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Education for Sustainable Development - Pedagogical Research
This page provides results from a project, funded by the English Subject Centre, exploring the role of ecocriticism in education for sustainable development. As further pedagogical research in this area is completed, results, conclusions and suggestions will be added.
The study, carried out at Bath Spa University between October 2006 and April 2007, used a combination of questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews to establish the contribution of teaching ecocriticism to sustainability literacy. Full results and commentary may be found in 'Ecocriticism and Education for Sustainable Development', Greg Garrard, Pedagogy 7:3 (Autumn 2007)
Students from all three undergraduate years were surveyed to establish whether there were changes in environmental values and knowledge during the programme. Focus groups were undertaken with students before and after taking the 'Writing and Environmental Crisis' module to see whether their critical habits were altered. Individual interviews looked for qualitative evidence about the origin of students' commitments and attitudes.
The results of the questionnaires were not encouraging. Focus group and individual interview results broadly supported the claims of ESD researchers in other subjects.
- Levels of stated environmental commitment were moderate, with no clear variation (let alone an increase) during the course of a degree. Around 20-40% of students showed little or no environmental commitment at all, although the same sort of proportion declared significant environmental values.
- Basic knowledge of environmental issues was extremely low, and did not improve over the course of a degree. 60-80% of students had virtually no knowledge of facts pertaining to either the local or global environment.
- The only area in which improvement was discernable was knowledge of the meaning of 'sustainable development' and 'ecocriticism', and ability to apply ecocritical approaches to literary and cultural texts. Focus groups confirmed that students' critical abilities improved significantly over the years, but this seemed to lead as often to cynicism or despair as to any positive attitude towards sustainability.
- Focus group results (although small in number) indicated that students became much more alert over three years to contextual matters when presented with cultural artefacts (TV advert, newspaper article, poem) relating to the environment, and developed a sophisticated analytical vocabulary.
- General ESD research claims that direct personal experience, as well as education, can be highly formative in sustainability awareness. Focus group results and individual interviews strongly supported this view. In one especially interesting interview with a 'nature phobic' and antienvironmentalist student, a complete lack of childhood experience of nature - positive or negative - became the centre of our discussion.
- The most commonly cited response to material concerning climate change was helplessness. Some students linked this to the disjunction between university experience - which valued the reflective life and suggested generous possibilities - and the limitations anticipated after graduation.
The following suggestions for addressing the issues identified in the research are given with the knowledge that teaching time is limited, and that academics in English and Cultural Studies will typically want to spend time on cultural artefacts and theoretical arguments rather than remedial instruction in environmental biology.
- 'Prisoner's Dilemma' games can represent a vivid and engaging way to demonstrate both the power and the limits of morality and social cooperation. The same format also illustrates the problems of resource allocation often known as the 'Tragedy of the Commons'.
- Asking students to create 'subvertisements' could be used to engage with both the power of advertising and the consumerist ideology it continually reinforces.
- The American critic Bill McKibben wrote in The Age of Missing Information of an experiment in which he compared what could be learned and experienced in 24 hours of multi-channel cable television (hundreds of hours of recordings in total) with the same period spent on a mountain. We have asked students to undertake a similar comparison on a smaller scale to very good effect.
- Project work, focused on a specific environmental problem and linked to a literary or cultural text, can be a way to enhance students' environmental knowledge and their subject skills of analysis and argument at the same time. For example, reading A.R. Ammons' long poem Garbage could be combined with project work on waste management at both a social and individual level.
- Students are highly attuned to both individual and institutional hypocrisy. Inviting them to critique their working environment as well as set texts might reduce the dissonance some experience when asked to think sustainably within an unsustainable institutional context.
- Cultural texts should probably be combined with literary texts, and 'bad' examples (anti-environmental or highly hedonistic) set as texts as well as 'good' ones. The cultural aspects of environmental crisis operate within all media sectors, and the literary is far from predominant.
- Field trips may be introduced not only to provide motivational experience but also to give access to cultural 'texts' for critical analysis.
- Assessment ought to incorporate reflective elements where possible, to encourage students to integrate previous experience with knowledge gained on the module.
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