uk ite network for education for sustainable development

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‘Sustainable Schools’ and Initial Teacher Education: Thinking in

complexity about education

Roger Firth and Andrea Wheeler, The University of Nottingham, School of Education/School of the Built Environment

UK ITE Network for Education for Sustainable Development/Global Citizenship Annual Conference

London South Bank University, 9 July 2009

Starting points and questions

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We can all adopt sustainable development, respecting both man and nature - and alter our production and consumption habits. Everyone can make a difference, starting right now. (Sustainable Schools National Framework, Teachernet, 2009)

If traditional Western schooling is on the verge of becoming an anachronism (if it has not already become so) ‘How do we understand and approach education?’

1. What are the implications of recent education philosophy that takes inspiration from the phenomenological tradition and from complexity theory for initial teacher education and ESD?

2. Why is it important to include such critiques in our conversations about future education and school building?

Problematising and connecting complexity thinking, phenomenology, nature and sustainability

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• For those forging the new territory of eco-phenomenology and complexity thinking, sustainability concerns how we can develop new ways of being-in-the-world (Brown and Toadvine, 2003). And to extend these discussions to a context of sustainable schools, it also concerns how we can build different sorts of community (Lingis, 1994)

• Educators pay too little attention to the key issue for environmental education: our understanding of nature and our relationship to it (Bonnett, 2007: 707). Invitations to raise our appreciation of relatedness and interdependence between ourselves and nature offer an important perspective on addressing our current environmental predicament (Bonnet, 2009). As Bonnet argues, ‘we need thoroughly to understand this and to shape our actions in ways that truly reflect this understanding – in my view not now simply bio-physically, but also metaphysically’ (ibid)

ESD

• Every aspect of our education system is being urged to declare its support for ESD

• ‘There now seems to be widespread agreement that ESD is an important and timely educational policy response if we are to be able to face up to the social and environmental challenges that lie ahead’ (Scott, 2005, p. 1)

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Sustainable Schools: The Sustainable Schools Framework and the 3 C’s

• The connection between action and learning, between what the school does, as a community, and what the people in it, its students, teachers and governors can learn; and

• The way that schools can model sustainable ways of working for the wider community

• However, policy discourses are replete with deterministic and instrumental outcomes-based rhetoric 5

Building and learning for change

The Building Schools for the Future programme, launched in 2004, is described as beingset up to improve the fabricof school buildings, either through refurbishment or newbuildings, and at the same time transforming learning and embedding sustainability into the educational experience (Blair, 2004)

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• New school buildings are required to have a minimum BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) for Schools rating of ‘very good’.

• The Government has detailed an ambition to build Zero-Carbon Schools and that all new school buildings be zero carbon by 2016.

• The Government has set up a Zero Carbon Schools Taskforce, to explore the technical issues involved in how to achieve this aim (DCSF, 2007, p. 107).

• However, there is little to suggest that 'low-carbon schools' will address the question of encouraging pro-environmental lifestyle change in any wholistic way. Behavioural change, has been translated into a discussion of the technology of user-friendliness of devises for measuring and thereby lowering energy consumption.

• Current research avoids discussion of how we can really engage with young people to increase awareness of the consequences of excessive consumption. It avoids a conversation of architects with educationalists, philosophers, political and economic theorists.

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Where and how do children and young people best learn? What do young people think about school buildings? How can we find out? Ask them? Design workshops? Participation exercises?

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A documentary about the school we’ve designed…

ITE and Sustainability

• Over the last 15 years, there has been a strong emphasis about the need to reorient teacher education towards sustainability (UNESCO–UNEP, 1990; UNESCO, 1997, 2004, 2005), and accordingly, ITE has been given a significant role in the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD 2005-2014)

• However, at the same time, ITE in England has been established as a national system, closely controlled by the government, where policy priorities reach down into the finest detail of provision (Furlong et al, 2008: 307). ‘It is also important to recognise, for all its formal achievements, ITE in England, at least in terms of its formal requirements, is now almost entirely practically based

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• The theoretical interest in the local and the concrete is now evident in many areas of the social sciences, drawing attention to difficult issues not only of difference, but also of process, multifactoriality and dynamic flow through time

• Though these issues are implied, and sometimes integral to, many constructivist, sociocultural and postmodern/poststructural approaches, each of these groups of perspectives offers a unit of analysis or framing which focuses on only some of these aspects, from their particular position

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Complexity Theory/thinking

• Davis and Sumara (2006: 30) suggest that ‘complexity thinking takes the discussion to realms that these other discourses often ignore or evade’

• They argue that such thinking moves beyond the oppositional extremes of individual concerns and society’s needs, introducing ‘the biological across all phenomena’

• Complexity insists that the physical and the biological be brought into discussion of the ‘social’, which otherwise tend to ignore the impulses of bodies and physical elements 12

