Learning teaching in the sustainability classroom

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a v a i l a b l e a t w w w. s c i e n c e d i r e c t . c o m

w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / e c o l e c o n

ANALYSIS

Learning teaching in the sustainability classroom Meg Holden⁎, Duane Elverum, Susan Nesbit, John Robinson, Donald Yen, Janet Moore Simon Fraser University, Urban Studies and Geography, 3rd Floor, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 5K3

AR TIC LE I N FO

ABS TR ACT

Article history:

This article analyzes the experience of a particular sustainability learning classroom model,

Received 15 April 2007

examining the classroom composition, structure, positioning, and atmosphere components

Received in revised form

in an experimental course on the topic of sustainable buildings. The course, called Angles on

12 September 2007

Green Building, offered as the second in a suite by the Learning City sustainability in higher

Accepted 13 September 2007

education collaborative, experimented with content, which concerned the emerging

Available online 23 October 2007

practice and policy of green building, and with form, exploring the most appropriate pedagogical methods for the advancement of sustainability learning and action. The course

Keywords:

took as its practical focus the green building industry in Vancouver, Canada, with an initial

Learning city

case study of the new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), a green

Green building

building and research facility planned for completion in 2009. This article uses evidence

Vancouver

drawn from the instructors, students and visiting professionals in the course, together a

Sustainability education

diverse and interdisciplinary group from four different higher education institutions in

Transformative learning

Vancouver. Our findings contain lessons about the careful attention needed for instructors to design, run and implement courses in sustainability topics that enable students from widely different backgrounds and levels of self-directedness to engage with, take responsibility for, and transform their behaviours in favour of sustainability. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1.

Introduction

The challenges of sustainability are complex and multifaceted, requiring problem-solving methods that resolve the opposing forces of seemingly intractable issues. Put succinctly, sustainability demands learning. While preparing the 1990 international environmental Talloires Declaration, Tufts University president Jean Mayer observed that his university lacked the capacity to graduate students with the “tools to create an environmentally sustainable future” (Talloires Declaration, 1990). To Mayer, this meant the university needed to develop interdisciplinary approaches to curricula and research initiatives that would build expertise in emerging fields related to the challenges of sustainability and the environment. Implicit in this understanding is that the pursuit

of sustainability within the university means revolution within each of its learning scales: student learning, faculty learning, institutional/operational learning, and learning at the university-community interface. The experimental Angles on Green Building (AGB) graduate course was created in the spring and summer of 2005 out of the belief among its instructors that a new way of learning about sustainability, and about the rapidly developing fields of green and sustainable building in particular, was needed. The purpose of the Angles on Green Building course was: • to examine the potential for a new approach to both pedagogy generally, and to sustainable building in particular; and

⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 778 782 7888; fax: +1 778 782 5297. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Holden). 0921-8009/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.09.007

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• to help reconceptualize potential roles for students, instructors, and green building practitioners in closing the sustainable building gap.1 The instructors came to the AGB course because of our shared passion for sustainability. We conclude that better teaching is fundamental to sustainable outcomes in any sphere of practice and that current approaches to teaching sustainability are mostly ineffective. The process of learning these lessons through the course was an unexpectedly positive experience in some ways, unexpectedly troubling in others, and in all ways offered strong support for the future of the sustainability classroom.

2.

