Assessing the impact of a program designed to develop sustainability leadership amongst staff members in higher education institutes: a case study from a community of practice perspective

Abstract

This study focuses on the impact of a sustainability leadership development program (SLDP) designed to develop staff members as leaders who encourage sustainability practices within institutions of higher education (IHE). Using the framework of community of practice (CoP), we explored the program’s contribution by interviewing 16 staff members who had attended the program. At the individual level, we found that the SLDP provided participants with opportunities to learn from and with other members of the CoP and to engage them in debate about the various meanings of ‘sustainability’, increasing their environmental awareness and their environmental involvement within the IHE’s community. At the institutional level, the SLDP disseminated the college’s socio-environmental mission statement, increased its administration’s commitment and involvement, served as a platform for addressing local socio-environmental problems and initiated an Education-for-Sustainability (EfS) activists’ network. However, the participants indicated that the SLDP had limited impact on the environmentalism of other staff members and that the on-going mentoring and support from the college administration was insufficient. This study highlights the importance of such EfS professional programs to the development of both staff members and entire institutions as sustainability leaders. It also suggests ways to increase staff involvement in institutional EfS discourse.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• community of practice
• education for sustainability
• professional development
• sustainability leadership development program

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our participants, the academic and administrative staff of GVC who attended the SLDP, for their cooperation with us and agreement to be included in our study. We appreciate the funding of the Kibbutzim College of Education which supported our study. We deeply thank Prof. Amos Dreyfus, whose thoughtful comments and excellent suggestions were instrumental in developing and improving this paper.

Notes

1. Adopting Bonnett’s (2002) perspective of sustainability as an ecocentric worldview of human–nature relations, in this study we use the term EfS, which views sustainability as ‘a frame of mind’ (Bonnett 2002, p. 12), rather than the term Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) which views sustainable development ‘as a policy’ (Bonnett 2002, 11). However, in some parts of the literature review we have sometimes used the term ESD if this was the term used by the researchers in the study we describe.

2. A pseudonym.