect of the week was the way in which the participants' motivation developed. At the start of the course, many of the participants claimed they were extrinsically motivated: the course would help them get to university or give them something to add to their CV. By the end of the week, every single young person wanted to get more involved with political activism or learn more about radical politics.
The "taste of activism" we offered participants was crucial in developing this motivation. It was clear from speaking with them afterwards that they had found the experience of collective action exhilarating. One young man spoke of how his fear at taking part in direct action turned to a feeling of empowerment once the protest started. All our participants were able to draw lessons about strategy from their experiences. It is interesting that participation in political activity seemed to have a greater radicalising affect than learning about injustice. Ed and I had spoken about how, at the start of our involvement in the anti-war movement, our political ideas had lagged behind the action we found ourselves taking. The same seemed to be true of our participants.
The week was a pleasingly unconventional educational experience both for us and for the participants. Ed and I were able to take at face value some of the educational jargon we encounter in our working lives. We were able to use "discovery” and “kinaesthetic” forms of learning, discussions, role plays and debates to encourage genuinely critical and independent thinking, rather than as tools which tend to simulate such learning, as we act on the managerial prerogative to get students to pass exams. It was also liberating to teach knowledge and skills we felt were intrinsically important, rather than those said to be important by government, employers and universities. The participants relished the chance to use the analytical parts of their brains, instead of mastering "the trick to get the tick".
We had mixed success in getting participants to adopt a critical attitude to present social arrangements. There was unanimous agreement that a pyramid is the shape that best represents the distribution of wealth and power in society, and most agreed that capitalism was fundamentally exploitative. However, most of our participants stopped short of a full-blown anti-capitalist critique. I think there are two main reasons for this. First, there was a strong faith that Britain is a meritocratic society - even among those most critical of capitalism's exploitative nature. This faith seems to me to have psychological and sociological routes. Psychologically, to accept that meritocracy is an ideological myth would be immensely demotivating for young people fixated on improving their material situation. Sociologically, the fact that our participants have not had much contact with those from more privileged backgrounds may also have prevented them recognising class barriers. Interestingly, the one area in which our (overwhelmingly female) participants seemed happy to adopt a radical position was on gender and feminism. This might be because they encountered concrete manifestations of patriarchy in their daily lives. Perhaps if we had done more to encourage participants to identify the ways in which capitalism impacts on their daily lives, the anti-capitalist position would have appeared more attractive.
The second impediment to our participants embracing a more radical critique of society was their strong conviction that "there is no alternative". For some, there was as little point criticising inequalities of wealth as there was criticising the fact that water flows downhill. This belief was linked in a sense with the belief in meritocracy. Since there is no way to alter the fundamentals of our social and economic system, the only course of action is to strive through individual endeavour to make the best of things. The case studies we selected showed that collective struggle can, in fact, bring about change, and many of our participants found them interesting and inspiring. In retrospect, there may have been ways to utilise these case studies to more effectively bust the TINA myth.
In our session on alternatives to capitalism, we presented simplified, schematic visions of different social structures that could humanise or replace capitalism. Most participants favoured social democracy over other alternatives, such as “the participatory model” (drawn largely from the ideas of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel) and "eco-anarchism". This is not surprising, since social democracy was the least radical and most familiar model we offered (and because we didn’t leave enough time to explore the implications of more radical ideas). Nevertheless, it is encouraging that participants embraced a model of social and economic organisation significantly different from that advocated by Britain's political class. After all, many on the Left were initially attracted to mainstream social democratic politics, and only became radicalised once their experience of activism demonstrated the limits of this politics.
On the final day of the course, our participants presented campaign action plans that were supposed to synthesise all that they had learned about the impacts of capitalism, anti-capitalist alternatives and approaches to strategy. They came up with some imaginative ideas, including a campaign against gendered children's toys and one for greater democracy. Ultimately, though, most of the campaigns had fairly limited aims and were predicated on a reformist strategic approach. Again, given our participants' limited experience of activism, perhaps this is not surprising. Activists do not adopt a more radical approach as a result of abstract choice but because, through reflection or experience, they see the limits of pure reformism.
Looking back on the week as a whole, it is clear that some of our aims for the course were realised more fully than others. We certainly made our participants aware of some of the harmful effects of capitalism. This, along with the empowering experience of involvement in collective political activity, created powerful motivation which can hopefully be harnessed in future. However, we were less successful in developing an orientation towards specifically radical or left-wing politics. One main reason for this, I feel, was that our participants seemed to accept the assumption that the rules and principles governing our society are the result of a tacit agreement between members of that society. Radical left-wing perspectives are based instead on the understanding that there is a fundamental conflict of interest between elites and the rest of us. It is only with this understanding that we can see why the myth of meritocracy is so prevalent, why reformist measures will not alter fundamental injustices and why social democracy in Britain has probably had its day.
This raises the question of how we might have cemented an understanding that capitalism is a system based on conflict. My own feeling it is may have been possible to develop a more radical orientation in two ways: first, by placing more emphasis on taking action during the week, and seeing if that leads to more general insights about the kind of society that we live in (the brief action they did take did indeed help to generate some very interesting ideas). Second, I think in future we ought to encourage participants to reflect upon their own experiences more than we did, particularly in relation to features of society they encounter directly – education, the media and policing (by contrast, we focused a lot on the workplace in trying to elucidate key processes of capitalism).
In any case, we are already planning for the next time we run the course, and looking to grow the network of people involved in order to generate a project that can be increasingly valuable in the future.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/radical_education
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