International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Practice makes pedagogy – John Dewey and skills-based sustainability education

Seaton Patrick Tarrant Leslie Paul Thiele
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Seaton Patrick Tarrant Leslie Paul Thiele , (2016),"Practice makes pedagogy – John Dewey and
skills-based sustainability education", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol.
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IJSHE
17,1
Practice makes pedagogy – John
Dewey and skills-based
sustainability education
54 Seaton Patrick Tarrant
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA, and
Received 5 September 2014
Revised 10 December 2014
13 January 2015
Leslie Paul Thiele
Accepted 29 January 2015 Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
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Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to ground contemporary sustainability education in John
Dewey’s democratic pedagogy. Specifically, the authors argue that Dewey’s thought anticipates, and
theoretically informs, the sustainability skill set required of contemporary citizens in a complex and
changing world.
Design/methodology/approach – For illustrative purposes, the authors consider how these skills
are at work in current approaches to the adaptive co-management of ecosystems, and they argue that
these same skills are at work across professional and cultural contexts, toward the achievement of
sustainable societies. In turn, the authors situate Dewey’s relevance to contemporary sustainability
education in his writing on interdependence, fallibilism and experimentalism.
Findings – Dewey’s writings provide both a historical antecedent and still valid moral and practical
justification for sustainability education’s emphasis on integrated and adaptive learning.
Practical implications – Grounding sustainability education in Dewey’s democratic pedagogy
underlines its capacity and obligation to develop critical thinking and systems thinking skills,
communication skills and collaboration skills in students.
Originality/value – The paper acknowledges the many ways Dewey has been incorporated into
environmental philosophy, experiential pedagogy and sustainability theory. But Dewey’s role in the
historical development of skills-based pedagogy and, more specifically, his continuing contribution to
contemporary practices of sustainability education has yet to be explored. By grounding sustainability
education in Dewey’s democratic pedagogy, the authors underline its civic mandate to empower citizens
to become lifelong learners and skillful stewards.
Keywords John Dewey, Adaptive co-Management, New civics, Sustainability pedagogy,
Sustainability skills
Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction
At its best, sustainability education mentors students to become informed and critical
analysts of the world, effective agents of change and stewards of the environment, social
community and worthy traditions. While future-focused and operating within
expansive time horizons, sustainability education is in the business of conservation: the
International Journal of
Sustainability in Higher Education preservation of beneficial practices, processes and relationships. It is focused on
Vol. 17 No. 1, 2016
pp. 54-67
conserving communities of life, but is not, for that reason, either an apologist for the
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1467-6370
status quo or a nostalgist for an earlier state of affairs. Rather, innovation stands in
DOI 10.1108/IJSHE-09-2014-0127 service to conservation. Sustainability entails managing the rate and scale of change to
 conserve core values and relationships (Thiele, 2013). Cultivating and conserving the Skills-based
knowledge, values, relationships and skills that make possible adaptive innovation sustainability
within a changing world is the mandate of sustainability education.
The United Nations (UN) commissioned expert literature review for the Decade of
education
Education for Sustainable Development (DESD, 2005-2014) identifies common skills
and learning outcomes that equip students to:
• ask critical questions; 55
• clarify values;
• envision sustainable futures;
• think systematically;
• respond through applied learning; and
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• explore the dialectic between tradition and innovation (Tillbury, 2011).

Likewise, Wals (2012) writes that the DESD has underlined the importance of
developing four capacities in students:
(1) an integrative capacity that allows for a holistic perspective;
(2) a critical capacity that questions taken-for-granted patterns;
(3) a transformative capacity that moves from simple awareness raising to
empowering change; and
(4) a contextual capacity that embeds the values of pluralism in learning.

