Anand Roy

Project description

Achieving sustainability on a global scale has become imperative for addressing current societal challenges. However, addressing societal challenges require transforming mindsets, behaviours, and actions of society’s leaders, policy makers, and other key stakeholders (Rimanoczy, 2021). One effective way to give impetus to this transformation is through Education for Sustainability (EfS). Education, at its best, is a transformative experience that has the capacity to change thoughts, behaviours, and actions (Dewey, 1922, 1938; Cohen, 2009); and could enable the pursuit of everyday goals through sustainable social practices – the root goal of EfS (Rimanoczy, 2021). In this regard, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are strategically positioned to provide EfS to its students – future leaders of tomorrow. However, EfS practices inside HEI are currently fragmented because of possible barriers to strong transdisciplinary collaborations (Činčera et al., 2019; Tejedor et al., 2018; Yarime et al., 2012; Max-Neef, 2005).

EfS is currently underpinned by particular discipline-specific strategies, practices, and approaches, that make it fragmented in nature; caused by siloed ways EfS practitioners make sense of sustainability and their EfS practice (Bien & Sassen, 2020; Tejedor et al., 2018; Benton-Short & Merrigan, 2015). Scholars advocate epistemologically pluralistic approaches – transdisciplinarity – when strategizing for the formal curriculum (Max-Neef, 2005; Daly & Farley, 2004). Transdisciplinarity ought to be important when strategizing for EfS. Yet, how transdisciplinarity might influence the consolidation of EfS strategizing practices inside HEI is an understudied and taken-for-granted phenomenon.

Recognising the potential of transdisciplinarity when stakeholders inside HEI strategize for EfS, my research seeks to further our understandings of how transdisciplinarity might influence the consolidation of EfS strategies at the pan-HEI (whole-of-university) level. The research involves a qualitative mixed methods case study design built through interviews, observations, and documentation at multiple levels inside three UK HEIs. The research is underpinned by Schatzki’s (1996) Practice Theory, the Strategy-as-Practice approach, and a Sensemaking lens.