Monitoring Educational Organizations' Culture of Sustainable Consumption: Initiating and Evaluating Cultural Change in Schools and Universities

Abstract

Problem Statement: Patterns of consumption are considered as a main driver of unsustainable development. In the debate, education and educational organizations are unisonous considered as a key player to contribute to a more sustainable socialization of young consumers. Both schools and universities are challenged to become places and life-worlds in which sustainable consumption can be learned and experienced. The objective of this paper was to explore how educational organizations can effectively engage their members in bringing about the aspired transformations and monitoring their effects. Approach: The study used a conceptual approach that included three steps. Firstly, the concept of an educational organization's Culture Of Consumption (COC) was adopted as an analytical frame of reference. In a second step, methodological propositions for changing the organizational COC were discussed drawing on the concepts of mode-2 knowledge production and participatory change management. In a third step, existing tools and approaches to sustainability auditing in the educational context were screened and critically discussed against the background of recent innovations in mode-2 approaches to sustainability evaluation. Results: The findings revealed that while existing sets of indicators did adequately account for key consumption-related organizational operations and to some extent for educational goals and aspirations, they failed to tap the realm of underlying and tacit basic assumptions that substantiate the essence of an organizational COC. To remedy this shortcoming, additional indicators and modifications were proposed. As a synthesis, a synoptic framework of a monitoring system for an educational organization's COC was presented. Conclusion: The study's results highlighted the need to develop monitoring frameworks that go beyond assessing operative performances and pay greater attention to reflective, interpretative and deliberative capacities in educational organizations.

Assessing the Performance of Jordanian Educational Counselors in the Environment of Private and Government Schools toward Gifted Students

“…This is due to the fact that the educational counselors for gifted students stay at the same level without any further improvement and development of skills due to the shortages of training programs, seminars and workshops that must be offered on regular bases to educational counselors in both government and private school. This is in full agreement with (Fischer, 2011;Ahmad et al, 2010;and Bakar and Ishaka, 2010).…”

“…The results of this research indicates that gifted students in private Jordanian school environment perform better in a climate characterized by high expectations and the readiness to invest effort, the enjoyment of learning, a strong disciplinary climate and good teacher-student relations. Among these aspects, gifted students perception of counselor-student relations and classroom disciplinary environment display the strongest relationships with student performance (Maidin and Hamzah, 2010;Fischer, 2011).…”

Getting an empirical hold of thesustainable university: a comparative analysis of evaluation frameworks across 12 contemporary sustainability assessment tools

“…A growing number of diverse tools and methods have been developed and implemented by single institutions as well as campus alliances. These sustainability assessment tools are underpinned by different monitoring purposes, from ensuring compliance to predetermined standards to diagnosing the state of internal processes to providing data for competitive performance comparisons (Fischer 2011). In accordance with this plurality, different types of sustainability assessment tools exist for different monitoring purposes (Jenssen 2012).…”

Learning to change universities from within: a service-learning perspective on promoting sustainable consumption in higher education

“…The main idea behind the project was that organisational cultural change can be brought about by implementing different activities planned and designed collaboratively by practitioners and researchers to stimulate learning processes. In order to identify organisational domains affecting consumer learning, a framework of 'culture of consumption' (Fischer, 2011b) in educational organisations was developed that builds on Schein's (2004) concept of organisational culture and applies this to educational organisations and to the domain of consumption. A total of six domains with relevance for students' consumer learning were identified (Table 1).…”

“…A total of six domains with relevance for students' consumer learning were identified (Table 1). (Fischer, 2011a and2011b)…”