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How not what: teaching sustainability as process
E. Melanie DuPuis & Tamara Ball
To cite this article: E. Melanie DuPuis & Tamara Ball (2013) How not what: teaching
sustainability as process, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 9:1, 64-75, DOI:
10.1080/15487733.2013.11908108
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ARTICLE
How not what: teaching sustainability as process
1
E. Melanie DuPuis & Tamara Ball
1
2
2
Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz, UC Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington,
DC 20036 USA (email: emdupuis@ucsc.edu)
Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA (email:
tballgoes@gmail.com)
Ever since the word “sustainability” entered public discourse, the concept has escaped definition. The United Nations
has christened the years 2005–2014 “The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development” and has called
upon universities “to make education for sustainability a central focus of higher education curricula, research, physical
operations, student life, and outreach to local, regional, and global communities.” Nevertheless, the indeterminacy of
sustainability as a concept has challenged those designing university sustainability efforts, in terms of both campus
planning and curricula. Some instructors and campus sustainability planners have chosen to stabilize sustainability
concepts into a technical and ethical “greenprint” based on some agreement concerning shared (or imposed) concepts and values. Yet others have realized that this is not a problem to be “solved” but instead presents an opportunity to advance and implement alternative approaches to teaching and learning “post-normal” or “Mode 2” science.
This article describes a curricular design that attempts to maintain both canonical disciplinary learning about the
techniques of sustainability and training in the reflexive skills necessary to explore sustainable change through postnormal learning processes, which we delineate as three “modes of knowing.” By training students to practice these
ways of knowing sustainability, they come to understand the “how” of sustainable practice, process, and design, while
allowing the “what” of sustainability to emerge from group interaction in a collaborative context.
KEYWORDS: education, learning, colleges and universities, design, environmental engineering, sustainability
ceptionalizations of knowledge production separate
out codified didactic knowledge—what we call here
“know what”—from the more contextual, tacit, and
relational knowledge production we emphasize here
and refer to as “know how.” We then ask, can universities, as centers of codified, disciplinary knowledge,
teach students how to practice this new way of
knowing? Then, we use one example of an interactive
learning activity we have designed to train students to
be competent, reflexive producers of sustainable
knowledge in collaborative group processes. Through
our own collaborative process of designing this
learning activity, we found that students practiced
three post-normal “modes” of knowing. We describe
each of these modes and show how the learning activity evolved to explicitly teach both disciplinary
technical learning about sustainability along with
these other three transdisciplinary, reflexive processbased “how” modes of knowing. Finally, we briefly
show how we are developing ways to assess student
acquisition of these process “how” knowledge competencies.
Our example comes from a learning activity we
have designed and conducted as part of the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design (SEED) consortium, a
The Challenge of Teaching Sustainability in the
University Context
The United Nations declared 2005–2014 to be
the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, calling on universities to help create a more
sustainable world (UNESCO, 2005). Yet, higher education may not be well prepared to fulfill this goal.
Historically, the university has created knowledge
with individual experts in siloed disciplines who research and transfer codified knowledge using didactic
pedagogies (Jonassen, 1991; Sharp, 2002). Yet, many
observers have argued that working toward a sustainable future requires educational models that go beyond teaching codified “what” facts to models that
emphasize “how”: that train students in the transdisciplinary, collaborative ways of knowing-how that
have been recently characterized as “new knowledge
production” (Hessels & van Lente, 2008), “postnormal,” or “Mode 2” science (Functowitz & Ravetz,
1993; Gibbons et al. 1994; Wiek et al. 2011).
In this article, we describe the problems with defining sustainability as codified, stable “whats.” We
then look at new characterizations of sustainable
knowing and learning as a more collaborative, “dialogic” process (Gibbons et al. 1994). These new con-
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DuPuis & Ball: Teaching Sustainability as Process
should be taught (Bulkeley, 2006). Pedagogy also
tends to be didactic, relying primarily on the lecturetest “banking” model, an approach that treats students
as passive recipients receiving codified information
transmitted to them from “the sage on the stage”
(Friere, 1970; Sharp, 2002; Gao et al. 2007). This
“codify and convince” strategy of creating sustainable change is not confined to the classroom. It is evident in a broader range of campus sustainable planning operations. Organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education (AASHE) standardize sustainability into a
set of “best practices”—technologies and behaviors
—and then certify an institution’s progress in
meeting these standards through the “Sustainability
Tracking Assessment and Rating System” at levels
from bronze to platinum (AASHE, 2012).
group experimenting with reflexive pedagogical designs and learner-centered curriculum to train students to work effectively within collaborative group
processes (Bacon et al. 2011) to create positive sustainable change.
Sustainability as What
A focus on sustainable knowledge and practice
as simply gathering and imparting to students the
right codified information has led to confusion in the
classroom. Sustainability knowledge continually slips
out from under these codified, standardized, cannonical definitions. This situation has led to a frustrating
indeterminacy in which “[s]ustainability appears to
be about ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ all at once,”
(Sherren, 2006) so that “[a]t times, the plurality of
angles, concerns, and interests embodied in sustainability debates devolve into a confusing cacophony”
(Brand & Karvonen, 2007). The slipperiness of sustainable knowledge means that those attempting to
prepare students to make informed contributions are
often puzzled “in stipulating what is core to educate
in something so amorphous as sustainability”
(Sherren, 2006) leaving universities to become
caught up in the question (to paraphrase Dave Eggers
(2006)): “What is the What?” of sustainability.