These learning outcomes are at various times referred to as competencies, capabilities

and capacities for action and change (Barth et al., 2007; Sterling, 2008; Reunamo and
Pipere, 2010; Thomas and Day, 2014). Wiek et al. (2011), reviewing the past two decades
of research on sustainability education, add the key inter-personal competencies of
communication and collaboration.
The authors have synthesized DESD and related literature (Tarrant and Thiele, 2014,
2015) to produce the following set of key sustainability competencies or skills:
• Critical thinking and systems thinking skills, which facilitate investigative,
integrative and holistic thought, navigation between tradition and innovation and
the clarification of values; and
• Communication and collaboration skills, which facilitate the empowerment of
students as adaptive and interactive lifelong learners, stewards for conservation
and agents of change.

This simplified skills framework synthesizes the past two decades of practice-based
sustainability pedagogy. This paper does not address the important role of knowledge
discovery and acquisition and awareness-raising. With this in mind, the key skills
framework is proposed as a necessary, but not sufficient condition of sustainability
education. At the same time, the aforementioned skills, particularly critical thinking and
systems thinking, provide crucial pathways and preconditions for both knowledge
discovery and acquisition and awareness-raising[1].
The DESD literature has provided a clear sense of the importance of developing
sustainability skills. However, it has given little attention to the historical and
 IJSHE theoretical roots of this contemporary impetus for experiential and adaptive skills-based
17,1 learning. Wals’ content analysis of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher
Education demonstrates that the publication’s first nine years (2001-2010) were largely
devoted to what is commonly called greening the campus or reducing a university’s
ecological footprint. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education’s content analysis of its own publications further confirms the past decade’s
56 emphasis on infrastructure and administration. They report on 1,777 publications, 71
per cent of which were news stories. Of these stories, 54 per cent concerned campus
operations, 28 per cent focused on administration and finance and a strikingly low 18 per
cent involved actual education, research or student engagement (AASHE, 2012). Only a
small portion of these studies focused on the pedagogy of skills development.
This article uses John Dewey’s early twentieth-century work on education and
democracy to ground skills-based sustainability education historically and
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theoretically. Dewey’s strategies for problem-based learning and adaptive intelligence

have been applied to general science curricula (Barab and Luehmann, 2003).
Philosophers and ethicists have long argued that Dewey’s work is a valuable antecedent
to contemporary environmental philosophy (Chaloupka, 1987; McDonald, 2004; Norton,
2005; Browne, 2007; Minteer, 2011). Environmental educators have laid out Dewey’s
foundational importance to experiential education (Warren et al., 1995; Ord, 2009;
Moncure and Francis, 2011). And theorists and practitioners of sustainability reference
Dewey’s unique synthesis of democracy, science and the art of communication (Prugh
et al., 1999; Norton, 1999; Jickling and Wals, 2008). But Dewey’s role in the historical
development of skills-based pedagogy and, more specifically, his continuing
contribution to contemporary practices of sustainability education have yet to be
explored.
Granted, contemporary skills-based sustainability education exists in a
socio-ecological context quite different from Dewey’s. Today, people are far more
invested in global-local interactions. Ecology is an established and influential science,
and innovations in computerization allow better understanding and modeling of
emergent complexity. While acknowledging these developments, it remains true that
Dewey’s contributions give historical grounding to the pluralist epistemological and
democratic commitments of present-day sustainability pedagogy and present
opportunities for its further development. Specifically, Dewey’s thought anticipates, and
theoretically informs, the sustainability skill set required of and cultivated by
sustainability educators. Reflecting on Dewey’s contributions allows educators an
opportunity to explore and model the fertile dialectic between tradition and innovation
as they introduce students to the relationships and competencies that facilitate creative
and collaborative problem-solving.

