SEAS Events

Abstract

Global guidelines for sustainability education such as the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) approach promoted by the Untied Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) encourage higher education institutions to introduce courses on sustainability and human-environment relationships, including in STEM-focused programs. Some countries, including India, have issued national policy mandates for universities to incorporate ESD, in attempt to build educational and political legitimacy through alignment with global standards.This study uses ethnographic methods and case studies in India and the United States to examine graduate engineering students' experiences of sustainability-related courses. The study describes how national and institutional directives, combined with students' market-driven career anxieties, often steer instructors toward prioritizing the career-focused or 'industry-ready' targets of the ESD guidelines over their more social and environmental principles. Despite this apparent hierarchy, however, students and faculty bring their unique 'senses of place' - their civic identities, emotional attachments, and socioeconomic goals - to their classroom experiences, re-emphasizing ESD's social and environmental principles in so doing. This study explores how sustainability education in classrooms reflects global and local dialectics, and the role that innovative pedagogical approaches play in connecting students' and instructors' senses of place to classroom experiences that may otherwise center institutional priorities."

Samuel T Dana Building
IGCB Seminar Room, 1024, first floor

On Zoom:
https://umich.zoom.us/j/96102684518
Meeting ID: 961 0268 4518
Passcode: placebased