Student-Centered Learning and Sustainability: Solution or Problem?

Abstract

While discussions surrounding education for sustainable development (ESD) are diverse, most scholars and policy makers view student-centered learning (SCL) as axiomatic. In contrast, we argue that promoting SCL potentially stymies educational contributions to sustainability by extending a culturally specific belief in ontological individualism. We first highlight that countries committed to SCL tend to be dominated by ontological individualism and then show that these same countries score lower on a range of social and environmental sustainability indices. Moreover, countries where the belief in ontological individualism reigns tend to be liberal market economies, an institutional arrangement largely ineffective or even detrimental to social and environmental sustainability. In raising these issues, we seek less to provide a definitive account of the key relationships than to catalyze a deeper conversation about how to reimagine the taken-for-granted logics of education as the sustainability imperative looms.

Social mindfulness for global environmental sustainability?

“…Our findings suggest SoMi can be a useful predictor for achieving global sustainability, rather than local sustainability. Our findings and those reported in several recent studies ( 5 , 6 ) thus further underscore that people’s mindset is perhaps even more important than Van Doesum et al. ( 1 ) suggest, particularly when we turn attention to combating climate crisis and environmental problems at a global scale.…”

Student-centred learning in higher education in times of Covid-19: A critical analysis

“…As the same authors explain, SCL emerged with teacher-centered learning (TCL) declining, becoming the construction of pedagogy dichotomous (SCL/TCL). However, the conception behind this study is not in line with the idea of students taking distance from social relations posed by Komatsu et al (2021). In considering different forms of SCL, I recognize the importance of social relations created by methods such as (group) project-based learning or (group) problem-based learning.…”

Facing the Anthropocene: Comparative Education as Sympoiesis

“…Rooted in the Platonic-Christian view of human society, modern(ist) schooling has been used to instill the idea that we, humans, are special and superior to other species and the rest of the natural world. For centuries, education institutions have perpetuated the logic of human exceptionalism through curriculum and pedagogies (such as child-or student-centered learning), while justifying the hierarchical idea of "man over nature" relationship (for critique, see Common Worlds Research Collective 2020; Komatsu et al 2021). Its Cartesian logic divides culture and nature, mind and body, self and other, in deliberate and systematic ways, positioning teachers and students as the agentic all-knowing subjects and the world "out there" as the inert matter to be studied, managed, and acted upon at will (Stengers 2018;Common Worlds Research Collective 2020).…”