Paul Vare
University of Gloucestershire
Paul Vare is Postgraduate Research Lead for the School of Education at the University of Gloucestershire, he is also a founder director of The South West Learning for Sustainability Coalition, a network of over 130 organisations. Before joining the university Paul worked for over 35 years in environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in various settings, chiefly on international development projects. For over a decade Paul represented European ECO Forum, an NGO coalition, on various expert groups of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) drafting the UNECE Strategy for ESD, a set of ESD indicators and recommendations for ESD educator competences. He is currently leading an EU-funded project that is developing a competence framework for educators that can underpin ESD qualifications in a broad range of contexts. Recently he co-authored a book with prof. Bill Scott, “The World We’ll Leave Behind: grasping the sustainability challenge” that provides brief introductory chapters to a wide range of issues, concepts and strategies related to sustainable development.
We are frequently reminded that environmental and social challenges threaten our wellbeing if not the habitability of the Earth. In an effort to address these concerns the United Nations has defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO 2017), which it hopes will be achieved globally. The challenge is to make this effort relevant and achievable locally. This is no small task because, simply by choosing to do our jobs well without reference to the bigger picture, our commonplace actions tend to contribute cumulatively to our unsustainable condition. Where educators do choose to be part of the solution, they find that defining what that means is not straightforward.
This paper references a decade of initiatives to develop educator competences for sustainability (Sleurs 2008; UNECE 2012; Weik et al. 2011) and presents the outcomes emerging from an EU-funded project, ‘A Rounder Sense of Purpose’ (RSP). This project has been developing an accredited framework of competences in education for sustainable development (ESD) that has been piloted extensively in six countries.
Divided into three clusters (thinking holistically; envisioning change; achieving transformation), the RSP competences tackle a range of issues familiar to anyone attempting to lead a process of institutional change. The first competence, systems thinking, highlights the nature of intractable or ‘wicked’ problems that arise within complex adaptive systems and the need to develop what Jacobs (undated) terms ‘cognitive complexity’. Other competences in the framework highlight such essential leadership skills as promoting participation, engendering commitment, balancing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, working across disciplines, critiquing evidence and fostering productive, inclusive relationships.
Currently the RSP team are conducting research into the assessment of learners (trainee teachers). Preliminary results suggest a powerful impact on the breadth of issues that these students are considering in relation to their practice as well as the level of critique to which they subject their concerns.
While the UN Sustainable Development Goals offer us content and context, they do not in themselves facilitate critical education for sustainable development and global citizenship. Indeed the Goals can read like a top down ‘to do’ list. The RSP framework represents an effort to balance the tendency to promote preferred ‘green’ behaviours with the capacity to think critically about and beyond sustainable development concepts and, crucially, to develop the competence to build this capacity in others. The extent to which this represents a pedagogy for transformation is a point for discussion.
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