John Dewey and the historical grounding of skills for adaptive learning
John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, pedagogue and
public intellectual. He was a founding voice in pragmatism, functional psychology and
student-centered experiential learning[2]. Much of Dewey’s work articulated the
connections between a vibrant civil society, educational institutions and an improved
and adaptive sensitivity to one’s environment (Weston, 1985; McDonald, 2002).
Dewey’s work can be historically contextualized as a response to the massive and
rapid changes of industrialization and incipient globalization of his day that had
 “dislocated the established relations of persons with one another” (Dewey, 1939 LW Skills-based
13:178)[3]. Dewey argued that the disparate distribution of the benefits and burdens sustainability
accumulating from scientific and technological innovations threatened the democratic
potential of these cultural achievements (Menand, 2002). He wrote:
education
We have displayed enough intelligence in the physical field to create the new and powerful
instruments of science and technology. We have not as yet had enough intelligence to use this
instrument deliberately and systematically to control its social operation and consequences 57
(Dewey, 1931 LW 6:60).
To rectify this situation, and deepen democracy, Dewey argued for a refined art of
communication and engagement with the relational processes that define one’s
experience as a member of society. Of particular concern for Dewey was the individual’s
role as an active learner-citizen and agent of change.
Dewey emphasized the primacy of education and the pressing need for its ongoing
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and balanced reform. As an educator, no less than a pragmatic philosopher, he sought

“an intellectual technique that would be consistent and yet capable of flexible adaptation
to the concrete diversity of experienced things” (Dewey, 1930 LW 5:151). Against
essentialist understandings of a fixed and fully discoverable world, Dewey’s
pragmatism informed a philosophy of experience that described social and moral
existence, like physical existence, in a continuous and relational state of flux (Dewey,
1930 LW 5:267-278). In such a dynamic world, knowledge is gained by solving problems
in context. Dewey writes, “there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful
understanding except as the offspring of doing” (Dewey, 1916 MW 4:284). Knowledge, in
other words, is the product of an adaptive process of engagement. Adaptation, in its
most basic definition, is a negotiation between existing core values and relations and
changing circumstances. Dewey’s pragmatic focus on adaptive problem-solving and its
relationship to contemporary sustainability skills is highlighted in his writing on
interdependence, fallibilism and experimentalism.

Interdependence
Reflecting on the natural world, John Muir wrote, “When you try to pick out anything by
itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (Muir, 2004). Muir’s
ecological vision of an interdependent world has become emblematic for the
sustainability community. Dewey, a contemporary of Muir, evidenced a similar concern
for interdependence. Dewey’s focus, however, was less ecological than it was social and
political. Thinking pragmatically about the interdependencies that characterized
emerging global systems, Dewey saw that communities would increasingly have to
negotiate both local interests and broader national and international interests (Dewey,
1939 LW 13:178).
Such complex interdependence across local-global scales was summed up in Dewey’s
concept of a situation. For Dewey, there were no simple events:
In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or event; an object or event
is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an environing experienced world – a situation
(Dewey, 1938 LW 12:71).
The adequacy of any given account of a situation, he writes, is “found in the extent to
which that account is based on taking things in the widest and most complex scale of
associations open to observation” (Dewey, 1928 LW 3:42). Anticipating present day
 IJSHE ecology or environmental science, Dewey argued that social phenomena, as well as
17,1 physical objects, should be understood as dynamic relational phenomena, and so “a
transaction extending beyond the spatial limits of the organism” (Dewey, 1938 LW
12:32). With his focus on the complex interdependent relationships that characterize
socio-political life, Dewey anticipated systems thinking.
Systems thinking entails learning and thinking “relationally” (Sterling, 2008). It is a
58 basic capacity for recognizing and understanding complex situations in terms of their
boundaries, drivers, adaptive processes and the direct and indirect interactions of their
component parts. Systems thinking involves coordinating a diversity of knowledge
forms to grapple with multi-variable cause and effect relationships, intricate feedback
loops and emergent behavior, as well as the “mental models” that guide our beliefs and
assumptions about the systems with which we interact (Gunderson and Holling, 2001).
Citizens contributing to the development of sustainable societies require critical and
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systems thinking skills to understand their roles and opportunities as consumers,

producers, stewards and agents of change within the complex interdependencies of their
socio-ecological communities (Glasbergen and Smits, 2003). Dewey’s seminal thoughts
on interdependence provide a theoretical foundation and historical grounding to the
development of systems thinking within sustainability education[4].

