Sustainability is such a really important topic and if tutors think “ this is nothing to do with me and my subject area”. …Then they need to think again as Sustainability relates to just about everything.Unless you’re a climate denier its hard not to want to be concerned for the future. So how can we do are bit for Sustainability education?
The obvious thing is as Tutors we can help by introducing it into the curriculum, lectures, PDP, both within university and with work experience. As a part time teacher who lectures at various colleges it hard to influence or change a college or universities core ethos but it certainly something which I can try and bring into my film and moving graphic projects I teach on. Rather than talk about my teaching , I’ve looked at LCC and general educational sustainability values.
The LCC is an excellent example of a university, which is striving to improve their sustainability. Two tutors have been behind “conscientious communicators”, which is a cross-disciplinary community at LCC established to develop practice-based research around environmental and social creativity. They have run a highly successful Green week at the university.
http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/researching-at-ual/research-infrastructure/research-groups-networks-and-collaborations/conscientious-communicators/
The Green week held Feb 2015 at LCC, was a packed week of events.
They have worked to increasing links between the LCC and the wider community to promote sustainability and environmental issues, I attended recently an outstanding talk from one of the founders of the Greenpeace who screened extracts from his documentary film, it was a thought provoking and a challenging evening which the packed audience of students hopefully left better informed and a bit more aware of environmental issues.
The two tutors running “conscientious communicators”, have a three year mission to make a difference. This link is their objectives:
http://workflow.arts.ac.uk/artefact/file/download.php?file=176758&view=30034
I decided the most useful thing was to try and learn more about sustainability so I read most of Future Fit Framework: An introductory guide to teaching and learning for sustainability. It was a fascinating and helpful guide and it sets out that: Education for sustainable development (ESD) is a vision of education that seeks to balance human and economic well-being with cultural traditions and respect for the earth’s natural resources. It makes helpful suggestions for tutors to develop the students knowledgeable and values and skills so that ESD can improve the quality of life and the quality of life of generations to come. It’s a positive message that most tutors within HE I’m sure would back. As tutors if we can help ingrain these values into students we can make a difference when they start work and also encourage students to be vocal amongst their peer group and work colleagues.
Page 9 quote” In a nutshell “ sustainability education prepares people to cope with manage and shape social, economic and ecological conditions shaped by change, uncertainty, risk and complexity. It’s clear therefore for ESD to succeed, as tutors we need to support and back ESD and make it part of an arts and designer students life and become embedded within the culture of a university like at the LCC. It seems obvious to me that we need to involve and educate students to create a better & more sustainable world. Universities have a strong and ethnical responsibility to commit to educating the students to take a positive role in ensuring society looks to lower carbon, waste, become resource efficient and possibly more localised economics.
All this of course has to fit within the bigger picture, “in Europe we face the challenges of the fall out of the economic and social consequences of the global financial crisis, climate change, declining water and energy resources, threats to food security and health risks.” The challenge clearly for art and design colleges is as tutors how can we make it relevant? How do we define ESD to our students? There is no easy booklet to refer to, no great library of resources, set lessons or obvious guest lecturers which makes it both challenging & rewarding if we can play our part in trying to make students think about ESD and want to be active.
An important and motivating factor for Student’s is that their employability will be more attractive as employers look for graduates with skills to address sustainability and to tackle developing into a low carbon economy. Its also clear that Universities who are huge business’s within their own right are marketing themselves as green universities as they recognise that this is an attractive proposition to students and for research funding. Students are going to want to attend a university where sustainability is the core of the ethos of the education.Today’s graduates face upwards of 50+ yrs of employment where unless there are major changes they will suffer the consequences of deadly rise of global temperatures, water and energy wars, credit fuelled financial crisis, encroaching peak of oil production and a growing refugee crisis’s. By making ESD at the core of their education we can arm them with the tools to make a difference.
P17 to quote “ The global challenges faced today cannot be solved in isolation and to ensure a sustainable future the sector must share good practice and collaborate within and across institutions work with staff and students, student unions and extended partners.
The report outlines what a sustainability graduate would aim to be and it falls in line with the UN’s decade of ESD which aims to “create citizens and leaders who have skills in critical & creative thinking, conflict management, problem solving, respectful of the Earths resources and biodiversity and committed to a peaceful and democratic society.”
As Tutor how can I make a difference?
Become better informed
Find like minded tutors
Find out what universities policy is, will they support me
Set projects, which build in ESD
Get students more involved, setting projects which well inspire and be thought provoking.
I need to be pro-active i.e. get involved with LCC Green Week, guest lectures, show films to inspire debate about global issues. I can also see the many obstacles in the way i.e. crowded curriculum, trying to force it into subject being taught, my limited knowledge – will the university help make me better informed if there is limited commitment from the university?
However I feel it’s a fundamentally important issues that all tutors need to get behind ESD.
Hi Mark, I love your enthusiasm about this topic. It’s also great to hear how LCC is approaching sustainability. As the work I do sits outside the curriculum I wasn’t sure how much of an emphasis there was on sustainability within teaching – it sounds like LCC makes a concerted effort to put it at the centre of what they do.
There was one thing you said that I thought was really interesting and possibly quite relevant to my blog post on this topic:
“The challenge clearly for art and design colleges is as tutors how can we make it relevant?”
