by Robert Stratford
Dr Robert Stratford completed his doctorate on the ecological university in 2019. He has a background in secondary education evaluation, policy and leadership. He is currently the Manager of Academic Quality and Policy at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His current research interests include ecological theory and wellbeing in higher education. You can contact Rob at: robert.stratford@vuw.ac.nz
There is an ongoing push in higher education to develop sustainability skills and knowledge. Sustainability in higher education is typically concerned with students developing their understanding of sustainability concepts and ethics and also becoming good sustainability citizens, able to solve sustainability problems. In many cases sustainability in higher education is linked to university aspirations to help realise the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) as if they provided the best or only basis for planetary survival.
While the development of sustainability knowledge has its merits, there is arguably too little questioning of the inherently mechanical and rationalistic basis of sustainability in higher education. From this perspective one could potentially ask: Is there a need for anything else to learn besides practical sustainability skills and knowledge? Is there a possibility for something deeper, richer, and even more philosophical? Something that helps students go beyond the practical and perhaps even helps them to develop meaningful ways of flourishing on our finite planet?
Questions about richer forms of learning also hover in the background as we think about what options we have for other areas of higher education. For example, while employability also has its place, I hope anyone reading this occasional piece is also aware of its limitations as a dominant approach to higher education. Similarly, as we continue to ponder how to build student engagement post-covid, we might also collectively hope that ‘deeper learning’ might be one of the approaches used to engage students – or at least have more of them turn up to class. And also similarly, in considering artificial intelligence’s role in university education, after we have set aside the significant academic integrity issues brought by this technology, can we imagine a meaningful educational response that is not limited to improving our efficient and skilful use of this new ‘tool’?
If we are to get beyond instrumental approaches to sustainability, engagement and artificial intelligence, the search for a richer approach to higher education could potentially be informed by the concept of wellbeing. While wellbeing is too complex a term to be defined in a short occasional piece, the possibilities for wellbeing include the somewhat neglected area of staff and student spiritual health. Spirituality is one of the ways in which we might clarify our purpose and meaning in life, our belonging or mission. It is our spirit – our connections to people, places and ideas that then gives us a reason for applying our knowledge, for making the world a better place and for understanding why we need to know stuff in the first place.
Certainly, the need for mental and spiritual wellbeing is evident in a context with epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. By the same stead, questions of belonging, purpose and meaning are acutely relevant for young people staring down the uncertain futures in this mad world of Donald Trump, rising sea-levels and astronomical house-prices. In a context of ravaged natural, social and political ecologies – students need more than strategies for a mechanistic sustainability, but also something that helps them find a deeply healthy way of engaging in today’s absurd ecologies.
An example of a higher education approach that has sought to build deeper meaning and purpose is a course taught by the philosophers: Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2011). Their teaching might be briefly described as a search for meaning in a world in which ‘God is Dead’. Leaning on philosophers such as: Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Charles Taylor; as well as literary texts from authors as diverse as: Homer, Dante, David Foster Wallace and Herman Melville; Dreyfus and Kelly have encouraged their students to find out what they should be committed to, and what it means to have lives worth living, in a secular age (Taylor, 2007).
Drawing inspiration from Dreyfus and Kelly, there are other ways we might help students find meaning through higher education too – even as the planet’s various interconnected ecological crises appear to worsen. We could, for example, connect students to indigenous forms of knowledge and alternative spiritualities – thereby helping them to develop worldviews outside the liberal and consumerist norm. Perhaps many of us have also been lucky enough to learn and teach in such contexts: those occasional moments of transcendence – possibly through an impassioned discussion in a humanities or science tutorial, for example, or via a lecture that makes fundamental connections to new ideas, beliefs or even liberating epiphanies – where you will never be the same again.
One approach to developing meaning which I have argued for from an ecological perspective is exploring higher education as a place to teach friendship (Stratford, 2023). Such an approach would begin with the importance of our social interconnections as a way to build commitment and purpose on a finite planet. Friendship, in other words, is a way we learn that we are not alone in the world – at least not in the individualistic, liberal, Western tradition. Friendship is a way to build valuable connections with other humans and non-humans. In contrast to the more instrumental excesses referenced above, the teaching of friendship goes to how we build relationships of meaning. Such an approach could include, but also go beyond, the knowledge of friendship – think everything from Aristotle to Seligman – to ways in which we might reflect on and improve our friendship interconnections. Such teaching could also open up the possibilities for understanding the role of friendship beyond our culture’s over-privileging of romantic relationships. Moreover, while it might provide insight into the power of Platonic relationships, it could, alternatively, also explore the limits of friendship as a cure for too much that ails us. (We’re still being critical in the teaching of friendship afterall).
From a perspective where we take social ecologies seriously – the teaching of friendship has at least as much to offer students as the sorts of practical sustainability knowledge discussed above. While students may not be calculating the carbon footprints of individual friendships in the very rough course outline I have sketched here, by the end of a friendship course students might have a sense of how others are a source of a life worth living – even at times such as these. Students might also have made friends in the course, even as they face down an absurd, climate changed world. Who knows, maybe through a philosophical teaching of friendship students may also consider what it is that makes life worthwhile even as they also take other courses to build their employability, their skills with new technology and the knowledge required to implement sustainability solutions.
Maybe, just maybe, beyond the practical, tech-savvy and efficient approach our culture aims for in higher education, Universities also have an important role actually teaching us to develop affective and spiritual dimensions that will be the best reinforcement for an increasingly meaningless set of consequences that await so many of our students in the 21st century.
References
Dreyfus, H., & Kelly, S. D. (2011). All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (1 ed.). Free Press.
Stratford, R. (2023). Finding Meaning at the Ecological University – An argument for an education of spirit through ‘teaching’ friendship Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), Auckland, NZ.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press.