Universities have so far emphasized answers to
“what” questions, fulfilling the United Nations sustainability mandate by creating campus “greenprint”
plans that lay out sustainability “best practices”
(Heinz Family Foundation, 1995; Bulkeley, 2006), a
set of advisable technology adoptions to make campuses more “ecoefficient” (Bartlett & Chase, 2004;
El-Mogazi, 2005). In addition, campuses often combine these technological recommendations with new
“sustainability learning” initiatives that include inculcating “values and motivations that bring about environmentally responsible behavior” (Hansmann,
2010). 1 In other words, universities teach notions of
what technologies are sustainable along with what
norms and behaviors lead to “good,” sustainable lifestyles (Sherren, 2006). In these greenprint processes,
a group of interested stakeholders on campus define
sustainable technologies and behaviors and then hope
that business decisions and instruction will follow
suit. These processes of sustainable knowledge creation tend to be reductionist, that is, to reduce sustainability to a simple list of technologies and behaviors,
both in terms of the sustainability plans for the campus itself and a set of codified facts and values that
Sustainability as How
In contrast to these “codify and convince” university planning and teaching initiatives, new approaches define this sustainable knowledge as “postnormal science” comprising “a multiplicity of
knowledge as well as a multiplicity of forms of
knowledge” (Brand & Karvonen, 2007) requiring
new, multidisciplinary, “reflexive” research and pedagogies (Functowitz & Ravetz, 1993). These scholars
describe sustainable knowledge production as “a vibrant arena that is bringing together scholarship and
practice, global and local perspectives from north and
south” (Clark & Dickson, 2003).
Weik et al. (2011) recognize that training students in the post-normal science of sustainability
“does not imply that ‘regular’ competencies, such as
critical thinking and basic communication skills, are
not important for sustainability professions and academic programs (they are!).” However, they argue
that there are several other key competencies “critically important for sustainability efforts” (Weik et al.
2011). To teach these post-normal key competencies
requires “an alternative model of policy learning
[that] points to processes of argumentative struggle
between competing frames or discourses as a means
through which new understandings of policy problems arise, and policy change takes place” (Bulkeley,
2006). Teaching the “how” of sustainability requires
us to “replace pedagogical approaches based on (relatively ‘authoritarian’) transfers of information with
more interactive and collaborative learning processes: citizen participation can start with the creation of a community of learners” (Simon, 2002). In
addition, a growing body of research in the learning
sciences has shown that courses that rely only on didactic pedagogic strategies are less successful in attracting, retaining, or preparing students for STEM
1
See, for example, the University of Colorado’s Blueprint for a
Green Campus at http://ecenter.colorado.edu/greening-cu/
blueprint-for-a-green-campus, and the University of California
Santa Cruz’s Campus Sustainability Plan at http://sustainability.
ucsc.edu/actions-planning.
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(science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
disciplines (Seymour, 2002; Smith et al. 2009). For
these reasons and others, this article explores research on post-normal forms of knowledge and on
socioconstructive pedagogies to teach noncodified or
“reflexive” ways of knowing.
UC Santa Cruz’s SEED curricular design team
has been experimenting with pedagogy that embraces
the reflexive nature of sustainability as a field or a
concept. Defining sustainability is not taken as a
problem that needs to be “solved,” but an opportunity
to raise new ways of thinking about the world. This
approach recognizes sustainability as an intrinsically
unstable concept, a dynamic idea that can never be
pinned down to a particular technology, set of behaviors, or even worldview and set of values. Under
this scenario, the challenge becomes to design a curriculum around an unfixed concept and engage students with multiple modes of knowing without creating an unfocused strategy, agenda, and pedagogy.
Faced with this challenge, SEED curriculum designers have to date focused on training students in
understanding multiple frames, problem-based and
transformational learning, critical thinking, and dialogic exchange in group learning (Wells, 1999;
Thomas, 2009). These emphases shift the focus away
from codified knowledge toward various processes—
“modes”—used to create new understanding (Barad,
2007). Our approach follows sociocultural theories of
learning and teaching that focus on alternative options for participation in “joint activity” (Lave, 1991;
1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff et al. 2003).
These efforts reflect broader transformations in the
conceptualization of knowledge and understanding
toward an embrace of what Silvio Funkowitz &
Jerome Ravetz (1993) characterize as “post-normal”
knowledge, what Gibbons et al. (1994) call “Mode 2”
forms of knowledge, and revive ideas about those
kinds of knowledge that escape codification, or what
Karl Polanyi called “tacit” knowledge (Nonaka &
Takeuchi, 1995). We characterize all of these understandings as “know how” modes of knowing. According to this perspective, leaving the definition of
sustainability open, interdisciplinary, and emergent
enables a focus on the “how” of technical and social
processes informing sustainable designs (Brand &
Karvonen, 2007).
Curriculum design that enables the “what” of
sustainability to continually emerge and be redefined
through group interaction around intersubjective
knowledge-production practices prepares students for
the kind of experimental creativity, reflexivity, and
collaboration that will be required to produce new
sustainable ways of knowing and living. Gibbons et
al. (1994) describe this kind of knowing as always in
the making. It is experiential, discursive, processual,
social, tacit, contextual, transdisciplinary, open to
different worldviews, collaborative, practice-based,
and informal (Martens, 2006; Brand & Karvonen,
2007; Luks & Siebenhüner, 2007). In this kind of
“new knowledge production” (Hessels & van Lente,
2008), discursive processes are not seen as separate
from scientific research but rather as integral to it.
