Office for Environmental Programs - Theses

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    The Melbourne Model and educating for sustainability: opportunities and possibilities
    Nisi, Krista ( 2008)
    Universities have a responsibility to their students and to the wider community to respond to the environmental crisis. Education for sustainability (EfS) represents a curriculum-based approach through which universities can respond to this crisis. Understanding how EfS might be adopted by universities requires an exploration the term sustainability, and an examination of the relationship between sustainability and higher education. The new Melbourne Model (MM) at the University of Melbourne is a major educational reform for the University, and although not a model based upon EfS, it incorporates a number of elements that appear conducive to EfS. Based upon interviews with University of Melbourne staff and students this research found that the new transdisciplinary 'breadth' component of the MM was considered to provide significant opportunities and possibilities for EfS. In terms of enacting these opportunities and possibilities, the participants of this study were divided: half felt that the possibilities for enacting EfS would be subsumed by the broader issues of tradition, poor management and ill-considered implementation processes; the other half considered the MM to be the perfect arena for exploring EfS in higher education and did not consider these challenges to be of significant risk to achieving this goal
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    Challenging values to effect change for sustainable future
    Greenfield, Andrew ( 2005)
    The current paradigm in which we live is both environmentally destructive and socially unjust (Furman and Gruenewald 2004). The fundamental values of the paradigm can be traced back to changes in thinking around the time of the scientific revolution; with these values maintained through participation in the constructed dualisms and hierarchies of the capitalist and global market economies (Gruenewald 2003). Environmental education as a school subject does seem to have made much impact on dealing with the environmental crisis as a result of becoming a disciplinary subject. Place based education could challenge the current paradigm through giving place its full cultural identity.