Environmental thinking in higher education: Towards a systemic integration

Abstract

This research considers emerging approaches of environmental thinking in Higher Education, perceived as a need, but also as a “trend” that leads to versatile orientations impacting both educational goals and curriculum design. As Knowledge is the core of higher education, environmental thinking seems like a complex parameter when considering sustainability-based education interconnections with an inherent knowledge-based economy. Thus, exploring the principles and “models” of environmental thinking and corresponding pedagogical approaches, conceived for an intended “education for sustainability”, should be focused on the divergent intricacies related to needed implementations of linear thinking, cyclical thinking, ecological thinking, and their interrelation with the concept of sustainability and its utility and extensions in designing pedagogical contents. Moreover, observing the constraints related to the actual use of environmental thinking could lead to understanding the various facets of required interdisciplinarity when “modeling” such contents, intended to be “sustainability-centered” and every so often “environment-oriented”, considering desired breadth, assimilations, and reflections on and with other relevant contents. Therefore, systemic integration of environmental thinking as the focused approach of this research envisions the understanding of correlated processes, opportunities, and limitations. The observations of designed pedagogical “situations” and their outcomes paired with generated learning experiences within the interior design engineering programme represent the major conceptual and methodological outline. The deployed quantitative and qualitative methods allied to reflective observations investigate various aspects, indicators, processes, flows, and experiential approaches aiding to modelize a potential viable systemic integration.