Fallibilism and experimentalism

In contrast to the many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century who believed that
the scientific method could produce objective empirical certainty, Dewey held that the
scientific revolution effectively ended such essentialist debates (Dewey, 1922 MW 14:
41). He held science to be grounded in fallibilism; the epistemological principle that we
may only assume a given scientific proposition (hypothesis, theory or law) is true based
on the evidence at hand. The proposition in question maintains its truth status only until
contradictory evidence or explanations present themselves, at which point intelligence
dictates amendments to beliefs and understandings. New information and amended
perspective is accomplished by experimentalism: the iterated process of knowledge
acquisition (data gathering), planning (hypothesis formation), experimentation
(hypothesis testing) and knowledge creation (theory building).
Dewey saw fallibilist science as the epistemological core for a democratic and
pluralist politics. In turn, democratic pluralism was the social condition of fallibilist
science. Dewey maintained that full knowledge of a social system was impossible. As
such, citizens must always navigate uncertainty in conditions of relative ignorance. The
fact of indeterminacy spoke to the importance of maintaining and integrating a wide
range of perspectives on any given issue.
Dewey believed a symbiosis of science and democracy supported the greatest
diversity of perspectives, which in turn supported both the growth of scientific
understanding, the continuing development of democratic institutions and the
individual self-transformation that makes for a vibrant democracy. “In the diversity of
others”, Dewey wrote, “we see the possibility of our own adaptations” (Dewey, 1940 LW
14:101). While trial-and-error experience was the way all creatures learn and adapt,
Dewey maintained that the human species had become conscious of this process,
allowing it to improve its adaptive potential by cultural means, that is, through
structured experimentation (Dewey, 1898 EW 5:34-53). Intelligence, so understood, is
the capacity to consciously adapt to new situations. Democracy is the political
 arrangement most conducive to a society that practiced the scientific arts. Dewey’s Skills-based
endorsement of fallibilism and experimentalism provides a historical and theoretical sustainability
grounding for contemporary adaptive co-management practices aimed at preserving
ecological systems and developing sustainable communities.
education