• Complexity thinking emphasises an attitude of openness

• For the complexivist truth is more about interobjectivity. It is not just about the object, not just about the subject, and not just about social arrangement (intersubjectivity). ‘It is about holding all of these in dynamic, co-specifying, conversational relationships, while locating them in a grander, more-than-human context (Davis and Sumara, 2006: 15)

• Bonnet (2009) Invitations to raise our appreciation of relatedness and interdependence between ourselves and nature offer an important perspective on addressing our current environmental predicament

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• As Bonnet argues, ‘we need thoroughly to understand this and to shape our actions in ways that truly reflect this understanding – in my view not now simply bio-physically, but also metaphysically’ (ibid)

• It is suggested that complexity theory and the ‘logic of emergence’ may be helpful in rearticulating the project of critical education in the light of current tensions between modern (Marxist, neo-Marxist) and postmodern/ poststructural versions of criticality (Osberg, 2007)

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Architecture, phenomenology and postmodernism

• Heidegger argues that our continuous questioning of our way of being in the world, motivates life itself (Heidegger, 1954). The human, he writes, is in the world in a way that this question is an issue for it. It is fundamental to the human. It is the manner by which he or she is.

• For Heidegger, man is not in the world as an object in space or as substance. Man does not stand in the world as a thing: '[man] stands "in" the world insofar as it stands outside of itself, disclosing the world, clearing things within it, inhabiting it' (De Bestegui, 2003, 16).

• The human being is in the world in a critical, questioning relationship, in relation of ‘care’ and where that care (which also includes cherishing, protecting, cultivating and building) discloses a more authentic relationship. But this mode of being has been forgotten.

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• The problem with much of Heidegger’s thinking for architects is that it is now more than fifty years old, for current architects working in more socially and culturally complex, and diverse environments, and with trends towards technological innovation in all aspects of culture, his philosophy may not appear immediately attractive. His philosophy is, however, fundamental to more contemporary thinkers that are being accepted by architects.

• Furthermore, architects generally tend toward the notion that for a philosophy to be useful it needs to be able to be applied – in this sense architects like plans, objectives and guidelines that can easily be put into practice. Nevertheless, in this way, architecture, and the architect, remain within the subject-object relations of 'scientific thinking' or ‘rationality’ that Heidegger’s thought (and broadly also the phenomenological tradition) challenges.


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Luce Irigaray, French feminist philosopher, critical of this phenomenological tradition questions her experience as a woman trying to find a way of living not shaped by a Western tradition or by ‘scientific thinking’. Her work explores sexual difference in terms of relationally different being-in-the-world.

From humanism to qualitative complexity

• The political and ecological crises that we are witnessing today are an indication that the worldview that underlies the way we think about and understand education might have reached its exhaustion

• Humanism: ‘privileges, isolates, makes central and unique human being’ (Smith and Jenks, 2006: 25)

• Humanism assumes ‘…that it is possible to know and articulate the essence and nature of the human being and to use this knowledge as a foundation for our educational and political efforts’ (Biesta, 2006:5) 18

• What might follow if we try to overcome the humanist foundations of modern education; ‘if we no longer assume that we can know the essence and nature of the human being

• or, to put it differently, if we treat the question of what it means to be human as a radically open question, a question that can only be answered by engaging in education rather than as a question that needs to be answered before we can engage in education’ (Biesta, 2006: 4-5)

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The emergent curriculum

• The notion of an ‘emergent curriculum’ as a central organisng concept

• Moving from an ends-orientated/pre-defined understanding of the curriculum: education to be educational has to be for something and that something must be defined beforehand

• Which underpins every form of education (traditional, liberal, radical/critical): education as a process of socialisation/enculturation

• Which is made possible by a linear/deterministic understanding of process 20

• 3 things education does: qualification, socialisation, subjectification

• Subjectifcation: how you become a human being/coming into presence - the real purpose of education

• Coming into presence (Levinas) expresses an educational interest in the human subject in a more open way a more open

• We start form the assumption of a radical difference between us: one where each of us is unique and irreplaceable

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Ideas to think with

• Emergent curriculum: a space of complex relationally, where we take seriously our mutuality with students and the world and pay close attention tot eh subtle ways in which we all too readily perpetuate the division between teacher from student, curriculum from lifeworld and our relationships from their context (social and material)

• Learning: not the acquisition of something ‘external’, something that existed before the act of learning, and as a result of learning, becomes the possession of the learner. Pursuit of the known

• Learning as a response: to what is other and different. Concerned with ‘coming into the world’ which is not something individuals can do on their own. Attentiveness to the unknown

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• Teaching: an act of responsibility towards an other, rather than an instrumental act identified through epistemology. Taking response-ability for the singularity and uniqueness of the student

• Subjectivity: 3rd way to think about subjectivity – beyond identity and universality. Subjectivity as response-ability, how we are coming into the world, the centrality of a subjective being in the world. We cannot know what it is to be human in advance

• Sustainable development: the logic of emergence offers a theoretical framework for the long term agenda/education as sustainable development (Bonnett, 2007; Vare and Scott, 2007)

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