McFarlane, Donovan A., and Agueda G. Ogazon. “The Challenges Of Sustainability Education.” Journal Of Multidisciplinary Research (1947-2900) 3.3 (2011): 81-107. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Oct. 2012.
The authors are Donovan A. McFarlane – founder of The Donovan Society LLC and Professor of Management, Business Administration, and Business Research – and Agueda G. Ogazon – Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Management. In this paper, they define sustainability and analyze the challenges of incorporating sustainability in all aspects of higher education, specifically in learning. Sustainability is more than “greening” the campus. A major challenge to sustainability is education. There is a conflict between education for social responsibility (sustainability) and education for economic purposes (jobs and marketability). Society is generally educated for economic growth.
This article aims at higher education institutions, encouraging them to rethink their curriculum and incorporate sustainability into the education. The authors provide examples of action plans and of schools that provide education in sustainability. This article is strong in that the approach to breaking down the challenges is organized and that it provides real life examples to support their claims. They are clearly biased towards using education as a force of sustainability, but I think the article overall is focused and well presented. It is relevant to our project because we can look at the examples of other schools to see how they are really making an effort to teach students about sustainability. Then, we can compare their efforts to Brooklyn College’s sustainability education efforts, or lack thereof.
From your description, I wonder if they also use the “three pillars” approach to sustainability or some other rubric.