Consultant for the ESD Project in Scotland’s Colleges or if the materials were credit rated?)
Table 5.5 - Comments about actions Required to use the Workbook
Comments Received in Response to Question 7
‘I need to source this workbook and ensure it is shared with our teaching staff’.
‘Would need more information’.
Providing appropriate funding for colleges to develop learning for sustainability, and incentivising its circulation throughout the campus, curriculum and wider community, could be one important catalyst in persuading college Principals to adopt a holistic view of sustainability. However, it would be important to ring-fence such funding to guarantee it is ‘reaching the grassroots and tangibly addressing community-based initiatives’ (Leal Filho
et al., 2015, p122). As already established, funding from the SFC for the ESD in the Scottish College Sector Project was patchy and piecemeal. Initial funding to Scotland’s
Colleges, was followed by a period of over six months with no funding, before the project then continued with the EAUC. During this interim period, there was a real danger that any momentum gained, and any progress made in the sector to that point, would be lost. The Project has now ended, and the EAUC now receive generic funding for their work with universities and colleges in Scotland. Topic Support Network events, it should be noted, organised by the EAUC for the tertiary education sector are always better attended by HE staff and students than by FE. This is where it needs to be recognised that
sustainability funding earmarked for colleges may have a more beneficial impact than undifferentiated HE funding. There is a danger in universities that resources might be ‘siphoned off to fund “experts”, reports and documentation that, while using all the appropriate terms and buzz words, further alienate the world community from the urgent matters’ (Leal Filho et al., 2015 p122). This leads me back to my earlier observation that colleges oftentimes can drive community engagement projects, which inform the wider community about sustainability, significantly more effectively than universities because of their generally better grassroots connections (Wals, 2014).
It is also interesting to observe that Principals might be further persuaded if ESD were made a compulsory requirement for community engagement. The United Nations (2010, 2012, 2013) has repeatedly recognised that there is recurrent concern over the slow and inconsistent progress of ESD, and even more worrying is the unease that unless progress dramatically increases there is a risk of undoing or even reversing the progress made to date. This would also appear to be a real danger in Scotland’s Colleges, where there is a mounting impression in some quarters that sustainability has been efficiently addressed and ESD is now seen as complete, allowing the institutions to move on to the next target.
To overcome the problem of the slow pace of sustainable development and ESD, the UN provided guidance in an important document entitled The Future We Want. The document advises, ‘we therefore acknowledge the need to further mainstream sustainable
development at all levels, integrating economic, social and environmental aspects and recognizing their interlinkages, so as to achieve sustainable development in all its
dimensions’ (United Nations, 2012, p2). One of these dimensions is education and the UN further states:
We recognize that the younger generations are the custodians of the future, and the need for better quality and access to education beyond the primary level. We therefore resolve to improve the capacity of our education systems to prepare people to pursue sustainable development, including through enhanced teacher training, the development of sustainability curricula, the development of training programmes that prepare students for careers in fields related to sustainability, and more effective use of information and communications technologies to enhance learning outcomes. We call for enhanced cooperation among schools, communities and authorities in efforts to promote access to quality education at all levels (2012, p44).
Leal Filho et al. (2015), believe that to honour the promises made in The Future We Want, we need:
suitable financial resources;
better coordination systems with clear indicators and deliverables that may allow progress to be monitored and assessed;
a stronger involvement of the higher education community that may initiate a chain reaction that improves ESD provision in formal, non-formal and informal settings (p126).
On an optimistic note UNESCO believes we are well on the way to meeting these requirements in Scotland and they have reported the current status of ESD in just those terms: ‘in Scotland, there is greater focus on a more integrated and coherent approach to sustainable development and ESD with education being recognized by policy makers and practitioners as a key enabler in the transition to a sustainable society’ (UNESCO, 2013, p4). This domain may be essentially the focus of policy makers, but in the present research there is limited evidence of these congratulatory principles being meaningfully translated into a policy agreed, adopted and delivered by senior management within Scotland’s Colleges. Moreover, in an age of educational austerity and staff reductions, ESD practitioners are increasingly thin on the ground in Scottish College education.