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What is Education for Sustainable Development?

In 2005, UNESCO declared the 'Decade of Education for Sustainable Development'. Its objectives were to:

• facilitate networking, linkages, exchange and interaction among stakeholders in ESD
• foster an increased quality of teaching and learning in education for sustainable development
• help countries make progress towards and attain the millennium development goals through ESD efforts;
• provide countries with new opportunities to incorporate ESD into education reform efforts

The Higher Education Academy, working with the NGO Forum for the Future, set about investigating the state of ESD within UK higher education. The task was delegated to the Academy's constituent Subject Centres, whose findings were combined into an overarching report. The very existence of an environmentally-orientated approach to literary studies came as something of a pleasant surprise to the report's authors, although the English Subject Centre report (written by Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge at Bath Spa University) admitted the relatively small scale of ecocritical research and teaching in the UK.

Within the context of the broad objectives set by UNESCO and FfF, aademic disciplines define Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) according to the history and values of their subjects. Thus far, ESD in English has meant simply teaching the results of ecocritical research, such as:

• the history of environmental concerns in literature, including Romanticism and 60s radicalism
• environmentally-orientated literature, including ecopoetry, nature writing, indigenous literature and some canonical texts by writers such as Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and Don DeLillo
• ecocritical theory, including discussion of ecofeminism, the importance of mimesis, the role of political activism, changing concepts of pastoral and wilderness, and the place of sensory and spiritual experience in the work of criticism
• increasing attention to questions of environmental racism and the intersection of postcolonial and ecocritical approaches

The pedagogical model for most ecocritical teaching arguably derives ultimately from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Romanticism. As William Wordsworth put it in 'The Tables Turned', 'One impulse from a vernal wood / My teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can.' Filtered through interwar proto-ecological movements, environmental education emerged in the 1960s with an ethos of direct, authentic experience in nature and an aim of moral epiphany and personal transformation.

Existing ecocriticism courses, some with field trips built in, seem to follow the environmental education model: inspiring representations of nature and jeremiads about despoliation are to persuade students towards right action, although there is seldom time or expertise to subject environmental desiderata to reasoned, evidence-based criticism. Interest in environmental justice and postcolonialism has usefully drawn attention to political as well as natural environments, but it is not clear how or if this shift has manifested in teaching.

ESD research in relation to literature is in its infancy (see 'Projects'), but there is a substantial body of work on ESD generally, much of which questions both the traditional environmental education model and the coherence and adequacy of 'sustainable development' as a touchstone. Direct personal experience of nature or of the destructive impact of consumerism is validated as a key factor motivating students towards sustainability, but the role of education in facilitating it is problematic.

ESD educators typically draw attention to the need to confront the ideology, culture and practices of unsustainability as well as persuading students to live more sustainably. As such, ESD promotes critical engagement with political contexts rather than moral exhortation aimed at individuals, and may encourage students to voice a sense of helplessness and apathy many seem to feel.

The environmental record of the institution - and indeed of the lecturer - ought to be a key focus of an ESD approach, and this should perhaps extend to examination of the impact of tuition fees and modularisation on the reflective, independent 'slow learning' once offered by universities.

However, there are significant tensions between ESD and other less prescriptive teaching philosophies. While politicised agenda-led education has long been part of English and Cultural Studies, there may be considerable pedagogical value in allowing students to determine their own analytical priorities.

The table below offers a simplified and schematised indication of the differences between environmental education and ESD approaches. Ecocriticism is already viewed with some suspicion by traditional literary critics. Were ESD to be taken seriously as an objective it would transform 'Literature and the Environment' courses, possibly beyond recognition as literary education at all. Cultural studies would perhaps experience less difficulty, although deferring to ecological science might prove painful.