Adaptive co-management
Dewey did not himself use the language of ecology. But his recommendation for 59
adaptive and experimental democratic societies found its ecological voice in the latter
half of the twentieth century in the work of C.S. Holling.
Holling (1973) incorporated the findings of applied ecology into a fuller
understanding of the inherent instability of natural systems, including systems
impacted by humans. Holling’s research shifted ecologists’ attention, and intentions,
from the maintenance of equilibrium within systems to the management of change.
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Applied ecology set the goal of sustaining dynamic human– ecological relationships
within particular locales through collaborative strategies. Today, applied ecology finds
its strongest expression in the theory and practice of adaptive co-management[5].
Adaptive co-management promotes the iterated interactions of multiple stakeholders
(e.g. citizen conservationists, resource consumers, resource managers, industry
representatives and government officials) to generate small-scale strategies for
sustaining human– ecological relationships in particular contexts. These strategies
outline safe-to-fail experiments in ecosystem management, with the dual aim of
conservation and the production of knowledge. Through systematized feedback
of implemented procedures and the repetition of the stakeholder-involvement process of
evaluation and deliberation, management strategies are experimentally amended. The
iterative nature of these processes makes the historical context of a given locale
increasingly important and, thus, emphasizes the necessity of “local knowledge experts”
(Dale et al., 2010).
Adaptive co-management is a foremost example of sustainability science. Its
connection with John Dewey has been made, albeit tenuously (Norton, 1999). This
section underlined how the Deweyan tenets of interdependence, fallibilism and
experimentalism ground adaptive co-management strategies. The skills required of
stakeholders of adaptive co-management strategies are the same as those required by
citizens for the broader mandate of developing and maintaining sustainable societies.
The ecologically adaptive learning required of practitioners of adaptive co-management
uses systems thinking by recognizing stakeholders’ roles in a web of social and
environmental relationships and by cultivating a sense of responsibility for the
long-term consequences of actions, and non-actions, within complex systems. In turn, it
demands clear and continuous communication and collaborative experimental
problem-solving among diverse stakeholders.
For illustrative purposes, consider one of the first well-documented efforts in
adaptive co-management. Lee’s (1994) seminal work regarding the Columbia River
Basin restoration in the 1980s and 1990s documents the early adoption of adaptive
co-management strategies at the level of large ecosystems. Lee describes adaptive
co-management as a policy that is understood and implemented as experimentation,
with a focus on the interdependence of social and ecological systems. The Columbia
River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program were adopted hastily in 1982 in response to an
energy crisis. A formal amendment process was implemented in 1984. This process of
 IJSHE adapting the plan integrated the setting of specific goals with the building of models,
17,1 persistent monitoring and evaluation, and the interactive sharing and negotiation of
findings, interests and goals with stakeholders. The case of the Columbia River Basin
suggests that adaptive co-management, at least ideally, might achieve social justice for
historically mistreated peoples, work to restore compromised natural resources and
prove economically viable, all the while providing an important regional source of
60 energy.
The theory and practice of adaptive co-management has steadily advanced over the
past two decades. The journal Ecology and Society (2014) recently published a special
issue on collaborative adaptive management. The issue documents the many challenges
associated with the implementation of cooperative resource management strategies. It
also highlights significant achievements in improving water quality, advancing
forestry practices, developing new sources of knowledge and heightening grass roots
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participation in the management and protection of natural resources.

