Exploring dynamic processes within the ecological university: a focus on the adaptive cycle

Abstract

The university-as-ecosystem concept provides a framework for the analysis of the dynamic maintenance of sustainable pedagogies within the university. Application of Holling’s adaptive cycle, used to describe the active constructive and destructive processes of stabilisation and destabilisation within an ecosystem, is explored here in the context of the ecological university. The cycle predicts that disruptions to the system initiate a period of reorganisation. The concept of nested cycles (a panarchy) is explored in the higher education teaching environment here for the first time. Crucially, this shows how adaptive cycles within ecosystems occur at different scales of time and space that might align with different levels within the university–the individual, the department/discipline, and the institution. These levels need to be in communication with each other in order to develop in ways that are complementary and mutually supportive. As decisions about teaching are made with a mixture of objective, evidence-based reasoning alongside more subjective and affective thinking, a degree of epistemological pluralism is required to support the development of post-abyssal thinking to promote consilience across the ecology of knowledges. The potential of an epistemologically plural ecological lens is discussed in the context of university teaching.