Environmental education is shaped in response to societal and environmental realities and it reflects new interests and demands that enable sustainable transformations. In recent years, the concept of resilience has taken an increasingly significant role among practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and especially within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite its growing importance, the literature surrounding the concept of resilience has struggled to find a consensus on definitions and measurements and therefore may be easily misconceived. In this avenue, a consensus among varying perspectives of resilience may be better achieved by understanding the interaction between students' prior knowledge (pre-conception) of resilience and the knowledge provided by educators. Based on the case study of five courses that teach the concept of this paper firstly identifies and discusses three common misconceptions among students, focusing on the concept of socio-ecological resilience. These include misconceptions to the value judgment, adaptability, and the costs that are relevant to the concept of resilience. Secondly, this paper discusses educational tools derived from scenario planning and theoretical foundations underlying empirical approaches to the concept of resilience, which may benefit educators in enabling critical thinking to address such common misconceptions. This paper may contribute to ongoing discussions in the environmental education literature, specifically to both pedagogy and curriculum focusing on the concept of resilience.
Purpose
This paper aims to describe how a sustainability-focused program in higher education can provide training and key experiences for implementing transdisciplinary approaches. The case is a fieldwork-based training course called the Global Field Exercise (GFE) at the Graduate Program in Sustainability Science, The University of Tokyo. The GFE is a methodological training course that emphasizes generating locally relevant research questions on sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach
This research is a case study regarding how a sustainability science program can offer a fieldwork-based training course that focuses on a transdisciplinary approach. Five students from diverse academic disciplines and cultural backgrounds participated in the GFE in QwaQwa where they conducted semi-structured interviews with six local entrepreneurs to identify the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship. The authors investigated the learning process and outcomes of the students through participatory observation in preparatory meetings, daily reflection sessions during fieldwork and a content analysis of feedback reports.
Findings
Four learning outcomes of the students were suggested: the reexamination of assumptions, managing misunderstanding and miscommunication, mutual learning and being empathic toward the local people.
Research limitations/implications
This paper suggests three key opportunistic experiences for the transdisciplinary approach: discuss the normative dimension of sustainability; build intersubjectivity among team members and adopt methodological pluralism; and become empathetic to diverse stakeholder groups to facilitate the cogeneration of knowledge.
Originality/value
How to design training on a transdisciplinary approach in educational programs remains an area for further exploration. This study addresses this knowledge gap by establishing a link between sustainability education and sustainability in practice.
This study examines the process and outcome of institutional change from a self-governing common-pool resources (CPR) model into state-reinforced self-governance. Empirical evidence is drawn from the Philippines' experience in decentralizing the management of communal irrigation systems (CIS) to local farmers through Irrigators Associations (IAs). The field data were collected through archival research, a review of secondary documents, and key informant interviews in Sagada, Philippines. Through institutional analysis, the study confirms earlier empirical findings that self-governing bodies can work well with the state provided they do not impinge on the autonomy of resource users. However, user expectations regarding the costs and benefits of state-reinforced self-governance affect its likelihood of success. Drawing from the case study, changes in the value and distribution of transaction costs are the two biggest challenges to sustaining state-reinforced IAs. The first challenge is the introduction of membership and irrigation fees, a huge shift from the non-monetary contribution that farmers were accustomed to. The second challenge is the change in the allocation and distribution of transaction costs or, simply, who bears what cost. Further research is recommended to expand the current discourse on state-reinforced self-governance to include more in-depth transaction cost analysis.
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