Adaptive co-management is here understood as a political-scientific response to the
indeterminate nature of complex social and ecological systems. It addresses the inherent
uncertainties of local ecologies, and perforce the heightened uncertainties of human –
ecological relationships, through a pragmatic, incremental process of conservation-
oriented interventions. For adaptive co-management to function well and broadly,
however, citizen stakeholders must acquire ecological knowledge and develop key
skills. In this respect, a primary obstacle impeding the success of adaptive
co-management is the lack of a citizenry educated for sustainability.
Practitioners of adaptive co-management systematically address the learning
processes of the stakeholders involved in a given management strategy. The
baseline knowledge and skills of stakeholders is given less attention. Sustainability
education, including the specific learning outcomes and pedagogic practices within
the higher education classroom, is seldom addressed in the theory or practice of
adaptive co-management (Armitage et al., 2008). That is unfortunate, as the primary
purpose of sustainability education remains the instruction, mentoring and training
of students, as future citizen-stakeholders, to take an active part in the conservation
and adaptation of their natural and social environments. Effectively, sustainability
education develops the knowledge, values and skill sets that citizen stakeholders
require to fully and effectively contribute to adaptive co-management strategies.
This practical education is less the achievement of a four-year degree than the
preparation of students to engage in an ongoing, developmental and collaborative
process. Sustainability education prepares students for lifelong learning by doing,
where citizens collectively grapple with the diverse and dynamic challenges
associated with the development and maintenance of sustainable societies (Diduck
et al., 2012). The mandate of sustainability education, beyond the transmission of
crucial data and knowledge, is the transformation of students into lifelong learners
who embody critical thinking and systems thinking skills and advanced
communication and collaboration skills.
Like proponents of adaptive co-management, sustainability educators promote a
civic science, which, as Wiek et al. (2011) writes, “requires strong communication and
negotiation skills, and expertise in participatory and trans-academic methods for
collaborating with stakeholders outside academia”. Wiek et al. goes on to emphasize
 that “Graduates should be able to work in teams, and understand, embrace, and Skills-based
facilitate diversity among cultures and social groups”, and that such: sustainability
Interpersonal competence is a basic ingredient in each of the other competencies [namely, education
ethical judgment and social justice, strategic thinking and anticipatory thinking, and systems
thinking] (Wiek et al., 2011, p. 8).
As Dewey recognized, to practice a symbiosis of science and democracy, citizens need
more than intellectual acumen; they require the ability to respond communicatively and 61
collaboratively to the uncertainty that surrounds their knowledge and accompanies
their experimental efforts.
For illustrative purposes, consider what this means for citizens grappling with
climate change. Scientists assert that:
[…] it is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily
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temperature extremes and decreases in cold extremes will occur in the 21st century at the
global scale.
The human activity over the past 100 years has sped up the warming of the planet (Field,
2012; Marzeion et al., 2014). But scientists do not well understand the overall
consequences of this shift or its spatial and temporal variations and impacts. At both
local and global scales, given the number of variables and their dynamic interactions,
the outcome of climate change is indeterminate (Wynne, 1992). In light of both the
scientific consensus on climate change, which dictates that action be taken to avoid
catastrophe, and the remaining scientific indeterminacies and socio-political challenges
associated with all strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation, the only
viable response to climate change is an adaptive co-management approach grounded in
safe-to-fail experimentation. This experimental, knowledge-building and participatory
approach is dependent on the widespread development of critical and systems thinking
skills and skills in communication and collaboration.
In an essay on the topic of freedom, first published in 1928, Dewey wrote that
“freedom is a resolute will operating in a world in some respects indeterminate, because
open and moving toward a new future” (Dewey, 1928 LW 3:92-114). The same essay
connects this indeterminacy to democracy. Judgments and choices, if they are made with
adequate knowledge of one’s environment, require decision-making processes
conducive to the communication of diverse perspectives and the “freedom of thinking”
that evaluates the interests and opinions of others when considering the best possible
course of action. For Dewey, this is both practically and morally the case, as one’s
environment is composed, in part, of other individuals and social bonds. The practical
pedagogical consequence of this theory is the recognition that the capacity for making
decisions within the constraints of indeterminacy, that is, our ability to make judgments
despite less than perfect knowledge, is cultivated by exposure to the diverse
perspectives of multiple stakeholders.
It is through the development of communication skills and collaboration skills that
students learn to face indeterminacy in a pluralist society. Course work on meteorology
or quantum physics may well cultivate an appreciation for indeterminacy. Without
communicative and collaborative practices that bring students to engage a diversity of
peers and community stakeholders, however, scientific sensibilities regarding
indeterminacy and convictions regarding fallibilism and experimentalism do not well
prepare students for their roles as responsible citizens, stewards and innovators.
 IJSHE Students often enter their introductory class on sustainability with a predisposition
17,1 for technological panaceas. Yet today’s technological solutions often become
tomorrow’s ecological problems. The lessons of adaptive co-management caution us to
resist strong-handed technocratic control of the environment. A safer, and more
sustainable, response is grounded in Dewey’s vision of safe-to-fail, pragmatic
experimentation that develops social resilience, achieving “associations whose ordering
62 of parts provides the strength that comes from stability, while they promote flexibility of
response to change” (Dewey, 1939 LW 13:181). In this respect, Kai Lee’s civic science
picks up where Dewey left off, documenting attempts democratically to generate and
apply the best science in the development of resilient socio-ecological communities.
Dewey understood the importance of scientific experimentation. But he would have
little patience for contemporary efforts in higher education to increase funding for
scientific research and technological development at the expense of the liberal arts. His
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scientific pedagogy was civically minded, committed to the development of citizens as

moral thinkers and skillful actors. His writings inform an adaptive process of lifelong
learning, artful communication and creative collaboration. Contemporary sustainability
educators can find nourishing roots for their scientific and liberal arts curricula in
Dewey’s vision of an experimentalist, democratic culture of interdependent
stakeholders and experiences.

