‘Not for everyone, but kind of amazing’: institutional friction and the nature of sustainability education

Abstract

SynopsisSustainability has become a popular normative social and ecological goal to address conditions of unsustainability. Such terms are often definitionally and contextually vague, warranting research into forms of sustainability education as they actually exist in practice. This study ethnographically explored the theory and practice of sustainability education in an institutionalized setting, including its varied ecological, educational and infrastructural implications. It reports on a three-year institutional ethnography of an elite private school in the northeastern United States. The purpose of the research was to investigate the rootedness, emergence and subsequent embodiment of sustainability education infrastructure, including the physical and ideational construction of a 'living building' on the school's campus.Rooted in a critical realist philosophical approach toward nature, and using ecosystem complexity theory, ecological communication dynamics and political ecology as theoretical lenses, and phronetic case and abductive gestalt analyses as analytic tools, I detailed how the institution engaged in elite-driven change with social, cultural, political and material implications in their immediate and surrounding community. For example, the case study of an animal slaughter experience revealed how specific institutional frictions played out in the school's change process. By tracing particular frictions through the institutional change process, I illuminated the unique cultural and socio-material dimensions present as the institution shiftedoften controversially -to develop and accommodate the nascent sustainability education infrastructure.The emergent conception of sustainability education manifested as the downshifting of social, political and ecological responsibility to the local level and represented a larger trend in the neo-liberalization of environmentalism. I also showed how sustainability education represented a privileged, progressive, upper-class ecochic sensibility in this school and discussed implications relative to conditions of Green Capitalism and Late Industrialism. I observed the eco-chic phenomenon in the artisanal nature of food production, in mindfulness educational activities, in marketing green lifestyles to prospective parents and in the implementation and mystification of efficient green building technologies. Overall, I found that sustainability education involved a classed expectation of a virtuous future life, and this was

Climate change as superordinate curriculum?

“…Counter to these efforts, in the instances of institutions that have the political capital and no seeming ideological problem with enacting a strong climate change education, more crass concerns seem to override its development and enactment. As Henderson (2014) found at an elite-serving private secondary school, what could be a rich climate change education experience for students had a pernicious tendency to emphasize individualistic values of "green" consumerism over the more superordinate concern of global catastrophe induced by a changing climate. In this way, the more pressing concern of educating students to be good "green" consumers came to dominate the motivation for concern, rather than finding structural solutions to the very real risks that a changing climate poses to the economically and racially disaffected.…”

Climate Change and the Canadian Higher Education System: An Institutional Policy Analysis

“…Institutional changes associated with accommodative (i.e., minor), reformative (i.e., significant but limited in scope), or transformative responses to sustainability in higher education are characteristically complex (Bieler & McKenzie, 2017;Sterling, 2013). This reflects the fact that institutional change is a culturally loaded, valueladen, and socially negotiated process (Henderson, 2015;Hoffman, 2014). Yet, transformative approaches are emerging, including so-called "third-wave" approaches that shift away from a partial integration of sustainability practices into particular domains, such as campus operations, and towards a more systemic view of sustainability and the epistemological changes that are needed for sustainability education, research, and community outreach (Wals & Blewitt, 2010).…”

Out of sight, out of mind: global connection, environmental discourse and the emerging field of sustainability education

“…My own research (Henderson 2014) involved ethnographically investigating an educational institution in the United States that implemented a state-of-the-art ''living building'' with the intent of having the students govern the workings of the space in the name of achieving a local conception of sustainability and sustainability education. Participants did not speak of sustainability as if they had a fully formed notion of the concept.…”