“It may turn out, in the end, that the idea of the future we’ve come to depend on so much is no longer even available. Or to put it another way: the future is already here, and it’s confusing as hell.”
Roy Scranton & Torie Bosch (2017) “What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future”
Education for Emergence – Education for Emergency
The transition to an ecologically sustainable society will involve a historically unprecedented revolution in institutions, systems, lifestyles and values. Much of Western culture has to be totally reversed in a few decades. We have to replace a long list of cultural traits by their opposites, particularly obsessions with material affluence, getting richer, competing, winning, exercising power and controlling nature.
Fien & Trainer, 1993:39 quoted in “Bourdieu and Education for Sustainable Development: analysis of an interview Justin Karol, Monash University”
Further listening – listen to the podcast (in Swedish): P3 Dystopia
A rough draft of the purposes of education at CEMUS
From “A rough draft of the purposes of education at CEMUS” by CEMUS course coordinators autumn 2018.
Bourdieu and Education for Sustainable Development
This paper introduces the terms ‘environmental capital’ and ‘sustainable habitus’ as extensions of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts that are considered valuable in contributing to a sociological understanding of our environmental crisis. Without more individuals possessing a sustainable habitus, the personal actions deemed necessary to achieve environmental sustainability might not occur. The role education can play in informing a sustainable habitus in students through the acquisition of environmental capital is investigated, with reference to semi-structured interview data drawn from a case study of an effective educator for sustainable development.
Karol (2006) “Bourdieu and Education for Sustainable Development: analysis of an interview Justin Karol, Monash University”.
Five metaskills — feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning
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Key competencies in sustainability
The emerging academic field focused on sustainability has been engaged in a rich and converging debate to define what key competencies are considered critical for graduating students to possess. For more than a decade, sustainability courses have been developed and taught in higher education, yet comprehensive academic programs in sustainability, on the undergraduate and graduate level, have emerged only over the last few years. Considering this recent institutional momentum, the time is seemingly right to synthesize the discussion about key competencies in sustainability in order to support these relatively young academic programs in shaping their profiles and achieving their ambitious missions.
Wiek et al. (2011) “Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development”.