Can We Make the Changes? Insights from the Edge

Asking a question like 'can we make the changes' implies that changes are necessary. So why do we have to change and what? I engage with this question in a Sustainability in Higher Education context, based on my experiences working in transformative education with undergraduate engineers and working in academic staff development in a variety of Australian universities. Not being a part of any particular discipline means working on the edge, but it also offers opportunities to see gaps and try to find effective ways of bridging them. Working in academic development means thinking about what teachers need to know, do and be in order to face the acknowledged challenges of teaching in the 21 st century. Futures thinking offers a meta-dimension to the resulting insights, which may be useful to other educators on similar paths. This paper aims to contribute to this discourse, which would include attempts to reach consensus as well as engaging in 'respectful dissensus'. Engaging with sustainability is a marathon, not a sprint. There is the prerequisite of support from the top and the need to understand 'resistings' to change which include recent aggressive arguments that sustainability is "eco-corruption" (Wood, 2010) and "corroding the curriculum" (Williams, 2010). The most challenging responses are transformative, based on deep understandings that we need to envision a sustainable world and take responsibility for creating it.

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