Transdisciplinarity and reflective practice in sustainable development learning

Abstract

Using various extracts from the reflective commentaries of MSc students, this article explores how transdisciplinarity and reflective practice operate in the programme. It shows how learners managed the uncertainties of sustainable development through regular critical and evaluative reflections. Students were able to apprehend the several worlds making up the sustainable development project and their own personal learning journey through the various competing, complementary and occasionally contradictory perspectives, modes of learning, sources of knowledge and information. One conceptual device facilitating this process was offering an understanding of sustainable development as constituting a ‘dialogue of values’, an approach that effectively invites students to square the metaphorical circle - i.e. broadly reconciling (ecological) sustainability with (economic) development.

Introduction

Transdisciplinarity concerns that which is simultaneously between disciplines, across different disciplines and beyond all disciplines. Transdisciplinarity is simultaneously an attitude and a form of action.

(Klein, 2004)

Sustainable development is multifaceted, complex and apparently contradictory. It requires an approach to learning that is simultaneously reflexive, hybrid, creative, inquiring and heterogeneous. No one discipline can offer anything more than a partial perspective on a process and practice that is essentially emergent. Understanding sustainable development, therefore, requires generating knowledge similar to Gibbons et al's (1994) Mode 2 - a contingent knowledge informed by multiple stakeholders including universities, corporations, think-tanks, the media, community groups, etc., who contribute differing skills, ideas and expertise to the whole. Consequently, learning for sustainable development ought to generate a disposition that combines theory with practice and a philosophy that is both pragmatic and reflective.

Confusions around the concept of sustainable development are made worse by academics devising new definitions, policies and proposals that apparently try to reconcile the unreconcilable : namely development (economic growth) with sustainability (living within ecological limits). This means that many practitioners, including students starting the MSc Sustainable Development at University of Exeter, search in vain for certainties they perhaps experienced in their first degree, their professional practice or personal ethical commitments.

Sustainable development Masters study at Exeter

The MSc at Exeter was launched in 2005 after an 18 month development period. In its first four years it grew from 15 students to 62. The course began as a joint multidisciplinary venture between the School of Geography, Archaeology and Earth Resources (SoGAER) and the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, and moved from being multi to transdisciplinary. The programme is highly flexible, being delivered on a modular part- and full-time basis, by blended and online distance learning and with identified pathways in communities, climate change and, in association with WWF-International, sustainability leadership. An option of undertaking a 60 credit dissertation by research or dissertation by professional practice has been available since 2008.

Students come from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds including geography, classics, film making, planning, finance, journalism, community development, education, permaculture, landscape architecture, economics, design, development studies, english literature and philosophy. Its flexible nature has enabled some participants to study face-to-face on campus and at a distance, from China, Nepal, Russia, Morocco, Germany, Greece, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and the Caribbean. Participants' ages range from early 20s to mid 50s.

From the beginning an inter-professional, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue emerged within the programme. One core module, Perspectives on Sustainable Development (see Blewitt, 2008), voiced this heterogeneity by examining the various ‘takes’ that sustainable development is subjected to. These range from Lomborg's environmental scepticism to aboriginal Traditional Ecological Knowledge, from eco-feminism to environmental management systems, from virtual reality to the economics of climate change and from the Gaia hypothesis to African American struggles for environmental justice in Louisiana's ‘cancer alley’. Students have debated, explored and critiqued this intellectual kaleidoscope in small classroom, groups as well as individually and collectively online. They have done so in real and virtual time and have used visual, aural, verbal, theoretical, practical, introspective and dialogic methods. Ratner's (2004) notion of a ‘dialogue of values’ and Robinson's (2004) attempt to ‘square the circle’ were offered to students as a guide and intellectual compass to help them navigate their way through the issues and debates.

Reflective practice

The ‘Perspectives’ module also required students to appraise their learning journey by keeping a reflective journal. Many did so via a WebCT learning log facility and, following a synoptic review, were summatively assessed on the depth of their engagement. Unsurprisingly, some students found the reflective process novel and quite alien. Some sought simple solutions, but later acknowledged the benefit of undertaking primary and secondary reflections. Indeed, one mature student, an engineer, believed the reflective journal was the most important element of the course. Others were less enthusiastic, but as Moon (2004) writes, reflective learning is a continuum accommodating those willing to modify their cognitive structures and those unable (or unwilling) to evaluate their learning processes.

The reflective learning experience was, for many students, simultaneously profound, difficult, transformative, stimulating and rewarding. Critical engagement with concepts of ‘dialogue’ often led to genuinely deep learning. For example, one student revised her thoughts on sustainable development three times in twelve months, concluding,

“The dialogue of values' concept is pertinent as long as it is inclusive; were all groups included in the dialogue? Are some groups listened to more than others? What about ethnic minorities, woman, the poor, indigenous people? These groups have regularly been neglected and therefore are setting up their own ‘dialogues’ to ensure their points are heard. Thus a different dialogue is required for each region/country as it must be considered that without good global dialogue would any SD be achieved? Values, issues and ideals are easily formulated but need to be put into practice. Much time is wasted through consultation so less talk and more action is required to identify whether SD is going anywhere”

Others were wary that dialogue would simply lead to talk rather than action, without acknowledging that dialogue could be productive of new possibilities. Internal dialogue was also common. When examining the role of measures, indicators and metaphors one learner wrote:

“Due to the diversity of values, culture and social structures within geographic locations and across national borders, developing social justice indicators seems particularly hard. A workable universal standard of social justice measurement still evades modern society. However, I wonder if it is possible to develop a similar social justice analysis approach through the use of indicators and metaphor. Rather than using land consumption as a measurement of the consumption of human time, quality of life, standard of living, equity, opportunity, life expectancy, etc., perhaps length of life would prove more powerful. In this way the number of human lives needed to maintain one person's, groups', nations', organizations' standard of living, quality of life, consumption of goods, equity and opportunity could be judged. Thus, the question becomes ‘how many human lives does it cost to maintain one persons/group/nations standard of living?”