Background

Most research recognizes that a transition to sustainability requires institutional, social, and individual change. This is due to several inherent characteristics of sustainability: it is fundamentally an applied, problem-based concept rather than a purely theoretical one, it integrates many domains of knowledge and practice and it is primarily pursued via collaborative approaches (Robinson, 2004). This understanding puts learning, adaptive capacity and institutional readiness at a premium. In this context, connecting learning with sustainability research in terms of finding an optimal role for higher education takes on particular relevance (Willard et al., 2005). Although it seems natural to seek the support of institutions of higher learning in learningoriented approaches to sustainable development, this is a step that has rarely been made (Winter et al., 2005; Buckingham, 1999; Nicholls, 1997). In a new book that challenges universities to return to their original orientation toward social change, M'Gonigle and Starke (2006, 9) lay the groundwork for the “‘sustainable campuses' movement … [which] is concerned about the most pressing issues of our time.” In addition to the university's time-tested contribution of critique and protest, M'Gonigle and Starke (2006, 9) and others (Carlson, 2006) suggest “a new role for the university [as] a place for creating precedents.” This offers a new goal to the longer-standing one of achieving transformative learning 2 in educational settings (Mezirow, 1995), one that views social change as well as individual transformation as crucial. The habits of learning in organizations and other social contexts are rarely connected to theories of classroom learning, and these literatures are seldom viewed alongside the task of reorienting the academy toward sustainability (Braham, 1995; Benbasat and Gass, 2002; Molnar and Mulvhill, 2003; Senge et al., 2006; Blewitt, 2006; Steiner and Laws, 2006; 1 The sustainable building gap exists between the inventory of green buildings and the inventory of buildings designed and constructed according to the status quo (John et al., 2005; Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 2006; Thayer, 1989). 2 Transformative learning is a theory developed by Jack Mezirow (1995, 2000) in the field of adult education that has also been applied to higher education contexts. It explains changes in individuals' meaning structures, their habits of mind and their points of view, catalyzed by a “disorienting dilemma” or an “integrating circumstance.”

Rappaport and Creighton, 2007). The Learning City research and education collaborative is based on a model of the classroom that connects universities to the practices of citybuilding. Higher education classrooms need to be open in structure, format and orientation to the world of urban development practice and committed to the goal of sustainability. Moreover, this opening of the classroom, the learning process, and the connections between learning, research and practice needs to happen in a careful way that does not abandon the critical distance that the academy aspires to maintain, a distance that makes reflection and new practical and theoretical directions possible. Thus, the classroom model being tested by the Learning City aims to incubate and foster the growth of a transformative learning community, able to generate and refine new ideas and disseminate jointly-created commitments in other circles, networks, and professional associations beyond the classroom. A key hypothesis of the Learning City is that the disciplinary, institutional, and professional diversity of the members of a classroom can provide the necessary components to maintain critical distance at the same time as the classroom radically engages with the world of practitioners. This hypothesis was supported by the AGB course experience. But, as instructors, we were struck by an additional surprising lesson: not only do students need new ways of learning sustainability — instructors need new ways of teaching sustainability.

3.

Case and methods

Angles on Green Building was the second course developed by the Learning City as a contribution to inter-institutional urban sustainability programming at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, BC.3 The Great Northern Way Campus will soon be the site of a new building, the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). CIRS project leader John Robinson, Professor, Sustainable Development Research Initiative, University of British Columbia, was one of the course instructors, and the other instructors are also involved in CIRS. The other instructors were Duane Elverum, Assistant Professor in Sustainability and Design, the Emily Carr Institute; Meg Holden, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Geography, Simon Fraser University; Susan Nesbit, Senior Instructor of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia; and Donald Yen, Program Director, Centre for Sustainable and Environmental Initiatives, British Columbia Institute of Technology. The case of CIRS formed the practical and inspirational background for the course. Scheduled for completion in 2009, 3 The Great Northern Way Campus (http://www.gnwc.ca) is an inner-city, former industrial site gifted to four major higher education institutions in Vancouver (the British Columbia Institute of Technology, the Emily Carr Institute of Art+Design, Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia) to create a new campus. The campus plan includes two major themes for educational programming: transforming arts and culture and urban sustainability. More information about the Learning City can be found in Holden and Connelly (2004) and Moore et al. (in press).

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CIRS intends to be the most innovative and high performance building in North America. CIRS has set targets to obtain all heating and cooling from the ground underneath the building, to obtain virtually all electricity from the sun, to use 100% daylighting during the day, to use no external water supply, to depend primarily on natural ventilation and sustainable building materials, to treat all waste produced, to minimize the use of private automobiles, to have hospital operating room levels of air quality, and to improve the productivity and health of building occupants. CIRS also intends to demonstrate leading edge research and sustainable design, products, systems and decision making, in three ways: • It will be a state-of-the-art “living laboratory” in which researchers and building industry partners can perform research on, and assessment of, every aspect of sustainable building design, systems, technologies, and use; • Advanced visualization, simulation and community engagement technologies and processes will support research on new approaches to interacting with citizens in exploring sustainable lifestyles; and • Partners from the private, public and NGO sectors will share the facility, working with researchers to identify areas of competitive advantage in sustainable technologies and services and helping to implement these on the ground, as a springboard to the export market in urban sustainability (Robinson, 2006; Cole et al., in press). CIRS offered the course a touchstone of best practice, though unproven as the building is still in design stage. The CIRS case additionally offered a framework that included an extensive set of principles of sustainable building and a process of engagement with legal, institutional, architectural and design, and research specialists toward its construction. The model for CIRS, at the highest level, is that it will be not just a green but a sustainable building, embodying the attainment of optimal, integrated ‘green’ features as well as ‘smart’ and ‘humane’ features (Fig. 1). To be ‘green’, the building will realize siting, water, energy, and material

