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Engaging Students' Voices in Partnership for the Rhizomatic Development of Sustainability in Higher Education

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2020) | Viewed by 9135

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Ian Kinchin

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Higher Education, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK
Interests: pedagogy; teacher development; knowledge visualization; concept mapping; care in the curriculum; salutogenesis in education; pedagogic frailty
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Universities are faced with the tremendous challenge of promoting a culture of sustainability within society, while simultaneously grappling with the ongoing development of a more inclusive and active pedagogy for the twenty-first-century curriculum in which students are seen as partners in learning. Rather than these being separate problems, it may be that a route towards a solution may become visible by adopting a more integrated perspective and a fresh theoretical lens.

The juxtaposition of the problem of education for sustainability with the challenges and opportunities afforded by a partnership approach to university teaching offers a fresh perspective that may be beneficial to both. The adoption of staff–student partnership has been explored as one approach to curriculum development to address many of the inadequacies of transmissive university teaching (e.g., Cook-Sather et al, 2014). However, one of the problems inherent in the staff–student partnership approach to university teaching is the potential barrier to engagement generated by differences in power between the staff and students. To address this, it has been suggested by Kinchin (2021) that reframing the issue through the lens offered by a rhizomatic perspective allows us to view students and academics on paths representing ‘parallel states of becoming’—rather than ‘being’ different at a particular point in time. This ‘philosophy of becoming’ has been championed by Clarke and Mcphie (2016) as making a positive contribution to learning for sustainability, and is part of the wider consideration of rhizomatic thinking that has the potential to revolutionize sustainability education, as summarised by Le Grange (2011, 747):

When sustainability education is viewed rhizomatically, it becomes possible to integrate and transform Western and indigenous knowledge, and thus create new knowledge spaces in which new knowledge on sustainability (education) can be produced.

A rhizomatic view of knowledge may, therefore, provide the point of conceptual overlap between engaging with students and promoting education for sustainability. Tillmanns et al (2014, 5) argue the following: ‘the rhizome has the potential to inspire educators and learners alike to become more critically aware of the interconnectivity and disruptive influences within sustainability’. Education for sustainability has to be more than dispensing information, and it is argued by Hroch (2014, 57) that we set ourselves the challenge to prepare ‘people-yet-to-come’ for life on a ‘planet-yet-to-come’. This requires ‘valuing learning as a process of transformation, the process of students coming to think differently, thereby becoming-other in the process, and supporting thinking differently from the norm’. Adopting a partnership approach to teaching at university may help to address these issues and allow us to face the discomfort and ‘brave spaces’ that have to be encountered if education for sustainability is to be truly transformative (e.g. Winks, 2018).

This Special Issue has a focus on innovations in higher education pedagogy and disruptive processes that might help education for sustainability to break free from the hegemony of the neoliberal university (Tillmanns et al, 2014), and move away from the danger that education for sustainability might be subverted as ‘education for consumerism and unbridled economic growth’ (Le Grange, 2011, 744). Submitted papers may address related issues that focus on education for sustainability with an emphasis on student engagement/partnership, and present empirical research, reviews, case studies, or conceptual pieces that consider how sustainability fits with a transformative view of university education, and challenge neoliberal norms. Authors should explicitly address the criticism leveled by Hroch, (2014, 54) that as an educational community, ‘we lack creativity. We lack resistance to the present’.

References:

Clarke, D.A.G. & Mcphie, J. (2016) From places to paths: Learning for sustainability, teacher education and a philosophy of becoming. Environmental Education Research, 22(7), 1002 – 1024,

Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: A guide for faculty. John Wiley & Sons.

Kinchin, I.M. (2021) Towards a pedagogically healthy university: The essential foundation for successful student-staff partnership. In: Heron, M., Balloo, K., & Barnett, L. (Eds.). Exploring disciplinary teaching excellence in higher education: Student-staff partnerships for research. (forthcoming) Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hroch, P. (2014) Deleuze, Guattari, and Environmental Pedagogy and Politics: Ritournelles for a planet-yet-to-come. In: Carlin, M. & Wallin, J. (Eds.) Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education. (pp. 49 – 75). London, Bloomsbury.

Le Grange, L.L.L. (2011) Sustainability and higher education: From arborescent to rhizomatic thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(7): 742 – 754.

Tillmanns, T., Holland, C., Lorenzi, F. & McDonagh, P. (2014) Interplay of rhizome and education for sustainable development. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability, 16(2), 5 – 17.

Winks, L. (2018) Discomfort, challenge and brave spaces in higher education. In: Leal Filho, W. (Ed.) Implementing sustainability in the curriculum of universities. (pp.99 – 111) Cham, Switzerland, Springer.

Prof. Ian Kinchin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • higher education
  • university teaching
  • rhizomatic knowledge
  • innovative pedagogy

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

9 pages, 811 KiB  
Article
Sustainability Higher Education in the Context of Bearn’s University of Beauty
by Lesley Le Grange
Sustainability 2020, 12(24), 10533; https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410533 - 16 Dec 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1567
Abstract
Sustainability and its relationship with education has been the subject of much contestation in recent decades. This article reviews some of the debates on sustainability in the context of higher education and raises concern about the narrowing of the discourse on sustainability and [...] Read more.
Sustainability and its relationship with education has been the subject of much contestation in recent decades. This article reviews some of the debates on sustainability in the context of higher education and raises concern about the narrowing of the discourse on sustainability and sustainability education in the neoliberal university. The methods used in this article are philosophical, combining traditional concept analysis with concept creation. The later method holds that philosophical concepts are created or reimagined so that they have transformative effects in the world. The key finding of this conceptual exploration is that sustainability (education) can be liberated from the fetters of neoliberalism and can be imagined differently. This might be possible in the “University of Beauty”. Moreover, the potential for reimagining sustainability higher education already exists within the neoliberal university and in those who inhabit it. This is because sustainability higher education and those who inhabit the neoliberal university are always in the process of becoming. The article concludes that the present generation of students should be viewed as key role players in rethinking sustainability higher education. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Engaging Students' Voices in Partnership for the Rhizomatic Development of Sustainability in Higher Education)
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11 pages, 279 KiB  
Article
Reflecting on Partnerships of Sustainability Learning: Enacting a Lewin–Deleuze–Guattari Rhizome
by Tanja Tillmanns and Alfredo Salomão Filho
Sustainability 2020, 12(22), 9776; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229776 - 23 Nov 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2797
Abstract
This paper works towards the enactment of a Lewin–Deleuze–Guattari rhizome. We assemble Deleuze and Guattari’s principles of the rhizome, Lewin’s idea of re-education, and reflections on the performance of one of the authors in the lecture hall, bringing into being what could be [...] Read more.
This paper works towards the enactment of a Lewin–Deleuze–Guattari rhizome. We assemble Deleuze and Guattari’s principles of the rhizome, Lewin’s idea of re-education, and reflections on the performance of one of the authors in the lecture hall, bringing into being what could be a rhizomatic partnership approach to sustainability learning in a higher education setting. The reflections are based on experiences delivering a sustainability module within a business education context, mainly for international students in Germany. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate possibilities of student–teacher partnership assemblages, aiming to motivate sustainability change agency on “people-yet-to-come”: those who are open to enacting difference, or multifaceted, heterogeneous, and often partial transformations addressing the current plethora of contemporary crises. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Engaging Students' Voices in Partnership for the Rhizomatic Development of Sustainability in Higher Education)
27 pages, 3104 KiB  
Article
Engineering Students’ Human Values as Rhizomatic Lines of Sustainability
by Gabriel-Mugurel Dragomir, Mariana Cernicova-Buca, Vasile Gherheș and Liliana Cismariu
Sustainability 2020, 12(18), 7417; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187417 - 9 Sep 2020
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1947
Abstract
The study reports on research carried out at the five major technical higher institutions in Romania. It views the human values students bring with them to the educational setting as rhizomatic lines, in the Deleuzian sense, and aims at identifying the intensity of [...] Read more.
The study reports on research carried out at the five major technical higher institutions in Romania. It views the human values students bring with them to the educational setting as rhizomatic lines, in the Deleuzian sense, and aims at identifying the intensity of each value, respectively, at grasping the correlations between the students’ values and their projection concerning postgraduation life, including nomadic (i.e., migration) intentions. Such an approach is novel in educational research. The 1782 valid responses collected after applying an online questionnaire were subjected to multivariate statistical analyses. The results unfold the research stages, from intensity-identification concerning the 18 values included in the questionnaire to the factor extraction and correlation findings that highlight strata beneath the upper layer of responses. The values boil down to three nodes of the rhizome, anchoring the Romanian engineers-to-be in the present setting and allowing them to grow in a sustainable manner, i.e., to become professionals, socially accepted, and belonging to a group. The findings are useful to professors, who need to constantly check their assumptions about the profile of the young generation, to better ground their partnership relation with students in moral realities that are relevant and help learners face disruption, crisis, incertitude. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Engaging Students' Voices in Partnership for the Rhizomatic Development of Sustainability in Higher Education)
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16 pages, 276 KiB  
Article
While We Are Here: Resisting Hegemony and Fostering Inclusion through Rhizomatic Growth via Student–Faculty Pedagogical Partnership
by Alison Cook-Sather, Jamie W. Becker and Alexis Giron
Sustainability 2020, 12(17), 6782; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176782 - 21 Aug 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2113
Abstract
Postsecondary educational institutions often struggle to enact their espoused commitments to inclusion. Faculty on temporary appointments and students traditionally underrepresented in and underserved by colleges and universities, in particular, can feel excluded. In this article, we argue that student–faculty pedagogical partnership can help [...] Read more.
Postsecondary educational institutions often struggle to enact their espoused commitments to inclusion. Faculty on temporary appointments and students traditionally underrepresented in and underserved by colleges and universities, in particular, can feel excluded. In this article, we argue that student–faculty pedagogical partnership can help postsecondary institutions better enact their espoused commitments to inclusion by nurturing rhizomatic development for human sustainability. We describe how a student–faculty pedagogical partnership program provides a brave space within which rhizomatic growth can unfold by offering an autoethnographic case study of one faculty–student pair who worked in a semester-long pedagogical partnership through this program. Their work aimed to affirm and extend inclusive practices in the faculty member’s STEM course, and the unexpected intertwining of their paths also served to foster a sense of inclusion for both partners. After an introductory discussion of the partnership program, definition of rhizomatic growth as we use it, and an explanation of our method, the faculty and student partners present their autoethnographic case study by alternating their voices. We focus our discussion and recommendations on how partnership supports rhizomatic growth, inclusion, resistance to hegemony, and human sustainability. Finally, we propose possible directions for future research in each of these areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Engaging Students' Voices in Partnership for the Rhizomatic Development of Sustainability in Higher Education)
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