NON-TRADITIONAL PEDAGOGIES IN ADVANCED EDUCATION: ENGAGING HEAD, HANDS HEART FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AND EDUCATIONAL BENEFIT

摘要

Environmental insecurity is perpetuated by advanced education through specialist-oriented, disintegrative disciplines and curricula divorced from human experience and socio-ecological context. While academic specialization is important and often crucial, embedding such knowledge within integrative transdisciplinary realities is necessary in transitioning towards environmental security and, more broadly, sustainability, as per the current UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). In this paper, I discuss non-traditional sustainability and transformative pedagogies that in combination can enable profound changes in what students are learning, and how. Based on a pedagogical approach that balances cognitive ("head"), psychomotor ("hands") and affective ("heart") engagement with the explicit aim of equipping post-secondary graduates with the knowledge, skills and attitudes integral to the development of national and international environmental security, I use the example of integrating Community-Based Research and Community Service-Learning, to contribute towards the social responsibility of advanced education to meet the needs of environmental security. I reflect upon a pedagogical experiment, underway at the University of British Columbia, Canada, that directly addresses and actively contributes towards environmental security and sustainable community development through such pedagogical integration and the lens of food system sustainability, that is, food security.