Sustainability .... why I'm so interested.

I have been working on the concept sustainability for some time now, having become aware of and interested in these issues whilst teaching at Christchurch Girls’ High School. It was while attending a workshop on the Environmental Education Guidelines in 2001 that I became convinced that we needed to be doing more in our classrooms about sustainability issues. It was obvious that some Primary schools were working on improving their environment through edible gardens, recycling projects and tree planting, some even electing to become Enviroschools whilst most secondary schools continued to avoid engaging with any aspect of sustainability.

A colleague & I subsequently decided to develop a Year 12 course called Sustainable Futures in which we could teach in some depth about the 4 main aspects of sustainability. We ran that programme for 2 years and received positive feedback from the students but I remained dissatisfied as I felt much of what we were talking about also needed to be woven through our mainstream subjects. I realised that most schools & teachers were not able or willing to develop new cross curricular courses but were interested in understanding more about sustainability and willing to integrate aspects into their present courses. It was from these beginnings that I decided to apply for a NZ Science, Mathematics & Technology Fellowship, facilitated through the Royal Society.

I was lucky enough to be hosted by the Planning Strategy Unit within the Christchurch City Council hence I had available to me resources about the Council vision and ideas for sustainability. I also continued to work on the national panel for the Social Sciences curriculum development as a representative for Geography so have had some insight into the thinking behind the changes for our curriculum area. During my Fellowship year I read a great deal of material about sustainability generally from global to local perspectives and also looked more closely at what urban sustainability involved. I had the chance to interview people from both the Christchurch City Council and Waitakere City Council, and also produced and processed a survey of both teachers and students. The results were most interesting and stimulated me to look further into why a number of students and teachers were opposed to learning about sustainability & the development of specific sustainability courses being developed in schools.

Looking back now on the report I wrote in 2005 at the end of my Fellowship I can see how my understanding of sustainability has changed. I also perceive a fundamental shift in how the wider society now sees sustainability. I believe there is now a greater realisation of the imperatives for a change in behaviour - we have many things to thank for that, not the least media like Al Gore's 'The Inconvenient Truth'.