This leads to a more dynamic and decentered view of
knowledge-creation as emergent and historically
“contextualized,” based in practices and distributed
across agents and artifacts (Cole & Engestrom, 1993;
Gibbons et al. 1994; Shove & Ingram, 2008). Such a
counterview is based on acceptance of coexisting
multiple ontologies, in which codified knowledge
exists with other marginalized knowledge processes
that are contingent on context and exist only so far as
they are “in use”—that is, applied through interpretation, experience, and practice.
Ways of Knowing How
The increasing acceptance of multiple ways of
knowing does not lead automatically to new forms of
pedagogy. To achieve collaborative learning, students
need to work through their multiple and competing
ways of knowing and commit to a process of collaboration despite tacit and/or explicit commitments to
different frames/worldviews: ways of understanding
and of acting in the world. To teach these skills we
relied on the work of educational theorists John
Dewey, Paulo Friere, and others working in the
Dewey tradition, such as Jerome Bruner (1990).
These education thinkers have attempted to create
socioconstructivist pedagogies around active, experiential, service, and practice-based learning that require not only training across fields but also in the
application of collaboration skills that can span disciplinary divides/boundaries. We ultimately categorized our pedagogy into four separate modes, including the didactic strategy of teaching normal science as “facts”—knowledge that is delivered from
experts to non-experts—and three collaborative, postnormal modes of knowing (Table 1).
Know How 1: Subjective Knowing
Each person learns important information
through personal experience, history, and their own
social situatedness. Subjective knowledge is the embodied knowledge we carry within ourselves though
our histories and connections. A number of scholars
have been seeking recognition for this kind of “situated” (Haraway, 1988), “local” (Geertz, 1983), and
“standpoint” (Collins, 2000) or “witness” knowledge
(contextually based and “true” in particular places,
with particular people in particular times and contingent to particular situations). Postcolonial and critical
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Table 1 Modes of knowing and pedagogical strategies.
Lab Steps
Rank Individual
Rank Group
Analyze
Redesign
Modes of
Knowing
Subjective
Intersubjective
Scientific
Practice
Competencies
Reflexivity
Deliberation
Research
Innovation
Processes
Empowerment
Understanding
Analysis
Creativity
race theories especially emphasize witness testimony
based in particular histories, memories, identities,
subjectivities, and embodied knowledges (Ahmed &
Stacey, 2001). These are also the knowledges tied to
a particular culture’s ecologies (Cronon, 1983) or
agroecologies (Altieri, 1995).
Those who take the subjective-knowledge perspective see Kuhn’s (1962) notion of paradigm as
restrictive. Different ways of knowing can coexist
even if one form has dominance. Sustainable agriculture provides an excellent illustration of this point;
because it depends on a more agroecological, and
therefore place-based context, it tends to be more
tacit and situated and therefore harder to teach. Industrial agriculture, on the other hand, is dominant
not only because industrial economic interests heavily influence agricultural education but also because
industrial agriculture knowledge is more codified and
universalizable, a form of knowledge more open to
didactic university pedagogies (Goodman et al.
2011).
Ontology
Interpretive
Relational
Positivist
Design
Pedagogy
(example)
Journaling
Discussion
Lecture
Project
bility, we must make decisions in order to act. Discursive knowing, however, is intersubjective rather
than subjective because it is carried out in concert
with others, either through face-to-face deliberation
or through civil discourse in public arenas. The intersubjective knowledges that result from these social
interactions are neither situated in any one subjective
position/standpoint nor represent a singular universal
truth. These knowledges are contingent on the unique
constraints and affordances of the activity underway,
including the material, social, and historical context
of that activity and the specific tools and resources
available. It does not exist in the head of any one person or in the cultural ideas of one group of people.
Instead, this type of knowledge is produced through
social interaction, group decision making, debate, and
collaboration. Scholars refer to this knowledge as
coproduced (Jasanoff, 2004) or networked (Callon &
Law, 1995).
From the discursive (or intersubjective) perspective, sustainability science is a design collaboration
between various actors involved in new ways of living in the world rather than the pursuit of a prescribed end goal such as a set of sustainability greenprints. For example, new ways of looking at the history of technological design have shown that bicycle
design emerged not from experts’ ideas of what a
bicycle should be, but from designers paying attention to the diverse visions and needs of various user
groups (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). Additional evidence
of the importance of discursive thinking can be found
in literature on business management and innovation,
which has paid increasing attention to the problem of
collaborative teamwork incorporating users early on
in the design process (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003).
Researchers have shown the importance of studying
situations in which people bring different disciplinary, codified knowledges together to innovate a
particular technology or product (Nonaka &
Takeuchi, 1995). Nonaka & Peltokorpi (2006), for
example, look at how engineers involved in designing the batteries, brakes, and electrical systems of the
Toyota Prius had very different disciplinary viewpoints about the automobile as a system, and yet
learned to work together to create one car that
emerged through collaboration rather than the fulfilling of a single vision. These engineers succeeded
Know How 2: Discursive Knowing
Discursive knowing is produced through social
interaction and respectful deliberation among collaborators who work jointly to complete complex tasks
that require coordinated action. As Tomasello and his
colleagues have explained (Tomasello, 1999;
Tomasello et al. 2005), coordinated action requires
establishing a common purpose and a “joint focus of
attention.” Since complex tasks require a division of
labor, individual participants who come with different histories, worldviews, and frames of understanding must learn “intersubjectivity”: to communicate
their individual subjective understandings through
language (verbal and written), gesture, physical
movement, facial expression, demonstrations, symbolic inscriptions, and so forth in ways that articulate
and respect subjective framings, yet accomplish
common goals.
