Building on the Millennium Development Goals, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) were established. Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace the SDGs, given escalating sustainability challenges, this article questions whether ESDG is desirable as “an education for the future”. Many challenges outlined by the SDGs are supposed to be solved by “inclusive” or “sustainable” economic growth, assuming that economic growth can be conveniently decoupled from resource consumption. Yet, the current hegemony of the sustainability-through-growth paradigm has actually increased inequalities and pressure on natural resources, exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change and resulting social tensions. With unreflective support for growth, far from challenging the status quo, the SDGs and consequently, the ESDGs, condone continuing environmental exploitation, depriving millions of species of their right to flourish, and impoverishing future generations. This article creates greater awareness of the paradoxes of sustainable development and encourages teaching for sustainability through various examples of alternative education that emphasizes planetary ethic and degrowth. The alternatives include Indigenous learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, education for steady-state and circular economy, empowerment and liberation. “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in 'Journal of Environmental Education' on 01/20/20, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00958964.2019.1710444 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Over the past decade, the maker movement and in its slipstream maker education have attained worldwide popularity among educators, politicians, and the media. Makers’ enthusiasm for creative design and construction, using old and new tools has proven contagious, and is worth exploration and critical reflection by the community of engineering and technology education (ETE). This chapter describes what has been said about “making” by philosophers and educators; what maker education is, and what is new and not so new about it; why it has gained momentum; what the evidence is about its effectiveness and its possible weaknesses; and how mainstream technology education may benefit from maker education. This chapter concludes with ideas for a research agenda.
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This book provides insight into an ambitious project to re-invent the educational method practiced at NHL Stenden. The predecessors used different approaches to the delivery of education. One of them used Competency-Based Education, whilst the other practiced Problem-Based Learning. The choice to combine the advantages of both methods, as well as to develop an entirely new concept that provided a better response to the fast and ever-increasing pace of changes in the workplace, was made by both institutions together. This approach was called Design-Based Education (DBE). Given the significant changes required of stakeholders to facilitate learning according to the new DBE approach, it is important to take stock of what these changes mean in terms of teaching and learning and to ascertain from early steps how everybody can stay, or step, on board.
