Engaging Mindfully With the Commons: A Case of Caribbean Teachers’ Experience With ESD

Abstract

A study of teachers’ responses to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in a graduate course in Literature and Education for Sustainable Development, at the School of Education, The University of the West Indies, Mona, revealed that ESD can change indifference to the “commons” to one of mindfulness about local and global sustainability. Through a combination of three main teaching approaches, these teachers have become more aware of sustainability issues and have been motivated to take action to address these. Equally important, these teachers have continued to attend to sustainability and so have reoriented their teaching for sustainability.

Notes

The recent Coursera course (2014), “How to Change the World” led by Professor Michael Roth at Wesleyan University has been most helpful through the discussion and video lecturers on the concept of the “commons” and “social goods.”

Pope Francis' 2013 response to the tragedy of Lampedusa (http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-on-lampedusa-the-globalization-of-indifference).

“I went to this and there were 100 students max—explained i was a journo to the boys in blue and their words were ‘There's some students waving and some of them are shouting … as you can tell, the Metropolitan Police is not that worried.’ Think the punch was brutal, and it looks like the cops were not following procedure at all, but sadly I don't think it's a national student uprising in the making, Alistair Sloan, 2014 (https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/james-mcash/student-protests-this-week-mark-handover-to-new-generation).