Like personal subjective knowledge, discursive
knowledge is often a combination of rational, tacit,
and emotional knowledge. Rather than seeking universals, it involves how we, in society, cope with
various predicaments, contradictions, and dilemmas
that are intrinsically irresolvable, “wicked” problems
(Rittel & Weber, 1973). Yet, despite this unresolva-
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not by moving toward one worldview but by working
through particular kinds of group processes that enabled them to synchronize their differences as they
made decisions about the design of the product.
contextual and/or conceptual barriers that need to be
identified and removed, practiced-based theories of
knowing emphasize how it is only through robust and
continuing engagement that individuals build a coherent understanding of the complex relations that
define the world around them.
Know How 3: Practice-based Knowing
New theories of social behavior have stressed
various kinds of practice-based “know how” (see,
e.g., Hargreaves, 2011). In a related way, Cultural
Historical Activity Theory (Cole, 1985; Cole &
Engestrom, 1993), Communities of Practice Theory
(Lave, 1991; 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and Actor
Network Theory (Latour, 2005) emphasize the interrelations that organize decentered networks of activity, including physical and social actions, shifting the
focus from individuals to a dynamic “supraindividual” unit of analysis (Cole, 1985). Work in
strategic management also emphasizes processes of
trial and error in innovation and competent “know
how” practice (Von Hippel, 1994; Nonaka &
Takeuchi, 1995). Science studies scholars look at
scientific knowledge production as more than the
creation of codified knowledge through experiment
and hypothesis testing, but as a form of situated activity—or practice—that is distributed across the
tools-in-use, users, and material and social context in
the field of discovery (Latour, 1987; Rheinberger,
1997). These scholars show how particular combinations of all of these elements are intrinsic to any performance and not merely variables among others.
From this perspective, what we know (and how we
come to know it) is not separate or distinct from what
we do, and furthermore the particular ways we set
about doing things will shape and orient what we
know and understand at any point in time (Shove &
Ingram, 2008). Since what we do, and the ways we
go about doing the things we do, are constantly
changing as we encounter new situations with different people, different materials, different social norms,
and so forth, we must also assume that our
knowledge base is continually being modified and
adapted with each new performance.
Hargreaves (2011) explains the advantages of
using practice-based theories to understand and promote proenvironmental behavior and sustainable social change. Practice-based perspectives abandon
deficit models that focus on particular behaviors as
“maladaptive,” “irrational,” or “ungrounded” and
shift attention to the tensions and interplay among
social conventions (e.g., patterns of consumption),
immediate needs (e.g., staying warm) and the attributes of the material world that constrain and/or afford
different possible actions (e.g., opening a shade in a
south-facing window vs. turning up the heat) (Shove
& Ingram, 2008). And unlike theories that focus on
individual decision making as constrained by various
SEED Lab Activities as Scaffolds for Reflexive
Learning
The SEED curriculum trains students in reflexive
thinking through peer support and collaborative pedagogies, often using Internet applications and other
computer-based information technologies. The curriculum includes didactic learning of codified
knowledge through lectures and readings as well as
collaborative, active, group- and problem-based interactive exercises—which we call “labs”—and
service-learning components. A lab series generally
covers such technical concepts as life-cycle analysis,
carbon-footprint calculation, and sustainable supplychain analysis and examines topics ranging from raw
materials and technology used in solar photovoltaic
systems, to biofuels such as ethanol, to the marketing
of commodities as consumer goods.
Individual labs are used in several classes, including general lower-division engineering courses
on renewable energy and sustainable design; an
upper-division sociology course entitled “Sustainable
Design as Social Change”; and a senior capstone
course open to all majors called “Impact Designs:
Engineering and Sustainability through Student Service” that supports interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates in completing community-based sustainable design projects. Readings focused on technical
content are paired with readings on communication
strategies, sociological analyses of technical change,
business-management theories of innovation, and
histories of design. Lectures, readings, and prologues
to the labs introduce students to codified information
on different topics in sustainability. For instance,
students learn about the technical concept of lifecycle analysis in assigned readings, through lectures,
and with a lab activity on ethanol formulated to teach
the role of reflexive analysis in understanding various
ways to design life-cycle studies.
Each lab in the series is structured around the
notion of scaffolding (Wood et al. 1976), a concept in
education theory that explains how individuals meet
new challenges, appropriate new skills, and develop
new understandings during interaction. Scaffolding
has been broadly defined as the process by which a
teacher or more knowledgeable peer provides assistance that enables learners to accomplish tasks or
succeed in problem situations that would otherwise
be too difficult to resolve on their own (Wood et al.
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emphasis on student-led service-learning projects.
The activity has since undergone several revisions
and has been adapted to at least four other courses.
Altogether, the activity has now been completed by
approximately 500 undergraduates. In each case, The
Packaging Lab was one of the first instructional activities presented to students.
