Fifteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems (SHES) Roundtable, which first met in 2009, represents an ongoing effort by academics, program directors, administrators, environmental agency personnel, and practitioners to produce a living set of recommendations concerning the pedagogical and administrative aspects of interdisciplinary and higher-order sustainability education. The Roundtable’s vision is the emergence of societies that facilitate, enhance, and sustain indefinitely in that facilitated or enhanced state the well-being of human individuals, their communities, and their environments, while its pedagogical goal is to empower learners to contribute to the realization of that vision. The SHES approach to sustainability education focuses on the use of systems thinking to reveal the complexity of sustainability situations holistically as an alternative to discipline-based perspectives on sustainability, and thus enables learners to diagnose sustainability challenges, to prescribe sustainable responses, and to implement those responses, in ways that are not constrained by disciplinary boundaries or limited by the subject matter context. Papers in this colloquium focus on the background and pedagogical framework of the Roundtable, an example of an undergraduate and a graduate course developed using SHES principles, and SHES proposals regarding faculty, program, administrative, and external support. Papers are followed by an open discussion concerning the use of the SHES approach in sustainability higher education and theoretical or application issues raised by the audience.