Knowledge alone won’t “fix it”: building regenerative literacy

Becken, Susanne; Coghlan, Alexandra

doi:10.1080/09669582.2022.2150860

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…This was a good match for sustainability due to the urgency of the climate crisis, etc. [77]. Similar to Kijima [62], we found evidence of the bias to action mindset development.…”

Section: Bias To Actionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Nurturing Sustainability Changemakers through Transformative Learning Using Design Thinking: Evidence from an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Macagno,

Nguyen-Quoc,

Jarvis

2024

Sustainability

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Globally, society faces significant problems, from climate crisis to persistent poverty. Education for Sustainable Development offers an approach to achieving a sustainable society. The challenge is creating changemakers with the knowledge, mindset, and competencies to innovate. Teaching sustainability tends to be discipline-specific, taught content-heavy via “spoon-feeding” and neglecting student agency changes. To overcome these challenges, we developed a programme to “teach” innovation for sustainability that combines transformative learning and design thinking as the pedagogy. Classes were anchored by solving a real-world sustainability challenge, facilitating experience transformation into new knowledge. Design Thinking is a transdisciplinary methodology that helps different disciplines collaborate on addressing complex problems. However, there is limited empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of this transformative pedagogy in sustainability education. What is the value of combining Design Thinking and Transformative Learning as a pedagogy in sustainability education? Based on the University College Dublin Innovation Academy’s Professional Diploma of Innovation for Sustainability, we address this research question by exploring the impacts of the programme design. Data were collected during and after the programme through students’ reflections and observation field notes of teaching sections. Findings show that the programme design supported developing a sustainability mindset, sustainability literacy, and creative confidence. All characteristics support becoming a changemaker.

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“…This was a good match for sustainability due to the urgency of the climate crisis, etc. [77]. Similar to Kijima [62], we found evidence of the bias to action mindset development.…”

Section: Bias To Actionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Nurturing Sustainability Changemakers through Transformative Learning Using Design Thinking: Evidence from an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Macagno,

Nguyen-Quoc,

Jarvis

2024

Sustainability

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“…The potential of bridging the practitioner/researcher divide (Thomas and Ormerod, 2017) would foster what Tribe (1997) describes as "procedural knowledge" (professional practice knowledge as opposed to propositional knowledge or "knowing that" which is validated against a discipline's knowledge criteria). We suggest that building researcher literacy (Becken and Coghlan, 2023) and fostering intuition (Meadows, 2008) are key ingredients for designing effective sustainability research.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conducting replication research, as well as building systematically on a previous study, allows researchers to experience embeddedness in the context, that is, tourist accommodations in our case. The resulting increase in environmental literacy (Hollweg et al, 2011;Becken and Coghlan, 2023) includes not only technical knowledge but also practitioner knowledge, skills, and intuition, all of which will assist in the design of (future) effective experiments with high external validity (Viglia and Dolnicar, 2020). As one of the earliest and most influential proponents of systems thinking put it (and with reference to sustainability), a "systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and hone our ability to understand parts, see interconnections, ask 'what-if ' questions about possible future behaviors and be creative and courageous about system design" (Meadows, 1999, p. 6-7).…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

Designing sustainability changes in a tourist accommodation context from a systems perspective

Coghlan,

Becken,

MacAskill

2023

Front. Sustain. Tour.

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Pro-sustainability changes are slow and incremental at best in the tourism sector. Research on the topic can take the form of secondary data (e.g., content analysis of strategic documents, social media posts), survey-based intent studies (e.g., willingness to pay), survey-based studies of self-reported behaviors, observation of actual behaviors (e.g., benchmarking studies), lab-based experimental manipulations of measurable behaviors, and, finally, in situ, or field-based, experimental manipulations of measurable behaviors. The latter are some of the rarest studies and are held up as the gold standard for changing behaviors by providing evidence-based, measurable, and actionable sustainability interventions for tourism businesses. This study draws inspiration from a 4-year program of action research into pro-sustainability changes in tourist accommodations. It questions whether any of these approaches are sufficient for changing sustainability-oriented behaviors. This questioning extends to whether the theoretical approaches that underpin even “gold standard experiments” capture the operational contexts of accommodation businesses. It proposes instead that a scaffolded approach, built from a systems map of the theories, tools, experimental findings, interviews with stakeholders and operational context is necessary to create sustainability transformations in tourism businesses. This is a radical departure from the dependent/independent variable approach adopted in traditional scientific methods and that requires a different ontological approach to the science of sustainability. The study has implications for contextualizing intervention-based experimental studies within a wider system of influential factors within tourist accommodations.

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Transformative epistemologies for regenerative tourism: towards a decolonial paradigm in science and practice?

Bellato

Frantzeskaki

Lee

et al. 2023

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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Knowledge alone won’t “fix it”: building regenerative literacy

Cited by 14 publications

References 64 publications

Nurturing Sustainability Changemakers through Transformative Learning Using Design Thinking: Evidence from an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Nurturing Sustainability Changemakers through Transformative Learning Using Design Thinking: Evidence from an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Designing sustainability changes in a tourist accommodation context from a systems perspective

Transformative epistemologies for regenerative tourism: towards a decolonial paradigm in science and practice?

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