efficiencies to reduce the building footprint. In the humane dimension, the building should provide an environment in which occupants are happy, healthy and productive. Finally, in order to accomplish these two goals and be transferable to other contexts, the building must have the potential to learn through monitoring systems that make it fully adaptive to new conditions, and also cost competitive with buildings that don't have these features (the smart dimension). In sum, the concept of sustainable building embedded in CIRS holds extreme ambitions for the contribution to sustainable development of buildings as the places in and around which most human activity takes place, of the construction and building industry as an economic sector, and of the built environment more broadly for the motivational, behavioural, and aesthetic impacts that it may have on society. Angles on Green Building was designed for diversity of all those involved, students, instructors, and professional visitors alike, with a commitment to collaborative knowledge creation.4 Organizationally, the course had two primary components. In the first half of the course, the classroom served as a forum for panels of instructors and professionals across the spectrum of green building activity, who engaged with students in dialogue about current practice, questions, and needs in green building and urban sustainability. Students were immersed in the process of bringing CIRS into reality. At the course's mid-way point, students selected a major project assignment from six project descriptions designed for them by instructors and green building professionals, reflecting specific, real research and design needs. The four projects chosen by students were: 1) CIRS mobility project 2) Eco-urban infrastructures for the Great Northern Way campus 3) Emily Carr Institute: an environmental retrofit 4) British Columbia Institute of Technology Master Plan While one of these projects related specifically to CIRS, others asked the students to push the lessons of CIRS further to other cases. In the second half of the course, students worked in groups toward the completion of these major projects, with guidance from instructors and classroom visitors. At the end of the course, student groups presented their final projects to a public forum. Students' major group project outcomes were impressive works of interdisciplinary creativity and constructive dedication to advancing sustainability in green building. These projects may be viewed at http://www.learningcity.gnwc.ca/AGB_Course_Details.aspx. The AGB course had a unique, five-instructor team, assembled from amongst interested and committed faculty with a range of expertise from the four partner institutions. The instructor team met on multiple occasions prior to the course to plan its structure, content, and levels of individual involvement. Instructor involvement during the course ranged from a minimum of participating in introductory and final class meetings, leading one panel discussion class, and assisting 4

Fig. 1 – Conceptual model of sustainable building in the case of CIRS, featuring green, smart and humane components.

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As a four-credit graduate course, Angles on Green Building met for 4 h, one evening per week, over the thirteen-week fall semester.

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one student project team, upward to full involvement in each step of the course. A teaching and research assistant, Michael Caulkins, provided additional coordination, organizational, and other support to students and the instructor team. Fourteen students registered in and completed AGB. These students were in the midst of pursuing degrees in planning (2), engineering (2), urban studies (5), industrial design (2), environmental science (1), architecture (1), and public policy (1) from UBC, SFU and Emily Carr. The disciplinary backgrounds of the urban studies students in particular reached beyond these fields to include anthropology, theatre, geography, and design. Five students were also already working in the building sector concurrent with their studies. As an experimental course, Angles on Green Building did not appear in any course calendar, so students were drawn into the course by word-of-mouth and email list advertising. Assessment of learning about sustainability presents a novel challenge that is integral to the challenge of assessing progress toward sustainability as a whole. As part of the evaluation of AGB, post-course interviews were conducted by a research assistant with six students. These students were asked to provide feedback on their learning, their assessment and critiques of the course, and broader comments on the role of higher education in sustainability and green building, in a semi-structured format. A post-course focus group was also held with both the instructor team and a sample of the practitioners who had visited the course. The results of these interviews and focus groups have been analyzed for the insight they provide into the most significant learning experienced by students, instructors and visiting practitioners, and the areas of greatest disappointment or frustration. Often, instructors expect to influence students' knowledge and understanding based solely on the content of their courses. In contrast, the analysis in this article examines the impact of the course's unique process on students' sustainability learning. The analysis, presented below, contributes to a richer understanding of the difference that this course may make to the creation and maintenance of a learning community for sustainable building in Vancouver. The themes are further analyzed with contributions from course instructors and practitioners who acted as resource people, to provide a richer understanding of what was achieved and what could be done differently to improve future iterations of the course. To preserve anonymity, quotations from the interviewed students and practitioners are presented using pseudonyms.

