Education for and through sustainability: Toward interdisciplinary dialogue

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that sustainability education needs innovative, interdisciplinary, integrated, problem-based and transformative approaches to learning and teaching. However, in order for students to be able to appreciate, reflect on, and synthesize different disciplinary languages, content, methods, ways of knowing, and thinking these differences need to be made explicit and opportunities to interrogate these knowledge(s) and methods need to be embedded in the curriculum from the outset. Dialogue, discussion, and exchange of ideas are core sustainability principles that provide fertile ground for devising and delivering this type of interdisciplinary sustainability education, requiring a shift away from content-based shallow approaches to one of process based, participatory deep learning. The result is to teach less ‘about’ and more ‘for’ or ‘through’ sustainability. This chapter outlines the development and on-going evaluation of two university wide electives delivered by at RMIT University, Australia. Both courses-one fieldwork based, the other offered fully online-foreground interdisciplinary understandings and dialogue as key to education for and through sustainability.