This activity requires students to rank a set of
consumer packages provided by the instructor, then
reflect on and discuss their initial ranking before
providing a “group” ranking, and then revisit their
initial individual ranking to decide if they want to add
changes to an individual “reranking.” After viewing
the selection of consumer packages, students are
asked to rank the way they were packaged. In some
of these classes, students are simply asked to rank
packages from “best” to “worst.” In some other versions, students are asked to rank packages specifically in terms of their sustainability: from “most” to
“least” sustainable. Students are also asked to state
reasons for each ranking, and then to boil down each
reason into criteria they used to make their ranking
(e.g., plastics can be recycled, plastics recycling reduces dependencies on petroleum, vs. plastics have
been shown to disrupt ocean ecology). Students next
defend their criteria to a small group of their peers
and finally are given the opportunity to rerank the
items, integrating any new considerations resulting
from the small-group discussions.
The sequencing of successive “steps” within the
activity is designed to help students work gradually,
adding layers to complicate a working definition of
sustainability as applied to different exercises in the
lab. The idea is that students will learn the criteria
they considered important in the definition of sustainability and, by discovering that other students
have different criteria, learn that sustainability is a
discursive concept not open to a single definition.
The activity concludes with an instructor-facilitated
whole-class discussion and some questions, typically
assigned as homework, to give students further opportunity for reflexive practice.
1976; see also Palincsar, 1998; Stone, 1998). For
example, rather than telling a sibling where to put a
puzzle piece, an older sibling might point to the
straight edge on a puzzle piece to help the younger
child recognize that it does not belong in the middle
of a puzzle.
On a larger level, these interactive learning activities also function as scaffolds for the more complex and often confusing challenges associated with
real-world problem-solving that students face as part
of the project- and service-learning component integrated into most SEED courses. 2 Service learning
involves students working and reflecting on their
participation in projects that meet identified community needs. In these activities, students benefit not
only from the opportunity to apply course content to
actual practice, but also from an enhanced sense of
public engagement (Dewey, 1986; Butin, 2003;
Bringle & Hatcher, 2007). Service learning can provide pragmatic and authentic problem-solving contexts and broaden the student’s learning community
beyond the classroom. These projects can be a powerful way to build a sense of student investment, motivation, and ownership. Through the application of
academic content to tangible situations, service
learning can support student appropriation of challenging technical skills and the understanding of
complex ideas (Kezar & Rhoads, 2001). However,
without a shared understanding of project goals, service learning can also be distressingly unproductive,
wasting the time and “spinning the wheels” of both
students and collaborating community partners,
leading to an unwillingness to partner. The labs are
designed to function as practice sessions, to prepare
undergraduates to participate fully in collaborations
with community partners to solve real-world challenges. It is important that they first practice key
skills in a controlled setting and then are supported
through the process of translating these skills into the
applied context.
Example: The Packaging Lab
Step 1: Subjective Knowing
To demonstrate how a collaborative, activelearning curriculum design can support multiple
modes of knowing, we will describe the first activity
in the SEED series of interactive activities. Commonly known as “The Packaging Lab,” this initiative
was originally developed as an opening activity in
2009 for Sociology 115: Sustainable Design as Social
Change, an upper-division seminar that included an
We assume that most students will come to the
lab with some notion of sustainability, such as ideas
about recycling or conservation of energy and resources. We also imagine that a few students with
more sophisticated ideas will include criteria related
to more comprehensive views of sustainability such
as the “triple bottom line” (economy, environment,
equity). We expect that students will also bring their
own priorities to their decision criteria—including
economic feasibility, convenience, efficiency, aesthetics, social justice, and, of course, ecology—representing their different backgrounds and training.
2
The SEED Curriculum includes a number of different service
courses that involve students in problem solving of sustainability
issues in the Santa Cruz community, including both lower division
and upper division SEED courses.
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Accordingly, the first step in The Packaging Lab
is designed to help students reveal and then think
reflexively about their pre-existing frames of understanding (both tacit and explicit). Students begin by
individually ranking the packaging of selected consumer goods from “best” to “worst” or in terms of
their degree of “sustainability” (with these concepts
left undefined in the lab) relative to the others. Students invariably ask us to define these terms but are
consistently reminded that it is part of their job to do
so. After ranking each commodity, students are instructed to provide a reason for the ranking assigned.
From this set of reasons, students are asked to identify and articulate the more general criteria they use
to define sustainability (such as aesthetics, economics, reusability, recyclability, dematerialization). Students are able to see how different criteria, including
some based on tacit assumptions or framing understandings, lead to very different rankings. For example, some students ranked a metal tin as sustainable
because it could be reused while others questioned
the assumption that it would be reused and gave it a
lower ranking.
Student subjective knowledge includes the assumptions, expectations, and even the emotional or
visceral reactions that each individual accumulates
over time through different lived experiences. The
lab prompts each student to understand (and thereby
be prepared to articulate in Step 2) her or his criteria
for sustainability. Rather than imposing a singular
definition, the first step in this lab is intended to help
students to realize their own working definitions of
sustainability and to compare with others by asking
them to make and articulate concrete choices, and
then reveal and reflect on their criteria. The goal is
not only to awaken and expose students’ subjective
knowing but also to prepare students to gain reflexive
awareness about their own frames of understanding.
