English Language: Discourse and Sustainability
Discourse and Sustainability is a level one module introducing a key skill for working in a globalised world; sustainability literacy. The basis of this skill is the acquisition of a critical understanding of the values and world views fostered by dominant cultural discourses, and the effects of these values on people and planet. |
Active learning
Students learn how to analyse dominant discourses through active learning such as reading selections of magazine articles and adverts with a view to discovering the patterns and the common values enshrined within them. In preparing this activity, lecturer Arran Stibbe is careful with the data that he selects. For example, if he is looking to introduce students to the discourse of economics, consumption and production, he will choose advertisements which represent people doing fun things like spending time with families in MacDonalds restaurants or lots of friends happily having fun together at the beach and drinking Coke. |
Through reading and discussing the articles and magazines, students begin to notice that the language and messages contain no acknowledgement of the destruction and waste caused by the activities and products advertised. Arran encourages them to consider what are the consequences of such a discourse? What type of society does it construct? He says ‘here’s a model of the world – how does it relate to sustainability? Or ‘does this model include social, environmental and economic factors or is it missing something out?’ This active learning pedagogy is important, as ‘the aim is not to give [the students] bits of knowledge, although that’s important, it’s to give them the critical ability to find these things out for themselves’.
Visioning Technique
Another approach that Arran uses to help students understand the extent to which discourse shapes our understanding of society is a Visioning Technique that helps the students gain a new perspective on the Earth: One of these is called ‘Eye of the Eagle’ in which he guides the students on a journey in which they imagine that they are an eagle flying over the earth, and looking down upon human society. Through the eagle’s vantage point, humans look like ‘a bunch of apes’: all is socially constructed, ‘the eagle can’t see whether someone has got a PhD or hasn’t got a PhD, or has a certificate that they’ve graduated from university or doesn’t have it’. Through this exercise students begin to understand how socially constructed reality is and also the potential to deconstruct it and reconstruct it in more promising ways.
Counter and Alterative discourses
Following the study of destructive mainstream discourses, students go on to critique counter discourses, exploring the extent to which they offer a new direction for society. This often reveals that they are based upon the same assumptions as the mainstream discourses. Lastly, Arran introduces the students to some alternative discourses, built not in reaction to the mainstream Western discourses but in parallel, springing from other cultures. Arran says
‘I look at Japanese discourses around nature for example and these construct reality in a completely different way from these destructive ones, its not that these ones I’m supplying are the right ones...but it just opens[the students] up [to the] alternatives...we’re so out of balance in the west with the competitive kind of ‘bigger is better’ kind of discourses...that you need alternatives to get the balance back.’
A definition of ESD
To Arran, Education for Sustainable Development is not just ‘changing the direction society is heading, away from some of the absolute catastrophes which are very easily foreseeable’ but also ‘adapting to the inevitable changes’. He says that ‘combining those two things together, adapting to inevitable change in ways which help shift society in direction which avoids some of these catastrophes…and encouraging a new orientation – learning to adopt life enhancing or life affirming life styles, learning to adapt to inevitable change, and learning to change the direction of society toward sustainability’ – this is education for sustainable development. |
Interviewee: Arran Stibbe