Revealing Complexity in Educating for Sustainability: An Update on the Work of the Roundtable on Environment and Sustainability

Abstract

The Roundtable on Environment and Sustainability was convened to provide academics and others with a collaborative forum in which to pursue their commitment to providing students with the tools needed to craft holistic strategies for meeting sustainability challenges. In the first effort of its kind, the Roundtable is developing a framework for designing, recognizing, and assessing academic programs that prepare students to engage in the holistic, adaptive management of the interactions of the systems at the human-environment interface needed to support both stewardship of the natural environment and long-term improvement in the quality of life for human individuals and communities. The Roundtable tentatively has identified as pedagogically optimal at least eight supradisciplinary skills, fourteen supradisciplinary perspectives on sustainability challenges, and twelve supradisciplinary contexts for applying the two. Revealing the complexity of the set of interactions among human and environmental systems is the most important pedagogical touchstone of the Roundtable’s approach. This revealed complexity is partly a function of the conceptual resolution of the interacting systems into sets of subsystems, and has at least five dimensions. Viewing sustainability challenges from the supradisciplinary perspectives helps students to acquire a holistic understanding of the set of interactions among systems crucial to meeting those challenges.