Sustainable development in the higher education classroom: perspectives from area studies and development studies

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Sustainable development has been identified as a key priority by the UK funding councils and by the Higher Education Academy.
Sustainability literacy is an attribute to which graduates of all disciplines should aspire. To date, there has often been comparatively limited knowledge exchange between the fields of Area Studies and Development Studies, but the global and interdisciplinary nature of both subjects would suggest that both ought to be primary sites for engaging with questions of environmental sustainability and climate change.

Fees

• There is no charge to attend this event for employees and postgraduate students of publicly funded UK higher educational institutions and other institutions with a subscription to the Higher Education Academy.
• There is a charge of £50 for employees and postgraduate students of private institutions/organisations and non-UK institutions to attend this event.
• Please note that we reserve the right to charge a £50 cancellation fee if you do not notify us at least 48 hours beforehand that you are unable to attend.
• Full details of our charging policy are available.
• Lunch will be provided.

Travel bursary

A travel bursary is available for this event.

Provisional Programme for 19 March 2010

Time	Session
10.30-10.50	Registration and coffee
10.50-11.00	Welcome and introductions
11.00-11.45	Rebuilding New Orleans Anna Hartnell, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham
11.45-12.30	North-South collaboration in experiential learning: Case studies from Latin America Elizabeth Oglesby, School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona
12.30-13.30	Lunch
13.30-14.15	Development Studies Benchmarking, Area Studies and Sustainable Development Michael Tribe, Honorary Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Bradford Honorary Lecturer, University of Strathclyde
14.15-15.00	Introducing Sustainable Development across the curriculum at the University of Central Lancashire George Hall, Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Central Lancashire
15.00-15.15	Tea break
15.15-16.00	Experiences of embedding Education for Sustainable Development across curricula at the University of Brighton Jenny Elliott, School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton
16.00-16.45	Plenary discussion
16.45-17.00	Close

Abstracts

Rebuilding New Orleans

Anna Hartnell, University of Birmingham

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a storm that devastated New Orleans, many commentators questioned whether the city should be built back at all. Built below sea level and surrounded by water, some argued that its very existence was not sustainable. Yet with the advent of climate change, the same could be said of a great number of coastal cities vulnerable to flooding. And it seems likely that arguments against rebuilding New Orleans were not unconnected to the socio-economic status of a large section of the pre-Katrina population, the majority of whom were African American. While New Orleans has proved a lucrative destination for the tourist trade, the city has long been subject to a narrative that has cast it as a site of vice and corruption – a narrative that in the course of the twentieth century came to be intimately associated with New Orleans’ evolving status as a majority-black city. This paper explores the way in which crucial environmental issues – such as combating climate change – have been partially hijacked in Katrina’s aftermath to promote agendas deeply compromised by racism and class prejudice. Such agendas have not succeeded in preventing the rebuilding of New Orleans but they have arguably influenced the pace and direction of the city’s reconstruction – which has left many of New Orleans’ poorer residents homeless for years after the storm. Drawing on experiences of teaching the management – or indeed mismanagement – of the Katrina crisis in the classroom, I argue that New Orleans is an important case study for coming to terms with one of the greatest dilemmas posed by climate change: how to ensure that those who have benefited the least from industrialization and who will suffer the most from climate change are not made to pay again, many times over, for the cost of sustainable development.

North-South collaboration in experiential learning: Case studies from Latin America

Elizabeth Oglesby, University of Arizona

The University of Arizona has a strong area studies tradition, as well as a tradition of North-South research and teaching collaboration that stems in large part from our location on the US-Mexico border. A new school of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona is working to build on these strengths and to expand our teaching and research expertise in the area of human responses to climate change. Challenges include how to maintain the strong points of area studies (in-depth language training, fieldwork training, collaborative research relations, and cross-disciplinary pollination) with the theoretical breath and rigor of development studies. With these challenges in mind, this presentation will focus on issues of North-South collaboration, especially the integration of teaching, research and internships in sustainable development through experiential learning projects in Latin America.

Development Studies Benchmarking, Area Studies and Sustainable Development

Michael Tribe, University of Bradford

Perhaps no other area of study illustrates the need for multi-disciplinarity more than the study of the environment. Although the concept of ‘sustainability’ can be employed inter alia in the context of economic growth, of institutional development, or of the financial sustainability of programmes it is most often understood to refer to environmental sustainability. The range of disciplines or subject areas encompassed by ‘the environment’ include both the social and physical sciences – so that the degree of multi-disciplinarity required is extremely broad. This is an essential and exceptionally important characteristic of ‘environmental studies’.

