4th Global Conference

Tuesday 5th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 6: Educating Rita
Chair: Sabina Lautensach

Reclaiming Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Urban Environmental Reconstruction
Mark Rigstad
Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

In this paper, I defend John Dewey’s Progressive Era conception of democratic public education as an approach to the problem of urban heavy metal pollution. Dewey’s theory is an especially appropriate because it is (a) naturalistic, (b) socially progressive, (c) association-centered, and (d) conflict-preventive.
(a) According to Dewey, all genuinely educative experience arises from “the native structure of our body, organs, and their functional activities . . . and their direct interaction with the environment.” The starting point and outer limit of post-industrial environmental education is the fact that people are not capable of learning to flourish in the midst of heavy metal contamination.
(b) Education, according to the Deweyan pragmatic model, is a social instrument for “social reconstruction,” which involves human adaptation within historically changing environments. Updating this model, I call for a new mode of public education that can foster a critical process of environmental reconstruction.
(c) The most important tasks of democratic public education are often those taken up out of school. Free inquiry alone is insufficient to ensure that increases in scientific knowledge will promote common interests. It is also necessary, as Dewey urged, to create institutions that help to distribute scientific findings to interested parties when market forces alone fail to do so. Democratic public education must therefore be “association-centered,” establishing communications and common interests between schools, churches, local government agencies, and private enterprises.
(d) Market-based democracies tend to make individuals responsible for identifying their needs and problems. Yet, in the face of invisible harms and liabilities, public institutions created for the purpose of disseminating scientific knowledge are also socially necessary. Association-centered public education must seek to make citizens aware of their environmental health risks, and to make businesses aware of their legal liabilities.

Incorporating Sustainability into Accounting Education
James Hazelton and Matthew Haigh
Department of Accounting and Finance, Macquarie University, New South Wales

This paper chronicles an action research project seeking to incorporate the principles of sustainability into higher education. Both researchers are lecturers in accounting departments in Australian universities and implemented changes in the accounting curriculum. Researcher one introduced sustainability-related material as part of a core technical unit and modified an elective unit which enabled students to further study sustainability. Researcher two modified an existing unit to enable students to critically evaluate their employment options. Both approaches had some success. However, a key difficulty encountered in both projects was the vocational orientation of the student cohort. We conclude that content considering ‘sustainability’ needs framing in terms of employment-related skills if it is to attract a wide range of students. In the longer term, institutional and student paradigms must change in order for such offerings to be considered ‘core’.

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A Global Studies Abroad Program Sustaining Human Societies and the Natural Environment
Michael Tarrant
Warnell School of Forest Resources, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Studies Abroad in the South Pacific and the Caribbean (www.uga.edu/oie/southpacific) is an administrative umbrella for a set of unique and challenging study abroad programs focused on questions of how humans interact with the natural environment and how that relates to conservation, sustainable development, and human populations. At a time when employers are increasingly seeking people that are globally connected and with international experiences, our dynamic learning environment provides opportunities for students to live and participate in a diverse global community. As global citizens, Americans are recognizing the need to balance economic, social, and environmental demands. Issues such as global warming, resource depletion, biodiversity preservation, or environmental pollution transcend national boundaries and our responses will accordingly need to be not only international but also global in perspective. Furthermore, such problems and their solutions not only have complex ecological and biophysical bases but are also dependent on understanding the social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Sustaining human societies and natural environments has an integrated, multidisciplinary approach that is relevant for students of all majors. Accordingly, our courses and programs are all interdisciplinary in design, our field activities reflect this, and program faculty all have academic histories that speak to this commitment.

Our core mission is:
* To provide the highest quality, most intellectually and personally challenging and satisfying study abroad experience possible for both students and staff.
* To provide programs accessible to a diverse body of students by keeping them as affordable as possible and providing courses suitable for students of all majors and backgrounds.
* To use the programs as an education framework for developing a body of future scholars and leaders who understand the complex, multi-faceted, global nature of human-environment problems. This reflects our philosophy that the global conservation of natural resources and application of solutions is not just an issue or problem for scientists or politicians, but requires a well-educated and informed citizenry with a global perspective, sophisticated environmental understandings and sense of responsibility and stewardship.
* To guide students to high personal standards of global citizenship, environmental stewardship and inter-cultural competence. We believe that students themselves are significantly enriched not only academically but also personally by well-managed international experiences, and these are areas where we hope to have a significant impact on a student's own philosophy and values.
* To be at the forefront of redefining study abroad as not only a valid academic enterprise, but as an extraordinary one that far surpasses the impact of traditional campus-based instruction.

At present, we are addressing this last most ambitious mission by testing new ways to deliver core curriculum, increasingly integrating service learning and students into real research activities, and using international education programs as a platform for developing large scale, ambitious international environmental research projects. We are also increasingly engaged in development of study abroad as a solution in-and of-itself itself to ecological issues, as a mechanism for sustainable, low impact forms of tourism. Past students often use their study abroad experience with us to explore options for international internships, employment opportunities, and independent travel. We run programs in Antarctica, Australia, Belize, the Fiji Islands, Hawai'i, and New Zealand because they are ideal places to study conservation and management of natural environments and resources: there are unique flora and fauna, stunning ecological diversity, and complex environmental issues.