2.4 Areas of Student Learning: Embodied vs. Abstract Learning
As staff members interested in ESD and observers of the project, we saw the substantial potential for learning from the project: appreciating that enacting change is not as simple as the desire to see it happen; the level of research and decision‐making needed to underpin action; increased awareness of barriers to implementing change and how to overcome them; the range of different stakeholders and perspectives necessary in change processes; and the skills of lobbying, negotiation, persuasion, working with people constructively, public speaking, and grant application writing. All these learnings are in addition to the adoption of more pro‐environmental behavior. Our list of possible learning outcomes is long; however, are they achieved, and if not, how can such learning potential be realized?
Unsurprisingly, with such diverse motivations for taking part in the project, the learning students articulated was varied. The most frequently articulated learnings, for those not already viewing themselves as knowledgeable in these areas, were on everyday, visible practices such as recycling, composting, and food growing, and for some, increasing awareness of energy use through use of an in‐home energy display. When prompted, students were able to articulate that they had developed generic skills important for change agents, such as interpersonal communication skills and writing for an audience and managing multiple, competing tasks. The transformative learning about driving change that we envisaged, such as developing skills related to interacting and negotiating with different stakeholders toward a desired outcome, were not articulated by students in the interviews, in spite of being something we observed. One student did express learning about the nature of driving change:
It seems like it's very easy to just say [ideas] out loud and put them up, but when it actually comes to sitting down and planning them, fitting it in, trying to get the communication, the contacts we need, it's quite difficult.
(Student 4, Year 2 of project)
It could be somewhat disheartening to see limited articulation of deeper areas of learning, and a focus on learning of everyday practices. However, this could be in part due to the lack of reflection on learning, and the more abstract nature of their learning. As ESD academics and practitioners, we aspire for our students to develop broader sustainability competencies and a deeper understanding of systemic causes of unsustainability.
Yet the interviews highlighted that there is a need to develop basic competencies related to sustainable everyday practices. For example, one international student had never experienced waste segregation for recycling and developed new patterns of behavior:
Now after a year it's kind of now become in our pattern of life and it's the right thing to do, so doing it the other way just would not fit.
(Student 4, Year 2 of project)
All students were eager to take their practical learning into their future lives. One interviewee also highlighted that focusing on sustainable living in the home gave them the “first hand experience” of sustainability, which would inevitably lead to more activity outside the home and advocacy with others:
If you get into doing it at home, learning why it's important and how it can help you and not only you, I think you would start doing it more often outside of the house and speaking about it to more people, because it's first‐hand experience.
(Student 4, Year 2 of project)
Another student highlighted the importance of universities as places where students could develop sustainable everyday living practices:
I think that universities are the perfect place for it because people are moving out of their house, you need to develop those kind of skills anyway, whether it's cooking or growing food or being self‐sustaining in general. It's the perfect place for it.
(Student 1, Year 1 of project)
In addition, this student highlighted that universities are also places where bad habits can be developed, for example, through regular consumption of takeaway food. Through the hidden curriculum of the home, projects like the SSH have the potential to counter such bad habits, through provision of communal spaces and access to food growing and promote the development of more sustainable patterns of behavior.
In the academy, the role of the body in learning is often diminished by educators, giving preference to abstract, cerebral types of knowing (Ollis 2008). While the importance of embodied learning is increasingly recognized by ESD practitioners and in ESD scholarship, there still remains a reticence to incorporate it into everyday teaching, possibly due to lingering biases, methodological uncertainties, or impracticalities of trying to do so in educational institutions that have been built for didactic, classroom‐based learning. These areas of practical and visible learning, such as recycling and composting, conform to Vare and Scott's (2007, p. 193) ESD1, and as they acknowledge “it's a basic form of learning but it's still learning” which still comes with wider social and environmental benefits. Indeed, research by Chaplin and Wyton (2012, p. 413) highlight how even though students perceive sustainability as important “they demonstrate a lack of understanding of the concept or behavior that accords with these values,” and that further action is needed so that actions such as energy saving become normative behavior. The SSH provides a place for social modeling, an important way of learning pro‐sustainability behaviors, new routines, and social practices within the fabric of everyday living (Blewitt 2006). It provides a place to develop a community of practice and social learning through daily interactions with others.
Still and Kent (1996:131) describe the activist learner as one who “takes an active, assertive role in supporting measures that affect our common good – first, and continually, seeking to increase her/his level of conscious awareness of personal, social, political, economic, cultural and environmental realities.” By choosing to live in the SSH, students demonstrated a commitment to at least some of these areas. Chase (2000, in Ollis 2008) identified five different areas of learning of environmental activists: technical knowledge, political knowledge, personal growth, life skills, and knowledge of organizations. Even if we may find ourselves disappointed with what seems to be a lack of learning about political knowledge and knowledge of organizations, we do see the development of technical knowledge, personal growth and life skills. Our students, like all activists, must start somewhere. As with all communities of practice there are people at different stages of knowledge, newcomers as well as those who can pass on their knowledge, skills, and experience (Ollis 2008).
Student 2 is quoted in Section 2.3.2 referring to the SSH as a space for informal debate and discussion amongst residents and guests, in which we can assume that the deeper and systemic issues contributing to unsustainability may be considered. However, it is clear that students struggle to articulate deeper learnings, or to identify them as valid and legitimate learnings worthy of being mentioned in an interview. However, the questions remain – can this deeper level of learning take place in informal curriculum projects, and how can it be better promoted?
Even within the informal curriculum, staff‐facilitated reflection to support learning may be possible through integration into the project's student support. There are also examples of written reflection requirements for awards relating to non‐formal curriculum activities. However, opportunities for reflection clearly differ between activities that may be classed as situated in the non‐formal curriculum, which are top‐down and university/Students' Union initiated, and those which are genuinely student‐led (the informal curriculum of Table 2.1). The formal curriculum may also have a role in fostering habits of critical thinking and reflection that enable students to independently make these links between everyday practices and underlying systemic challenges.
2.5 Activist Learning across the Formal, Informal, and Hidden Curriculum
There is growing interest in the role of the informal curriculum, the interrelations between formal and informal sustainability