Development Studies is distinguished from Area Studies by two particular features. First, a high proportion of the concerns of Area Studies lie within the ambit of the humanities, while those of Development Studies lie very largely within the social sciences. Second, by their very nature Area Studies are focussed on particular countries or regions largely to the exclusion of countries and regions outside the focus of particular individuals or institutions – while Development Studies has particular concerns in the areas of international development (i.e. relationships between countries and regions) and in comparative development (i.e. comparing development experiences of different countries and regions).

In the context of sustainable development many of the significant environmental issues make study of the international dimension critically important – either because the phenomena being studied are international in nature (such as climate change) or because the inter-action between countries and regions is very significant (such as with externalities arising from de-forestation or from pollution). In many cases good familiarity with the history and contemporary circumstances of particular countries and regions is an essential input into ‘international’ or ‘supranational’ studies – and for this country or regional Area Studies specialists can complement international Development Studies specialists.

Where does this take us within the terms of the title and focus of this day conference? The concerns of the draft Development Studies subject benchmark prepared under the auspices of the Development Studies Association for the QAA were far from specifying an ‘appropriate’ curriculum or syllabi for Development Studies degrees. Rather, many of the concerns were to identify issues central to the delivery of multi-disciplinary degree courses and programmes. Some of these concerns are very broad – such as the question of how an element of ‘collegiality’ can be developed among academic staff (and students) who deliver (and receive) course units provided by several different university departments within multi-disciplinary courses of study. Another issue relates to the extent to which the objectives of courses of study focussed on Development Studies (or sustainable development) include the ‘production’ of graduates who are multi-disciplinary (or inter-disciplinary) or whether the objective should be to produce graduates who have a prime speciality within one (or a few) discipline(s) and who can work well within multi-disciplinary ‘teams’. Another issue relates to the specific disciplinary questions of internal (both first and second marking) and external assessment – the selection of appropriate external examiners being a particular problem of course.

Given that sustainable environmental development involves multi-disciplinarity bridging the physical and social sciences the issues associated with design, delivery and assessment of degrees focussed on sustainable development are particularly interesting. It is not clear that the Development Studies and Area Studies academic communities have effectively addressed or resolved these issues.

Introducing Sustainable Development across the curriculum at the University of Central Lancashire

George Hall, University of Central Lancashire

Sustainability literacy for our undergraduates is a core theme of the Medium Term Programme for the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), alongside Internationalisation and Employability. The challenge has been to make the topic applicable across a wide range of degrees and within a packed programme for each degree. Other issues for consideration include access to any course for external, part-time and deaf students and for members of the university community with a passing interest in the subject.

One initial attempt to address these issues has been an elective course at First Year Level called, “Issues in Sustainability” with twelve lectures covering topics from: biofuels, climate change, tourism, transport to energy and building design. The lectures were followed by a discussion session and each was broadcast and recorded for WebCT with signing for the deaf and, in addition, transcripts of the lectures and presentations were also available for later viewing.

The course was given extensive publicity across the university through the weekly electronic Newsletter, plasma screen advertisements and promotional talks to new students. This produced an audience for the live lectures of students following sustainability-related courses (who signed up for assessment) and students and occasional visitors with an interest in a specific topic. The appeal of the course was enhanced by the free access approach rather than one based on full attendance and assessment together.

Experiences of embedding Education for Sustainable Development across curricula at the University of Brighton

Jenny Elliott, University of Brighton

In 2007, the University of Brighton made a corporate commitment ‘to give students an experience of Higher Education that is increasingly informed by a critical understanding of global issues and sustainable development’ (Corporate Plan, 2007-12). This presentation reports on aspects of two projects at the University of Brighton that have sought to understand how the current curricula is engaging with education for sustainable development (ESD) and to develop resources and capacity to towards further embedding of sustainable development in undergraduate learning.

The first project has involved the development of an audit tool to investigate curricular at the module level, supplemented by interviews with tutors and focus group discussions with students. A second project has been to investigate in more depth, examples and models of effective and sustainable development in the Brighton curricula, with an explicit intention to uncover examples in disciplines that were perhaps ‘less obvious’ for ESD learning, to consider the kinds of pedagogies employed and to hear about tutors’ experiences of curricula change. The presentation will give insight to the range of curricula developments that tutors have made towards ESD and explore in some detail the nature of the knowledge, skills and affective outcomes that tutors at Brighton are seeking within this curricula. 

It is hoped that the presentation will provide insights to what ‘ESD’ can comprise in a range of disciplines and the value and application of a curricula review tool for institutional learning. However, the author of the paper is a development geographer who has been responsible for a large, lecture-based module on Sustainable Development with an emphasis on the livelihoods within the Global South for over a decade. She would be very happy to share thoughts on the particular challenges of forwarding ESD through such materia.