I’ve just been rereading Sharon Stein’s paper – Universities Confronting Climate Change: Beyond Sustainable Development and Solutionism. In this paper she critiques some of the green washing, techno-solutionism and colonial practices that can happen in higher education. As an alternative, she emphasises how important it is to make space for critical engagement with complexity that sees multiple possible paths to socially and ecologically just futures. I think this is a good way of thinking about the challenges we face in designing higher education curricula.

What this leads me to wonder is how we stay with this complexity and avoid simplistic solutionism without drifting into inertia or ‘anything goes’ approaches. After all responding to our current ecological meta crisis is intensely urgent. So here are my ideas about directions to take now that connect urgent action with openness to complexity:

1. Our curricula need to engage all of our students with social justice and deep consideration of their own experiences of privilege and marginalisation. Our students shouldn’t leave us thinking it’s acceptable to take more than their fair share of carbon budgets or ecological resources. Epstemic justice is an important part of the picture here, whose knowledge practices are valued, whose are excluded, and what is lost because of that? We need to model justice in our own behaviour to be credible in teaching it. The priviledged universities need to put the highest priority on responding to global challenges and their injustices, not on metrics or league tables, or shiny careers.
2. We need curricula that enable our students to find their courage and to work well with the strong emotions that come with facing the dangers and injustices of our world.
3. All of our students need opportunties to grasp and work with the complexity and unpredictability of global challenges and to resist simplistic solutionism, while still searching for actions that might contribute to making things better. An understanding of the social, historical and cultural underpinnings of these global challenges is central.
4. Our curricula need to enable students need to be ready to act and engage ethically in the boundary spaces between disciplines, communities, cultures, and world views.
5. We need to make sure students leave us being able to understand the science of the ecological crises. They need the capacity to see how bias pervades our datafied world, and to see through disinformation and the polarising positions presented across our media. We need them to understand that the narrow futures presented to us as inevitable are actually social constructs that they can challenge and imagine otherwise.
6. We and our students need to be part of the positive work towards a liveable world. It’s easy for academics to fall into just critiquing existing practice and perspectives without either seeing the value in existing positions (despite their limitations) or contributing to better ways forward.
7. We need to approach all these educational endeavours in the most equitable and inclusive ways possible. All of our students and staff should be valued and have genuine opportunities to flourish.

Photo by Benjamin Lizardo on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune