ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the importance of student learning in the context of community-based projects and partnerships, with an emphasis on real world project-based research, learning, and sustainability competency acquisition. Action research, community engaged research, and indigenous research methodologies as they are currently used in education and public health fields are suggested as frameworks to be integrated with engaged pedagogies for Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD). By learning through authentic, reciprocal community partnerships, students attain the interpersonal skills and proactive problem solving that 21st century employers are requesting, and that the development of sustainable systems and improved quality of life requires. Undergraduate education has not yet integrated Higher Education for Sustainable
Development fully into the curriculum; attention remains focused on graduation, career identification and disciplinary specialisation over a values-driven paradigm of sustainability. The annual Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey conducted at hundreds of American colleges and universities discerns trends in student values, such as their reasons for attending college. Since the 1980s, ‘Being well off financially’ has been the top value for students, while ‘developing a life philosophy’ ranks fifth (Astin 1998). In the 1960s, those values were reversed, and students attended college with a less careerist point of view. Statistics are frequently disseminated that link college degrees to increases in income, and indeed a new measure in the Obama administration’s college rating plan for US institutions includes postgraduation income as an indicator of college effectiveness (Pryor et al. 2007). Perhaps this values reversal is a response to the increasing income inequality in the US and the accompanying increase in the percentage of jobs that are less secure and less well paid, creating more concerns about future income among students. Such a trend connotes a more urgent need for the triple bottom line of sustainability that includes access to sustainable livelihoods. However, given parallels today to the 1960s movements in social justice, civic engagement and
environmental protection, it is likely that these trends could once again reverse. The Princeton Review (2014) created its ‘Green Rating’ as a criterion for evaluating colleges, because 62 per
cent of students said that a college’s commitment to the environment would influence their choice. The Democracy Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and the Association of American Colleges & University’s Crucible Moment report have generated real momentum in turning (or returning) the core values of higher education to civic engagement and social responsibility, with a priority of moving from ‘partial transformation to pervasive civic and democratic learning and practices’ (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Engagement 2012: 42). HESD is both a result and a catalyst for the shifting values that may be anticipated in the next 40-year analysis of what students seek in a college education. Even though a promising career is the top reason for attending college, Pryor (2014 cited in
Lawlor Group 2014), a Senior Research Scientist with Gallup Education, reported that only 34 per cent of college seniors said they are ‘very satisfied with the relevance of their coursework to their future career plans’. At the same time, faculty claim to prioritise workforce needs in their learning outcomes. Pryor argued that there is a ‘mismatch between what faculty mean by learning goals and what employers mean’ (Lawlor Group 2014: para. 3). This mismatch may also reflect the context in which faculty teach these skills, or the way in which students demonstrate them. A promising trend in HESD is to include real-world problem-solving assignments that also build a student’s skills for solving global sustainability challenges. Real-world assignments teach practical skills such as teamwork and proactive problem solving which are valuable in both the work setting and in the solving of societal problems. In this chapter, the authors argue that HESD can reconcile the values of students, the wants of employers, and the needs of communities through integration of active, engaged service, research and pedagogy with community partnerships. This chapter provides suggestions for next steps in delivering sustainability competencies in higher education in the context of community partnerships, and then describes a variety of action research frameworks from related fields, and their benefits for community-based learning. The chapter concludes with suggestions for further research and applications.