I wonder if you can give an example of how sustainability has been/is relevant in your own career/profession? I ask because I know you very much have one foot in industry and one foot in education and I’d love a practical example of what sustainability looks like in action in the creative industries. Does that makes sense?
I posted a video below my own blog post of an example I found of a creative business concerned with sustainability (in the broad sense) but I’m interested to learn about more examples of good practice in industry. Please do share if anything springs to mind!
Thanks, Hannah
Hello Mark, I like how you end with a manifesto, a rousing call to action addressed to yourself. The first line on your list of things to do is about becoming better informed. You might not have thought that far, but if you have, I wondered what you are going to start with (finding more about). There is so much one could research. I think that is one of my main problems.
I guess I could start ‘small’ and ‘just’ look at fashion but that in itself is such a massive subject: use of water in production of cotton, treatment and payment of garment workers, use of fur and leather … not forgetting the can of worms that is the representation of women etc etc.
So yes, I’d love to know what you will start with (I’m trying HTML tags which might go terribly wrong). And did you already have any films in mind that you think ‘inspire debate about global issues’? I came across this film by Ivo Gormley by accident on TV a while ago: http://www.hungertv.com/feature/ivo-gormley-us-now/
It was quite late at night … I thought at the time it was inspiring and thought-provoking but I have not seen it since. Not closely related to the environment but related somehow nevertheless. (And maybe I should get away from thinking sustainability just relates to the physical environment. I guess I already have, mentioning the representation of women above.)
Thanks for your replies C1
Hannah, I’m so pleased that were focusing on Sustainability on our PG Cert course. I feel that this topic is one of the most relevant for tutors and the more discussion, debate and research we all can do the better. Being a part time lecturer its very hard to influence a universities / colleges culture and curriculum, so far.
However interesting enough I’m doing a few days teaching / tutorials at Ravensbourne on the moving image course. Were the brief is “As a group your project is produce a 5 minute film for a proposed BBC Green Season. A pan BBC Initiative encompassing all aspects of the ‘green’ debate. It will include a diverse range of programming across all four main BBC Channels. The film must focus on the way that Londoners are doing their bit and making their City a better place live in. For example, that could mean making art from discarded objects, refashioning thrift shop clothing into cutting edge fashion items or running a City farm. Other ideas could be a profile of someone who belongs to an action group like Plane Stupid or a day in the life of someone who lives on
Food scavenged from supermarket bins.
As a director I have not directed any pure “green” projects but have made films for Coexist Foundation which supports children in conflict communities, the film focused on organic and free trade Ugandan coffee and a United Nations public service commercial which invites the viewer to consider the unforeseen ethical consequences from the consumption of fake goods.
Hi Beatrice – Your right it’s a huge subject that’s why I decided to try and read as much about sustainability as possible for this topic, some was heavy going but it inspired me and made me think about the wider issues both environmentally and socially which do or will affect us all in the future. Like so many things in life one hopes that the leaders, in politics, business and education will influence and make the changes required so that carbon admissions are reduced, water becomes more accessible, recycling is central to waste management, food isn’t wasted, trees are planted, chemicals in agriculture reduced, alternative modes of travel are developed.
What can I do? Its hard as I’m sure most of us try and do our bit to “save the planet” by cycling, avoiding using central heating turning off light bulbs, not wasting food, cycling – it important that everyone buys into this but ultimately the World leaders have to make the big decisions to create a better world.
However it’s not all doom and gloom and again when I get the opportunity, I’ll try and bring sustainability and green issues into some of my projects, a positive message, to influence and be thought provoking. A better education population ultimately will force the politicians to make the changes needed to create a more sustainable world.
Hi Mark, thank you for a post that is so engaged with the world “out there”. I love being in education but worry that we (the students and the tutors) get stuck in our education bubble and do not look out frequently enough.
I was somewhat overwhelmed by the reading and found that the only way to think about what I could do was to break down sustainability into areas (the areas suggested by the papers) and then decide what might be possible. I am looking at the projects already planned for this year and questioning the contextual references that we ask the students to look at, the physical materials we are using and as I also run a three or four one day projects I am going to change one of them to a green awareness/ problem solving day. In a funny/serious way.
Something that may encourage you is is a brilliant scheme run by our Foundation called Re-use/Exchange. Basically it is a materials resource for all students. At the end of each project the students dismantle their work and anything that can be used again is stored. Also, any donations from tutors or other folk gets added to the store. A lot of the time the materials may appear to be rubbish (egg boxes for example) but in the context of an art school they are useful. The students often buy boxes of stuff from pound shops when they only need one or two items and you would be truly amazed at how many pencils and rulers are left behind at the end of a term. It all goes into store to be used again.
So, the success of this scheme and the work done at LCC begs a very simple question: why is there such poor awareness across UAL about the good practices going on in the other colleges?
Hi Wendy
I agree where is UAL leadership promoting sustainability across the universities? There are silos within campus but no overall clear message which can be easily translated into teaching across the wide spectrum of courses. Education can make a difference its time for leadership, vision and supporting ESD across UAL. If nothing else if UAL were to have a strong sustainability ethos it could market itself as the green centre of excellence in London which would be attractive globally to students and future employers. I’m interested in your Foundation courses Re-Use / Exchange and look forward to seeing this when I come to visit Camberwell to do my peer observation