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NZAEE invites Pam to share her research with us.

University Leadership for Sustainability:

UNESCO (1997) notes that "Education, in short, is humanity's best hope and most effective means to the quest to achieve sustainable development" and there are increasing calls for both formal and informal education sectors to take a leading role in education for sustainability - to help citizens learn how to manage change and make transitions in practice away from unsustainable practices. Yet, as a part-time member of the national team of Education for Sustainability Facilitators, regionally based within Aotearoa New Zealand universities, I was astonished to find (in 2002) very  little learning for and action for sustainability among tertiary students in our universities.

I wondered why this was so, and when I realised how complex the reasons may be, decided to enrol part-time for a PhD, knowing that a research enquiry would provide easier access to a range of academics and policy makers involved in sustainability initiatives. At that time I knew of several international universities that were involved in learning programmes for a sustainable future, many linked to the operational sustainable management practices of their institution and I wondered how they had managed to establish their courses and whether our national universities could be encouraged to follow suit. In addition there are growing societal expectations that universities will undertake a leadership role in facilitating learning that enables current and future generations to re-design their personal and professional activities, for creating a more sustainable future.

Twenty lecturers teaching in integrated sustainability learning programmes, including eight in Australia, six in Canada and two each in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom were interviewed. The interviewees had experience in developing sustainability learning programmes and represented a range of different schools within university faculties. Initially I hoped that finding out what sustainability learning initiatives were being developed and implemented in universities and then seeking how they were developed would provide a platform for Aotearoa New Zealand universities from which to adapt or create successful sustainable learning initiatives for their students.

Interviews were also conducted with ten lecturers involved in the development and teaching of courses or papers with a sustainability focus, in four of the eight universities in Aotearoa New Zealand. I planned to compare their experiences with those of the international interviewees and decided, when faced with an extensive range and overwhelming quantity of interview data, to use grounded theory methodology to analyse the results. As often happens with research, I ended up in a slightly different 'space' than I had anticipated.

Extensive analysis of my research findings revealed that much more than 'process' was involved in developing tertiary learning for sustainability initiatives. There were key themes underlying the differences in sustainability learning programmes between international universities and those in Aotearoa New Zealand and the role of university leadership for sustainability emerged as an important factor that helps explain these differences.

In my thesis I discuss these leadership themes, relate them to academic leadership theory (an interesting new academic learning area for me!) and describe how this led to gaining fresh insights into the importance of effective 'positional' university leadership supporting cross-university 'distributed' leadership, for enabling the implementation of sustainability initiatives. Eventually this led to generating a theoretical model: an active dendritic framework for university leadership for sustainability, that may be useful for connecting and enabling collaboration between university leaders for sustainability.

I can hear those who never took human biology asking the question ... "what is dendritic"? Well, dendrites are those microscopic filaments (for want of a better word) that send chemically activated messsages back and forth from one nerve cell to the other. There is constant active feed-back and feed-forward to keep the body working normally and lots of rapid response when circumstances change. You will get the picture.

There are many challenges facing university teachers who wish to include authentic learning for sustainability in their programmes, some are similar to those challenges facing teachers in primary and secondary teaching. However, when I used the theoretical model and evaluated reasons for the relative lack of comprehensive education for sustainability in our universities ......... the key theme remained 'leadership'. This led to examining the roles of government, the Tertiary Education Commission and university policies for teaching and learning for sustainability/sustainable development and finding them inadequate, or largely rhetoric. While the research findings and the theoretical framework may apply to many other institutions, because I was limited by the requirements of a PhD thesis, I remained focused on universities, leading to recommendations for;  

• Universities to engage actively in more collaborative processes to develop authentic vision, mission and strategy statements and policies for sustainability.

• Vice-Chancellors to focus on recruiting appropriate future-thinking 'leaders' for sustainability, and provide current university leaders with more professional development in leadership.

• Research funding regimes and career promotion opportunities to be re-orientated to reward those scholars prepared to expend the time and energy to re-design teaching programmes to include more opportunities for sustainability learning and research, and

• University leaders to offer and reward professional development for teaching staff in best practice learning and teaching pedagogies, using sustainability as a context for their learning.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King's words, we face the fact that 'tomorrow is today' and we face the 'fierce urgency of now' and consequently, in the concluding thoughts of my thesis, I suggested that for universities to further delay embarking on learning and teaching for sustainability is to shirk their professional and personal adult responsibilities for current and future generations of students. Additionally, if universities fail to engage in education for sustainability, then they may encounter genuine antipathy from a society wishing to move beyond rhetoric and academic debate, to learning how to manage current and predicted challenges to a sustainable future.

I argue that if universities fail to engage in learning for sustainability, society may look to leadership from government and support government intervention in education to achieve national goals of sustainable development. One possibility is to make it a legal requirement to include education-for-sustainability (as in Sweden) in all sectors of education, particularly the tertiary sector, and develop a new Tertiary Education Strategy to better reflect the sustainability context. Another intervention is to strategically re-orient funding for university teaching and research to encourage changes to learning for sustainability, as occurred in Taiwan (J. Su, personal communication, January 25, 2006).

I suggest that maintaining a 'business as usual' approach is the metaphorical equivalent of the behavioural challenge that humans face when attempting to alter entrenched habits, particularly addictions, to make changes that lead to a preferred, healthier lifestyle. Unfortunately, to date there is little evidence that New Zealand universities have adequately engaged with the international agenda of education for sustainable development, nor considered how best to meet the many challenges that face them when re-orienting their research, teaching and learning to address future sustainability issues. Stone and Baldoni (2006) suggest that although aspects of bio-physical resource sustainability issues are explored in some university programmes, the human factors, including values and aspirations appear to have little coverage.

Hopefully, the findings, interpretations and recommendations made in "University Leadership for Sustainability - an active dendritic framework for enabling connection and collaboration" will stimulate conversation and debate and support those in universities (and other tertiary institutions) who have begun their journey to establish comprehensive university-wide initiatives for learning for sustainability.  

The thesis will be on the website: http://www.futuresteps.co.nz/ from early November. Meanwhile, if you really 'need to read' and can't access the website, email Pam on pam.williams@vuw.ac.nz and she will forward you a pdf. copy (4.5 MB). Or you can read a hard copy in the VUW library.