Reflexivity—understanding how one’s own ways of
knowing are based on who one is and that collaboration requires that we respect others who see the world
differently—takes practice. This step is designed to
give students some initial experience along these
lines.
dents work in small groups and therefore must come
up with consensual rankings despite different individual criteria. In the process of deciding on a final
group ranking to present and defend to the rest of the
class, the individuals in each small group consider
and deliberate over the different rationales and criteria offered by other team members to decide which
criteria justify their collective ranking. It should be
emphasized that, during this activity, students were
not encouraged to strive for absolute consensus or to
agree on a singular vision but to bring their different
worlds together through deliberation. Step 2 therefore
compels students to go beyond merely articulating
explicit criteria and to build intersubjective understanding through debate and argumentation with
group members, even as they also come to understand how others might have different frames.
These small-group discussions are therefore a
process by which students, through their reflexive
understandings of their own “situatedness,” learn to
make emergent decisions with others through a group
process that does not try to come up with one “ideal”
definition. Students further understand sustainability
as a discursive concept and expand their own comprehension by adding new transdisciplinary, transframe layers to their prior definitions of the term.
Yet, this kind of discursive knowledge building
can lead to problems in multidisciplinary design
teams as people talk past each other, confuse one
another, and disbelieve each other because each participant has a different frame. Therefore, to support
discursive modes of knowing, our pedagogical approach includes not only scaffolds for students to
reflect individually upon a more expansive definition
of sustainability but also scaffolds for them to articulate their individual perspectives and to listen carefully to others’ articulations. To promote receptive/
reflexive exchanges and deliberation, professors instruct students to read sources and to use careful listening techniques taken from nonviolent communication, a process skill designed to help groups resolve conflicts through increasing abilities to listen to
others, to articulate one’s own frame, and to look for
the common interests behind what look like intransigent positions. This training helps students to learn
collaborative practices that are an intrinsic part of
interdisciplinary teamwork.
Step 2: Discursive Knowing
This step is designed to help students learn more
reflexive knowledge practices, by compelling them to
engage with the multiple subjective frames that different participants bring to a problem. Reflexivity as
a practice is greatly enhanced by interaction with
others who have different ideas about the world, in
this case as expressed through focused discussion of
the different criteria students individually assign to
their rankings to support their working definitions of
sustainability. In Step 2 of The Packaging Lab, stu-
Step 3: Codified Knowing
For subjective and discursive modes of knowing
to become productive they must be infused with
technical, codified knowledge production and practice. Throughout the course, all four modes of
knowing, including the codified information produced by specialists, were recognized as important
learning processes. However, instead of didactic
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methods of teaching knowledge from “the sage on
the stage,” the lab prompted students to seek out this
knowledge on their own through joint research.
While it may seem incongruous to plan for gaining
technical knowledge as a third step in this largely
diagnostic and reflexive activity, we found that, typically, it was indeed at this very point in their learning
process that students began to ask technical questions
to ascertain whether or not particular packages in fact
met their subjective criteria (“Is this plastic recyclable?,” “Is less packaging that is less recyclable really
better than more but recyclable packaging?”). Realizing the importance of the technical questions they
were beginning to ask, students were then selfmotivated to do their own research to support their
arguments for or against the features of particular
packages as representing the more sustainable choice.
In the earlier versions of this lab, we found students
spontaneously turning to the Internet and library
searches, beginning a kind of investigatory research
despite the absence of this step as a required feature
of the exercise. As it seemed to be an activity worth
encouraging, we have now formally added this new
step, with some scaffolding to help students hone and
apply research skills in ways appropriate for training
in key technical research competencies that enable
them to take part in cogent sustainability planning
and practice.
they are using to distinguish “sustainable” from “unsustainable” materials and/or practices to perform the
practical work involved in completing their larger
service-learning projects.
What We Learned from the Packaging Lab
We examined the results from students completing this lab in two courses, Sustainability and
Social Change (Sociology 115) 3 and Sustainability
Engineering and Ecological Design (EE80s). In both
courses, we found that the activity generally accomplished what it was designed to do, namely: 1) expose students to multiple frames of understanding
when it comes to distinguishing unsustainable from
sustainable practice, 2) thereby increasing the number and broadening the scope of the kinds of criteria
that any one student might apply (or at least consider), and 3) challenge and engage students through
problem-based dialogue to work effectively with
people who hold different sustainability worldviews,
in order to 4) present sustainability as a complex rather than reductive concept and one that is fundamentally discursive in nature.
We found that initially, it was common for students to rely on one or two reductive characteristics
in their first attempt to justify a rank order. For example, in the version of the lab that asks students to
rank packages “from best to worst,” multiple students
used a simple binary heuristic: was the package recyclable or not? Other students remained narrowly focused on the recyclability of a package, but went a bit
further to consider the amount of and types of materials used. However, working within small groups to
agree on a collective group ranking in Step 2, students exposed each other to other possible decision
criteria. For instance, one student, an environmental
studies major, reported that when she joined her
group, she was surprised to find that other students
described “best” in terms of convenience and safety.
Conversely, another student in a lab that asked students simply to rank packages from “best” to “worst”
and who evaluated her packages by how easy they
were to open noted that “I didn’t think of sustainability and most of the group had this option.” In the
version of the lab in which we asked students specifically to rank packages according to their “sustainability” (rather than a more general idea of “best”),
students also found themselves thinking more
broadly about the meaning of this term after com-
Step 4: Practice-based Knowing
Knowledge gained through practical action is
fundamental to human understanding: we come to
understand concepts by putting them to use in the
world. Students participate in practice-based
meaning-making from the start of the lab activity.