Although transdisciplinarity challenged many learners, those with academic backgrounds in areas such as tourism or sociology or whose professional experience had brought them into contact with many different groups, felt more comfortable when moving beyond familiar comfort zones. Indeed, exploring disciplinary gaps, limitations and connectivities was a major factor in both face-to-face delivery teaching and the design of the virtual learning environment accessed by distance learners. Awkward questions and multi-modal learning became a fact of life with images, visual and verbal metaphors, analogies and stories becoming entwined with more ‘scientific’ or academic articles. One student noted,

“Initially, I struggled with what felt like a constant jump from economic, social and environmental issues and could not see the thread that sews them together. However, now what seems as significant as the different issues is the thread itself and perhaps this is what is meant by ‘border-work’; identifying the links between disciplines and nurturing ways of strengthening those links to create a more holistic understanding of sustainability. One further challenge I faced was the teaching approach of this module which was very much based on developing my own interpretation, understanding and meaning of the content. Again, having come from traditional learning which largely involved submissive acquisition of knowledge and information through lectures, the constant questioning of what I thought did not feel like academic studying. I found this approach extremely difficult and challenging.”

Intelligence reframed?

Universities tend to focus on developing the cognitive and linguistic to the exclusion of emotional, spatial, kinaesthetic, creative and intuitive intelligences. But as Gardener reiterates in Intelligence Reframed (1999), education should enable us to understand our several worlds - of the self, the world of human artefacts, of biology and of the natural environment. Education can be advanced through reworking insights from art, folklore and the movies as well as from the physical and social sciences. A variety of literacies and skills need to be pursued which further our understanding of the important contemporary questions, topics and themes. Gardener observes that deciding how to employ our intelligences is not so much about brain power as a question of values which are invariably bound into the magnitude of the problems we face and the scales at which we operate.

One problem for sustainability practitioners, learners and educators, are the conceptual tools and language(s) used to shape our worlds and ourselves. As one student noted the problem may not be that we lack the language but rather,

“…there are so many different ways of talking about it [sustainable development] that this in itself causes problems. Different discourses start from different premises, draw on different data, have different internal logics, are informed by different value systems, reach for different end goals. In order to grasp the magnitude of the problem and make sensible choices for action we need to be able to understand these different discourses - otherwise we will keep talking past each other.”

Interestingly, many students inserted diagrams, photographs, videos, satirical cartoons, sketches and drawings into their learning journals. Words were not enough as intellectual precision made way for emotional and intuitive truths. Bowers (1995) has written of the need to challenge and replace mechanistic root metaphors of university education and many students concurred almost in spite of themselves. However, there was sometimes a suspicion that sustainable development was, itself, a metaphor.

“Over the course of my studies I have come to think of sustainable development as being like a rainbow. Primarily the rainbow is never the same, with each person who sees the rainbow looking at it from a slightly different angle. (…) The rainbow is something out ‘there’, an untouchable object that is somehow distorted from reality. Akin to this, too often our connection with the environment is forgotten, perhaps because it has always just been there. It seems we take the environment for granted because we position ourselves as a spectator rather than a participant.”

The value of reflective practice was clearly evident when someone came from another culture and was relatively unfamiliar with western developments, approaches to learning and/or conceptualisations of sustainable development. For those with East Asian backgrounds, reflective practice often seemed akin to meditation - a practical and intuitive way of making sense of very different life-worlds and experiences. In discussing gated communities and their relationship to sustainable urban regeneration, community cohesion and social capital, one African student wrote,

“This was the first time I had heard a negative insinuation about gated communities. For as long as I remember, gated communities in cities I have lived in Nigeria have always been desirable because they provide genuine security to the upper class as well as expatriates. It may be embarrassing to say but I had no inkling that it could be associated with ‘unsustainability’. My immediate reaction to why houses were built without tall fences and gates like back home was that the western government provided adequate security therefore residents had no security concerns. Whereas, in the Niger delta in Nigeria for instance where militancy and kidnapping has been on the rise since 2007, there was greater need for individuals to secure their lives and property. (…) I realised that conflict increases as a result of a reduced sense of community which can lead to negative relations between neighbours. (…) Gated communities allow those who can afford it, to opt out of shared public services which could have a harmful effect in terms of the urban economy, social coherence and solidarity, building liveable cities and democracy. This significant learning enabled me to appreciate that gated communities could indeed have a dramatic impact on the long term sustainability of cities.”

This reflection was shared in class and stimulated considerable discussion about the cultural implications of sustainable development.

Conclusion

Transcultural, transdisciplinary and inter-professional learning has been a key element in the MSc programme at Exeter. Coherence is the ‘end in view’ of transdisciplinarity (Klein, 2004; Horlick-Jones and Sime, 2004; Max-Neef, 2005,) and is essential to sustainability practitioners because of the risks, uncertainties and complexities they engage with and should not be mistaken with unity of knowledge or perception. Indeed, coherence emerged through students' meta-cognitive activity, i.e. their reflective practice, being the vehicle for productive explorations between different disciplines and experiences. As students became more attuned to, and adept at, reflective thought and writing, the clearer the relationship between sustainability and transformative learning became. A sustainable education cannot divorce the personal from the professional, the academic from the experiential, and the emotional from the rational.