This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being. Elizabeth A. Lange advocates for a new approach to environmental and sustainability education, that of rethinking the Western way of knowing and being and engendering a frank discussion about the societal elements that are generating climate, environmental, economic, and social issues. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous and life-giving cultures, the book covers educational theory, transformation stories of adult learners, social and economic critique, and visions of changemakers. Each chapter also has a strong pedagogical element, with entry points for learners and embodied practices and examples of taking action at micro/meso/macro levels woven throughout. Overall, this book enacts a relational approach to transformative sustainability education that draws from post humanist theory, process thought, relational ontology, decolonization theory, Indigenous philosophy, and a spirituality that builds a sense of sacred towards the living world. Written in an imaginative, storytelling manner, this book will be a great resource for formal and nonformal environmental and sustainability educators.

Business Schools, Leadership and Sustainable Development Goals: The Future of Responsible Management Education is the sixth book in the series Citizenship and Sustainability in Organizations. It contains chapters from various scholars and practitioners in the field of responsible management education (RME). Through introspection, through celebrating successes and learning from failures (retrospection) and through looking forward (prospection), it aims to inspire a future of management education and leadership development that demonstrates its relevance to sustainable development. In doing so, it touches upon the grand societal challenges of our time, as illustrated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and discusses how business schools, and other providers of management education, could and should contribute to overcoming these challenges. It argues that management education needs to educate future leaders in a way that no longer hampers but truly accelerates the process of sustainable development. This book offers a collection of thought-provoking ideas, vivid stories (including personal accounts and experiences), and appealing and engaged forecasts, visions and ideas about management education and leadership development for sustainability. Hence, it is a must-read for anyone interested in or involved in RME.

This book is a narrative of conversations between two professors, with different backgrounds, academic disciplines, life experiences, and from different continents. It shows how their discourse has brought them to a single destination defined by a mutual interest in the social purposes of universities, and a hope in common that their academic efforts will somehow do good in the world. The seventeen internationally-agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide focus for aspirations and plans regarding sustainability, but notably, the SDGs’ targets and indicators rarely provide detailed accounts of who is expected to enact change. This book addresses the role of higher education in this context and explores the social purposes of universities and their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. It presents an academic analysis of this complex situation, based on insights from published literature on higher education, and the personal but very different experiences of two professors with this shared interest.

This edited collection aims to provoke discussion around the most important question for contemporary higher education – what kind of education (in terms of purpose, pedagogy and policy) is needed to restore the health and wellbeing of the planet and ourselves now and for generations to come? The book contains contributions from colleagues at a single UK University, internationally recognised for its approach to sustainability education. Introducing a conceptual framework called the ‘Paradox Model’, the book explores the tensions that underpin the challenge of developing sustainability in higher education in the 21st century. It asks probing questions about the purpose of higher education in the 21st century given growing concerns in relation to planetary safety and justice and calls for a rethinking of educational purpose. It draws upon the theory and practice of education and explores how these can develop an understanding of sustainability pedagogies in practice. Finally, it delivers thought-provoking discussion on what constitutes a ‘good’ higher education that meets the needs of a world in crisis. Drawing on a planetary health lens, the book concludes with a ‘manifesto’ that brings together the key insights from the contributing authors. This will be an engaging volume for academics and educators from a wide range of disciplines in higher educational settings interested in translating sustainability theory into educational practice.

Science and technology have made the modern world possible, but also created all the global problems that threaten our future: the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass extinction of species, environmental degradation, overpopulation, lethal modern war, and the menace of nuclear weapons. Nicholas Maxwell, world-renowned philosopher of science and author of 14 books, argues that all these problems have come about because humans have solved only the first of two great problems of learning — how to acquire scientific knowledge and technological know-how — but not the second — how to create a civilized, wise world.The key disaster of our times is that we have science without wisdom. At present, universities all over the world are devoted to the pursuit of specialized knowledge and technology, or 'knowledge-inquiry'. Maxwell contends that they need to be radically transformed so that their basic function becomes to help humanity tackle global problems, with a more rigorous and socially beneficial perspective he calls 'wisdom-inquiry'. The World Crisis — And What to Do About It spells out in detail the changes that need to be made to academic inquiry, why they need to be made, and how they would enable universities to help humanity actively and effectively tackle and solve current global problems.Related Link(s)

Globally, universities are the subject of public debate and disagreement about their private benefits or public good, and the key policy vehicle for driving human capital development for competitive knowledge economies. Yet what is increasingly lost in the disagreements about who should pay for university education is a more expansive imaginary which risks being lost in reductionist contemporary education policy. This is compounded by the influences on practices of students as consumers, of a university education as a private benefit and not a public good, of human capital outcomes over other graduate qualities, and of unfettered markets in education. Policy reductionism comes from a narrow vision of the activities, products, and objectives of the University and a blinkered vision of what is a knowledge society. Human Development and Capabilities, therefore, imaginatively applies a theoretical framework to universities as institutions and social practices from human development and the capability approach, attempting to show how universities might advance equalities rather than necessarily widen them, and how they can contribute to a sustainable and democratic society. Picking through the capability approach for human development, in relation to Universities, this book highlights and explores three main ideas: theoretical insights to advance thinking about human development and higher education Policy implications for the responsibilities and potential contributions of universities in a period of significant global change Operationalising a New Imaginary This fresh take on the work and purpose of the University is essential reading for anyone interested in university education, capability approach and human development; particularly postgraduates, University policy makers, researchers and academics in the field of higher education.