Environmental Studies
In the past decade or so, an array of scholars representing all major academic disciplines has begun to argue that educators are not only implicated in the crisis of sustainability but have an ethical responsibility to address it in their work. Peter Madsen, a scholar of applied ethics, argues that "universities and professional schools have a moral obligation to foster environmental awareness," first, because such institutions exist "to educate people and to conduct research in ways that are useful in realizing societal values" and second, because such institutions are in a unique position to promote environmental awareness (76), which is ultimately essential for our very survival. With such ethical justification and obvious practical imperatives, many scholars – notably David Orr and C. A. Bowers – have begun to re-imagine the undergraduate curriculum such that it not only incorporates the notion of ecological awareness – what Orr calls "ecological literacy" – but it also challenges basic assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity that lie at the heart of conventional undergraduate education.
These scholars have helped illuminate the ways in which contemporary models of curriculum and instruction as well as definitions of knowledge rest on modernist beliefs in positivism and objectivity that in turn rely on the prevailing Western conception of the autonomous, thinking self that I have challenged in this webtext. They call for us to redefine and restructure knowledge and curriculum and indeed to rethink the very purposes of education. Orr states the matter bluntly: "We now need an ecological enlightenment which revolutionizes our world and worldviews" – a revolution in "thought, perception, and behavior" (145). Education is the vehicle for such an enlightenment, which he sees as akin to the Enlightenment, arising from 18th Century philosophy and science, that reshaped the modern world. The work of scholars like Orr, Bowers, and Madsen, among others, offers philosophically sound and pragmatically workable models for the kind of pedagogy and curriculum I am imagining here.
Teaching With Technology for a Sustainable Future | Works Cited