“I can’t remember a time in my life when the world wasn’t falling apart,” Kenlee Danner, age 20, a sophomore at Parsons School of Design shared in a discussion about sustainable development, wicked problems, and the future of our world.
Kenlee’s experience is like many students’ experiences learning about sustainable development in our current age of information, the Anthropocene, and massive cultural and systemic shifts.
Her share was heartfelt and wrought with anxiety. Leaning back in her chair, she went on to describe the enormity and complexity of what she knows about the world. Her hands painted a picture of how big and interconnected it all is; how mass amounts of information feed and build the reality she holds. A timid tone in her voice expressed not knowing what to do or how to make true change within the complicated web. The weight of it all was felt and echoed by her peers.
As the seventeen students continued to grapple with key intractable problems, like climate change, structural inequality, and political gridlock, Chelsea Simpson, the professor of the undergraduate class Creative Team Dynamics, offered a strong, compassionate viewpoint, “If you’re feeling anxious it means that you’re paying attention.”
The collective anxiety that Kenlee’s share so bravely reflected is a common experience for students learning about sustainable development in the 21st century. Students are asked to know and connect a breadth of diverse, and sometimes conflicting, information into a cohesive framework that supports long term, effective social action. This grand task has unique challenges that offer equally unique opportunities for personal development and cultural transformation. Holistic education that includes the emotional, psychological and spiritual dimensions of world change lends itself as a strong option for actualizing these opportunities.
Learning about sustainable development requires students to activate left-brain thinking, as well as right-brain thinking. For example, students are asked to:
Use and make sense of mass amounts of information within and outside of the classroom. This requires evidence-based problem solving and institutional-awareness, as well as discernment and the exploration of worldviews and personal epistemological beliefs.
Process and manage challenging emotions, such as overwhelm, grief, anger and anxiety related to global issues. This necessitates psychological resilience, emotional intelligence and self-awareness.
Develop a systemic view of the world and engage in higher-order, complex thinking. This calls for critical thinking and logical analysis, as well as creativity and imagination.
Sustainability has shifted the field of international development towards a whole-systems approach that takes multiple sectors, disciplines and stakeholders into account when addressing world issues and developing the economy. In alignment with this, education for sustainable development needs to apply a whole-systems approach to the way we educate and develop students by integrating the emotional, psychological and spiritual dimensions of world change with subject matter and technical skills.