The subjective knowledge they offer and technical
information they query and gather becomes more
meaningful because they are actually using it to do
something—in this case to make decisions (i.e., establish a ranking) and later to defend those decisions
to an audience of their peers.
Like the learning activity itself, our design of
this lab was a collaborative experience, using student
evaluations and our observations to better design the
activity. As noted above, we added a technical research component to the exercise because we found
that students were turning to this activity on their
own. In a future version of this lab, we plan to add a
new step that asks students to design a new object
based on the criteria that they have been exploring,
thereby putting to work the process skills they have
just learned. This step will further train students to
apply this process knowledge to plan and justify design components of their service-learning projects.
Our expectation is that students will gain a deeper
knowledge of the subjective and discursive criteria
3
Sociology 115 was carried out both at UC Santa Cruz and as a
version of the academic program at the University of California
Washington Center (with DuPuis as instructor). In both cases, the
students were involved in service learning internships and represented many majors, including science, engineering, social science,
and humanities.
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pleting the exercises. For example, one student initially focused on whether or not a spray bottle was
recyclable and/or “reusable,” but after completing the
group discussion and reranking exercises the same
student introduced her own notion of a “waste to
functionality ratio” to justify her ranking, arguing
that the increased amount of material made the bottle
more reusable.
Irrespective of the initial prompt (“rank packages
from most to least sustainable” versus “rank packages
from best to worst”), it was less common for students
to integrate multiple types of decision criteria into
their first set of rankings. The number of students
showing that they integrated multiple characteristics
into their reasoning increased after students discussed
their individual rankings with a group of their peers
and then completed the group and individual reranking phases of the activity.
In some versions of the UC Santa Cruz electrical
engineering course (EE80s, Sustainable Engineering
and Ecological Design), we also used the lab as a preand post-assessment to evaluate what students
learned in the class. Students completed the entire lab
on the first day of class and again at the end of the
course on the final exam. In this case, the same students were asked to rank and justify their rankings for
a different set of packages and each of them wrote
multiple statements (“entries”) to justify the rank
order of each packaged item. Table 2 compares our
assessment of a sample (n = 59 students) of student
entries on the first day of class to their entries on the
final exam. Student entries were characterized as
being low-level, mid-level or high-level responses
depending on their overall complexity and scored
accordingly. Unsophisticated responses showed
awareness of only one or two reductive characteristics without including specifics or qualifying statements, or noting any contingencies. Sophisticated
responses 1) were characterized by multiple types of
considerations, 2) showed more specificity within a
theme (e.g., “mineral extraction” vs. “manufacturing”), 3) included more qualifying statements (e.g.,
the idea that waste should be measured against functionality), 4) showed awareness of contingencies
(e.g., an item is reusable but only if well-preserved
by the consumer) and 5) did not treat the package as a
unified whole but rather as a composite of different
materials. As Table 1 indicates, we found that from
pre- to post-instruction in the electrical engineering
course the proportion of high-level responses increased dramatically while the proportions of lowand mid-level responses slightly decreased.
We also analyzed whether the net differences
shown in Table 1 could be attributed to the gradual
improvement of many students rather than the dramatic improvement of just a few and found the former to be the case. Specifically, we found that on the
final exam, the number of students in our sample (n =
59) that included one or more high-level entries in
their response increased by 21 as compared to their
performance on the earlier individual ranking exercise. We also found that, while only three out of 59
students (5%) produced responses that included more
than three high-level entries prior to instruction, 11
out of 59 (19%) included more than three high-level
entries on the final exam. It is also encouraging that
the number of students giving responses characterized by a majority of low-level entries (5 > entries)
decreased by 15% from pre- to post-instruction.
While these results are evidence of student learning
in only one particular course, they reflect the kind of
improvement different instructors reported seeing
across all courses using this lab.
After completing the ranking exercises and inclass discussions, students answered a series of reflective questions to compile a post-lab report. The
work on these lab reports served to further improve
their learning about sustainability as a complex concept, and also allowed us to better assess whether
students were engaging in the multiple modes of
knowing described in Table 1. Indeed, in reflecting
on the lab, many students noted the discursive nature
of sustainability. For example, one student wrote:
Since there are so many different definitions
of sustainability it makes it difficult for society to agree on one specific one. I think a
sustainable society has to come from baby
steps. I believe that more likely than not,
similar priorities of sustainability exist and
it’s at these overlaps that we need to promote change. If someone were to just generalize all of sustainability into one giant definition, people would most likely be upset at
Table 2 Low-, mid-, and high-level student entries.
Total entries in
sample
Low-level
responses
Mid-level
responses
High-level
responses
Preliminary individual ranking exercise
633
54%
37%
8%
Final exam
788
48%
31%
20%
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the statement made. That’s why we need to
find the common ground between the definitions and work from there.
view the central idea that design can emerge from
collaboration in groups with different criteria and
different worldviews about sustainability as critical to
the success of their action-research projects or internships. Those who did not grasp this point judged the
activity as unnecessary but “fun.” With our addition
of Step 3, the practice step where students design
their own package, we hope to help students connect
their learning in class to their service-learning activities.
