Sustainable Higher Education Teaching Approaches

Abstract

The goals of public higher education are to generate knowledge and transfer knowledge and skills to students to prepare them for making the world a better place. Given current severe threats to human well-being from climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, and global trends of inequality, we will need a strong commitment to sustainability education to achieve that “better place.” This chapter focuses on several key concepts and teaching approaches that can engage students in sustainability challenges and give them some of the necessary knowledge and tools to become thoughtful leaders and followers, problem-solvers, and active citizens. It discusses how key concepts such as intrinsic and extrinsic values help students understand the role of values in human decision-making about addressing bigger-than-self sustainability challenges (e.g., global poverty). The concepts of overconsumption, social commodity chain, metabolic rift, the commons, polycentricity, and resilience allow instructors to traverse disciplines and help students recognize the complex, interdependent nature of social-environmental problems and solutions. The chapter also describes teaching approaches that help students understand how people, problems, and ecological conditions are interconnected and encourage them to move from individual to collective approaches to sustainability. These approaches include place-based experiential learning, project- or problem-based learning, case study conflict studies, collaborative learning, social learning, and community service learning. To effectively engage higher education students in sustainability, educators must provide interdisciplinary and experiential learning experiences and put students in positions where they imagine themselves using innovation, experimentation, trial-and-error social learning, and adaptive management to become future problem-solvers and change agents.