Sustainability principlesSustainable principals

Ian RutherfurdSchool of Geography

Rainfall vs grazing management?

CSIRO. Sustainable grazing for a Burdekin Catchment

Sustainability

Personal and professional decisions that maintain:•Intragenerational equity•Intergenerational equity

•Role of education? – Technical capacity (e.g. risk)– Interconnections (chains of causality)– Public and private outcomes– Empathy

A useful distinction ….• Brown sustainability issues– Quality of life– E.g. Water quantity and quality

• Green sustainability issues– Biodiversity – Climate change

Students often confuse these, and also transition from Brown to Green

Deep and shallow sustainability

• By secondary school … move beyond the action to the reason/consequence

• E.g. Why should we turn off the tap when we clean our teeth?

Melbourne’s Closed catchments 1881

Mountain Ash (E. regnans) in the Cumberland Valley 1880

Water yield (runoff) v. age for E. regnans

Why should you care about sustainability in the curriculum?

1. It is one of the defining challenges of our time

The Anthropocene by weight

Why should you care about sustainability in the curriculum?

1. It is one of the defining challenges of our time

2. Provides some of the most challenging and satisfying jobs for your students

The interesting problems of our times

95,000 increase in 2014

Not just about ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ issues

Why should you care about sustainability in the curriculum?

1. It is one of the defining challenges of our time

2. Provides some of the most challenging and satisfying jobs for your students

3. One of the three new cross-curriculum priorities

Cross-curriculum priorities from Aust. curriculum & included in new Vic

curriculumLearning Areas English • Mathematics • Science • Health and Physical Education • Languages • Humanities and Social Sciences (History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship, Economics and Business) • The Arts • Technologies

General capabilities • Critical and creative thinking • Personal and social capability • Intercultural understanding • Ethical Understanding • Literacy • Numeracy • ICT

Cross-curriculumPriorities • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures • Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia

• Sustainability

Why should you care about sustainability in the curriculum?

1. It is one of the defining challenges of our time

2. Provides some of the most challenging and satisfying jobs for your students

3. One of the three new cross-curriculum priorities

4. Opportunity to easily differentiate your school

Differentiate

• Easy to differentiate simply by highlighting the existing sustainability threads through the curriculum

• Sustainability is one of the clear links between STEM & humanities subjects

• Provides an easy hook for field trips (easy to organise)

• Clear link between the fabric of the school and the curriculum

Great scope for role modelling …

• “Inconsistency between teachings and practice has confused students and decreased both the likelihood of emulation and educational effectiveness” (p.40)

• Role models• Facilities (need to advertise what is done)• Governance (inclusive decision making)• School culture

• Higgs, A. L., & McMillan, V. M. (2006). The J. of Env. Edu., 38(1), 39-53.

Sustainability in the new Vic curriculum

• A sustainability education involves competencies in multiple subjects– Maths– Chemistry– History– English – Technology– Legal studies– Economics– ITC

• But including plenty of Geography is the easiest way to tick the sustainability boxes. Why?

How will geography help with sustainability?

1. Great sustainability curriculum 2. Great support for your staff

Sustainability in the new Victorian Geography curriculum

• Geography remains one of the eight distinct disciplines in the new Victorian curriculum

• Sustainability is embedded throughout the geography curriculum (one of the seven central concepts of the subject)

• A new VCE curriculum that has sustainability as a connecting principle

Sustainability in the new Victorian Geography curriculum (cont.)

• Class-room to planet progression (avoids the shallow sustainability problem)

• The structured geography curriculum makes it easy to achieve and report on ‘achievement standards’

More options for students between science and humanities

• Increasingly Geography is considered STEM • Major emphasis on spatial science• Increasingly Geography is being selected as a

6th complementary subject in VCE• The new VCE Geography curriculum

In the UK and the USA Geography is booming

• For the fifth year running, GCSE entries have risen. At A-level, geography had the largest percentage increase of all the major subjects in 2015, with candidate numbers rising sharply by 13 per cent, following on from the 19 per cent increase in GCSE in 2013. Enrolment on undergraduate courses is running higher than national averages, and graduating geographers experience some of the lowest unemployment levels of any degree subject.

• "At the moment, we don't have enough VCE-matriculated geography students coming through to the university level," says RMIT University's Dr Benno Engels,

• He hopes year 9 and 10 students will see the value of studying geography at VCE level

• The lecturer in global studies, social science and planning says more than 75 per cent of his final-year urban planning students will have jobs lined up before they graduate at the end of this year.

• "There is a skills gap and we just can't get enough students in the door," Engels says.

• (Herald Sun Nov 15, 2011)

How the GTAV can help you and your students

• Geography is growing in strength• https://www.gtav.asn.au• Australia’s largest geography organisation• The GTAV makes sense of the exploding

sustainability resources• Very well resourced training– E.g. Annual conference attended by 950 teachers

• Sit back and let them do the sustainability work for you

Geography & spatial science

“Spatial technology is the tool of the geographer in the 21st Century.” George Dailey, ESRI US Education Manager

The GTAV has developed professional arrangements with multiple spatial organisations (e.g. RMIT, Spatial Vision)

Spatial skills and analysis

Eltham High School year 10 student Casey McCormick won the Stapley Medal at the Planning Institute of Australia's Victorian awards.

Urban sustainability

Suggestions• Sustainability is a core element of the curriculum • Easy to reap the benefits of sustainability in the

curriculum• Let the Geography curriculum do the work• Let the GTAV do the work

• Give the Geography curriculum material to your curriculum coordinator

• Give the Geography careers brochure to your career adviser

• Consider sustainability as a powerful cross-cutting theme

• Consider Geography as a way to easily achieve that

Waste Wise Schools Program

• Introduced 1997• Active in 50% of schools• Becoming accepted behaviour• Time to evolve from recycle, reuse, reduce• To refuse, rethink, resist, replant