Overall, we learned that reflexive learning requires substantial class time, although with less lecture time. When students are struggling to find effective ways to collaborate, the professor needs to have
some way not to rush the process, to let things go. At
other times, the instructor needs to know when to
intervene to move things along so that students see
the value of the class-time work. When students do
productive classroom work, it is also important to
devote class time to recognize what has been learned.
We also learned that evaluating the acquisition of
uncodified, reflexive knowledge is difficult within
standard codified assessment systems. Our multimodal pedagogy requires a different approach to understanding and evaluating student learning. In The
Packaging Lab, no one rank order was considered
correct. Indeed, we were less concerned with the actual rankings than with how students arrived at different conclusions based on their stated criteria.
These challenges compound the difficulties of assessing reflexive, noncodified student learning. It is
by definition challenging to codify process learning.
Also, if students feel that they have learned something on their own, they do not necessarily credit the
pedagogical scaffolding tool that got them there. In
addition, in professional assessment (and in articles
like this one) researchers must show that the tool (and
the professor) has been effective. These difficulties
make it tempting to move back to didactic mode,
where the professor “gives” the information to the
students and is therefore clearly the source of the
information.
In other words, collaborative learning requires
that the instructor take on a significantly different
role in the course, one that is sometimes difficult
when one is used to the traditional role of being the
authority. In classrooms where the professor is
coaching collaborative learning processes, he or she
may appear superfluous. In institutions where instructor merit is based on ratings by students, collaborative learning processes put the instructor’s reputation at risk.
Making the world more sustainable presents a
formidable challenge for the future. As this study has
shown, the challenge is more than just designing the
right campus greenprint. Universities that seek to
Other students were able to comment on the
subjectivity of their own position and how they
learned reflexively through exchanges with others.
One student explained that “through discussion and
compromise, I learned about a product’s benefits/
negative elements that allowed me to reflect and
change my ranking.” Another student found that she
shared many of the criteria with others in her group,
“but recyclability weighed more in the group than it
did for me individually.”
Taken together, these results show that after instruction students considered a broader range of criteria and did so with greater sophistication. We are
aware, however, that the activity, as well as our
scoring criteria for student performance, is more
suited to capturing changes in the “breadth” of students’ thinking than in its depth or sophistication
about any one topic. For that reason, it is important to
mix an activity like this one with others that focus in
more detail on the specific skills and knowledge tied
to particular facets of the larger sustainability question.
For the SEED team, the development of the lab
was itself an interactive and reflexive design process
that required understanding the outcomes of successive changes. To solicit student feedback on the activity as a learning experience, we administered exit
surveys, which also changed as the labs developed.
When asked about their general experience with the
SEED pedagogy, all of the students (n = 39) participating in one iteration of this lab indicated that they
either agreed (47%) or strongly agreed (53%) with
the following statement: “Through collaboration
within my lab and design teams, I learned things I
cannot learn in a lecture-based class.” When asked to
rate the effectiveness of The Packaging Lab specifically for advancing their learning and skill development, 75% of these respondents rated their experience with this activity as “strong” (rating 4 or higher
on a five-point scale). In a comment section, several
students reported that this activity in particular helped
them to “weigh both sides” of a problem, understand
how different people might “think/see things,” and
helpful for “putting problems in another perspective.”
However, fewer students saw the connection
between their learning and their service-learning activities; only two of 39 students responding to our
survey rated their experience with The Packaging
Lab as “highly effective” (rating 3) in preparing them
for their out-of-class responsibilities, while 38% of
the students indicated that it was moderately helpful
at best (rating 3 or less). Overall, students did not
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grated sustainability curriculum and student praxis projects.
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provide sustainability education must face up to the
challenge of training students to become dynamic,
reflexive, and collaborative in how they arrive at new
understandings and how they participate in multimodal knowledge-production processes. As we have
suggested above, this has strong implications for
teaching practice as well as for the overall organization of learning within a university setting.
These challenges will not be easily met. In order
for a university to research and teach sustainability
through an interdisciplinary, dispersed, multimodal
learning pedagogy, curriculum designers will need to
overcome a long and entrenched history of presenting
knowledge as “what”: as immutable information held
by experts and segregated into siloed disciplinary
tracts. Universities that succeed in supporting faculty
to create and implement these new types of curricula
will better prepare students for the sustainability
challenges ahead. UC Santa Cruz’s SEED program
designers will continue to design—and redesign—
learning activities to meet this goal. New collaborative and reflexive pedagogies to train students in
post-normal modes of knowing will hopefully not
just impact learning about sustainability, but also
transform the university into a learning institution
that gives students the competencies to meet the
broader challenges of an increasingly complex world.
Acknowledgement
We thank the Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design (SEED) team at the University of California Santa
Cruz: Ali Shakouri, Ronnie Lipschutz, Ben Crow, Katie
Monsen, Corina McKendry, James Barsimantov, Mike
Isaacson, and Steve Gliessman. SEED research assistant
Ben Oberhand contributed greatly to our assessment of the
class described here. We also thank the students of SOCY
115, EE80s and IDEASS who participated in the interactive
activities described here and helped make those "labs"
better. Course development was funded by the National
Science Foundation under grant CCLI #0837151: Sustainability Engineering and Ecological Design Learning Partnership (SEED-LP) with additional resources from The Center
for Information Technology Research in the Interest of
Society.
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