A Failure Reveals Success

Abstract

SummaryAlthough environmental education and education for sustainable development have become well-established areas of scholarship and practice, there has not been a similar development focused on "industrial ecology education." A review of the historical context and guiding philosophies for each of these areas finds many similarities, as well as key differences. Environmental education traces its modern roots to the idealism of the 1960s and 1970s. It has focused mostly on improving environmental conditions. Education for sustainable development arose along with international concerns about social justice. It has emphasized general education as well as education about sustainability as necessary to ensure human prosperity. Industrial ecology, in its contemporary form, evolved as an applied approach to address environmental concerns and to meet sustainability goals. It has developed into a diverse, multifaceted approach to address the complexity inherent in industrial society. Education focused on industrial ecology remains decentralized, with core principles and tools being integrated into existing disciplinary programs as well as development of industrialecology-specific curricula. These efforts have not coalesced into a formalized, industrial ecology education. Rather than reflecting a shortcoming, this potentially offers a more robust method for applying industrial ecology principles and tools widely. Keywords:curricula industrial ecology interdisciplinarity pedagogy sociology of knowledge sustainability

Toward an Integrated Approach to Environmental and Prosocial Education

“…Indeed, while the main emphasis of environmental education is limited to the protection and/or preservation of the environment [26], EDS, or sustainability education, is usually defined as a tool for achieving sustainable development. It is thus interested in all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental [27].…”

Teaching Industrial Ecology to Undergraduate Students: Lessons Learned

“…Because IE education is closely related to sustainability education topics such as education for sustainable development and environmental education [7] which have been taught for a longer period of time, reviewing this literature is believed to be relevant.…”

“…It is a field which balances theory and practical application [6] and thus can influence real-world activities [5]. Cockerill [1,7] argues that IE is seen as an applied approach to address sustainability from multiple perspectives. This contributes to generating "new and imaginative solutions that build on overall sustainability" [8] (p. 133).…”

Google Books Ngram Viewer in Socio-Cultural Research

“…Linguists used it to investigate biomedical domain literature in respect of terminology changes (Grigonyte et al 2012), to follow word usage and cultural transformations in contemporary West Bengal (Phani 2012) and to illustrate diachronic variation of preferred adjective ordering (Hill 2012). It was also employed in social studies: Kesebir and Kesebir (2012) used it to prove that moral ideals and virtues decreased significantly in the American public conversation, Oishi et al (2013) to analyze the concepts of happiness across time and cultures, Cockerill (2013) to trace the roots of industrial ecology education to the 1960s and 1970s, Lucier (2012) to study the relations of science and capitalism, Kumar and Sahu (2010) to trace the history of marketing, and Johnson (2011) to introduce the concept of information overload, not to mention Greenfield (2013) who applied it to a research into human ecology. It has also been used by Alcock (2012) to assess trends in the use of evolutionary concepts in non-technical literature and Crasto (2011) to study the use of the term 'bioinformatics' in literature.…”