ABSTRACT

This book examines the difficult and wide-ranging issues relating to how we understand our environment, our place in it, and how we choose to act.

This comprehensive text provides an overview of these developing key issues, illustrating how - through schooling, higher education, professional training and development, and awareness-raising - people can bring about change, as well as engaging in debate and critique of issues. The book builds on existing work across a number of fields, as well as on original international research, in order to model the complexity of the problems, the institutional contexts in which they arise, and the interrelationships between these.

Areas explored include the policy context, the links between sustainable development and learning, the economic and moral interdependence of humans and nature, the management, assessment and evaluation of learning, and globalisation. The book suggests ways in which those responsible for learning can target their efforts appropriately, matching straightforward solutions to simple problems, and designing complex interventions only where these are needed.

This text will be a valuable resource for anyone studying Masters degrees and MBAs that focus on environment or sustainable development, and for professionals dealing with problems on a day-to-day basis. Though a free-standing text, its analysis is supported by a companion reader: Key Issues in Sustainable Development and Learning: a critical review.

 

chapter 1|11 pages

Framing the issues

Complexity, uncertainty, risk and necessity

chapter 2|11 pages

The policy context

Introduction: policy origins of sustainable development and the crucial role of learning

chapter 3|8 pages

Language and meaning

chapter 4|13 pages

Learning and sustainable development: making the linkages

Making the linkages Introduction: literacies and learning

chapter 5|12 pages

Humans and nature: tensions and interdependence

Tensions and interdependence Introduction: knowing what we need to know

chapter 6|10 pages

Theory and practice

Ideology and philosophy

chapter 7|12 pages

Management of learning: issues in curriculum design

Issues in curriculum design Introduction: four examples

chapter 8|9 pages

Curriculum and pedagogy

Introduction: themes for environmental meta-learning (TEMs)

chapter 9|10 pages

Measuring learning: aspects of assessment

Aspects of assessment Introduction: assessment and evaluation

chapter 10|13 pages

Measuring effectiveness: monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation Introduction: learning, efficiency, effectiveness

chapter 11|10 pages

Building capacity, developing agency

Evolving a theory of change

chapter 12|13 pages

Economic behaviour

Value and values

chapter 13|10 pages

Globalisation and fragmentation: science and self

Science and self Globalisation

chapter 14|5 pages

What happens next?