Conclusion
It has been suggested that Dewey’s vision chiefly suffers from having never been tried
(Prugh et al., 1999). Along such lines, one cannot help but wonder if sustainability
education is Dewey’s defining posthumous moment. Assessments of the Decade of
Education for Sustainable Development suggest as much, emphasizing the need to shift
educator practice toward a pedagogy grounded in the experiential development of the
skills of critical and systems thinking, communication and collaboration.
Dewey emphasized that ideals such as democracy are not achieved with finality, but
begun anew with each generation. As such, educating for democracy is an endemic and
enduring need, regardless of the stability and longevity of the institutions in place.
Indeed, to the extent that institutions and practices have become calcified, they may lack
the flexibility required to manifest their democratic potential. The same can be said
regarding sustainability and sustainability education. They are not final destinations,
but paths of learning. The resilience of sustainable societies and sustainability
education rests with their capacity for adaptation.
The preeminent definition of sustainable development put forward by the
Brundtland Commission (1987) – development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs – did much
to popularize the notion of inter-generational justice. While it contributed to an
expansion of the public’s time horizon, it has also led some, rather unfortunately, to
understand sustainability as solely future-focused. As such, sustainability is in danger
of becoming wed to an unhealthy infatuation with innovation and an excessive
commitment to technological solutions. Too often, future-focused sustainability efforts
grounded in technological quick fixes are forgetful of worthy traditions of thought and
practice that root people in social and ecological community. It is the authors’ hope that
this historical grounding of sustainability education in Dewey’s thought contributes a
sense of rootedness. Through such grounding, students and teachers might more
 successfully navigate the fast-changing global landscape without losing historical Skills-based
perspective and the sense of place that historical perspective allows. sustainability
Though future focused and aware of the unique demands of the here and now,
sustainability education is best grounded in geographical and historical context.
education
Dewey’s writings on education and democracy provide both a historical antecedent and
still valid moral and practical justification for the development of sustainability skills.
When sustainability educators situate their own practice in such a fertile pedagogical 63
tradition, they model sustainability for their students. That is to say, they manage the
rate and scale of change in their practice of teaching and learning to conserve its core
values and relationships.

Notes
1. See Orr’s (1991) work on ecological literacy regarding knowledge discovery and acquisition
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and Dobson (2007) on the importance of awareness raising.

2. John Dewey’s prolific career spans some 65 years and covers am impressively wide range of
topics. We cannot here claim to cover the breadth of this literature or even claim to mention all
the publications relevant to the topic of skills learning. Rather, we offer a range of evidence in
the hopes that readers will seek out these and other resources in Dewey’s legacy. For an
accessible introduction, see Larry Hickman’s 2 volume, The Essential Dewey (1998, 2009).
3. Page numbers from Dewey’s works reference the Collected Works edition, by volume and
page number.
4. Systems thinking holds a prominent place within the sustainability education literature, but
it is less well recognized within universities, more broadly speaking (Habron et al., 2012). An
increasing array of resources is available to sustainability educators who would embrace
systems thinking in their classroom practice (Meadows and Wright, 2008; Bell and Morse,
2013; Sweeney and Meadows, 2008). Educators can promote systems thinking by having
students explore the complex interdependencies of social-ecological situations, and modeling
these complex scenarios through simple sketches and also with online simulations
(Glasbergen and Smits, 2003).
5. Collaborative strategies for ecosystem conservation grew from the field of applied ecology,
taking the names adaptive management, resilience management, (new) social learning,
interactive governance and our preferred term, adaptive co-management (Armitage et al.,
2008).

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World Conference on Environment and Development (1987), Our Common Future, Oxford
University Press, New York, NY. education

About the authors

Seaton Patrick Tarrant is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Florida. His dissertation
addresses the relationship of sustainability education to emergent theories of citizenship and
67
democracy. Seaton Patrick Tarrant is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
[email protected]
Leslie Paul Thiele is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Director of
Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida.
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