4. The difference that process makes: learning in Angles on Green Building Outcomes from the course are presented below in terms of four major themes that arose as important in students' reflections on their learning. Students' reflections on the unique experience of the course's composition, structure, position, and atmosphere suggest that these aspects of the course made a memorable impression. First, for classroom learning, the learners' prior knowledge of the topic at-hand is important. Hence, the first theme that will be presented below is learning about classroom composition,

that is, the different starting points of knowledge and selfdirectedness that students came with to the classroom. We found that our students' diverse personal quests for sustainability, which drove them to take the course, did not always correspond with high levels of learning self-directedness. Because the class demanded self-directedness, this posed challenges and frustrations for some students while it opened doors for others. Second, the learning activities within the classroom come into play. For example, how are classroom activities conducive to students who are individual or social learners? The second theme considers classroom structure, in particular, the value and limitations of a classroom structure and environment open to student leadership and empowerment. Challenges were presented by instructors' assumptions about students' preparedness such that tipping the balance somewhat more toward lectures and storytelling from instructors early on could result in greater student empowerment overall. Third, the formal and informal learning context outside the classroom is important; for example, are the learners' curriculae “outcome oriented”? Are lessons and curriculae vertically and/or horizontally integrated? (Hubball and Burt, 2004) This raises the third theme of classroom positioning, where the integrated links among green building theory and practice that the course provided are considered for their value to students. Positioning the classroom with strong connections to the green building industry held value for the visiting practitioners, making the course a unique kind of networking hub. Practitioners' role in the course as designers of student projects provided an interesting bridge from theory to practice but one that remained problematic, perhaps in ways that no classroom design could solve. The fourth important factor in classroom learning is the position of the learners on the continuum between “domain specific” vs. “process-oriented” knowledge (Shavelson and Huang, 2003). In treating this dimension, we will consider the theme of classroom atmosphere, or the course's outcome of creating an impassioned environment, encouraging the pursuit of sustainable building as an on-going process. The enabling environment the course created for voicing passion, amongst students, instructors and practitioners alike, was uniquely inspirational, but posed new problems in terms of student evaluation and domain specific learning.

4.1.

Course composition: backgrounds and expectations

The interdisciplinary composition of the course made a strong impression on students. No more than two students had a common disciplinary background, they came from three different home institutions, had five instructors from distinct fields, and a range of guests visited from private practice, local government, and nonprofit work. Student groups were assembled by the instructors to ensure a rich mix of perspectives and capabilities in each group. This dynamic gave students a clear sense of the uniqueness of their ideas and contributions and resulted in final projects that were, for the most part, more satisfying to students than what they could have created alone. Interdisciplinary group work sharpened students' individual contributions to projects, held lessons for students in

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group facilitation, leadership, and communication skills, and created new connections to once-foreign disciplines. For students with considerable experience working collaboratively in other courses, the extreme interdisciplinarity of this course still constituted a marked difference. Jennifer expressed her commitment to interdisciplinary work like this:

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there wasn't consensus among them even as to what the answer was. So there was defensiveness, there was disagreement … it was hard for me to watch this … that was very confusing … I think for the other students as well … (Andrea)

The uniqueness of the five-instructor model was felt by all students, and valued or critiqued for a range of reasons. Students felt simultaneously honoured to be part of a class with an instructor–student ratio of 5:14, confused that all the instructors were not consistently engaged in the course as a team, and occasionally frustrated by the lack of consensus among instructors. The depth and diversity of “full-spectrum” instructor attention received by students were clearly valued, although some found this “intimidating” and even “diluting each of their presence.” Some students were confused trying to put their finger on the balance of power among the instructors, wanting a better grasp of the hierarchy that they perceived but that went unacknowledged. For others, the key confusion was not so much an implicit or explicit hierarchy among instructors, but the “mixed messages” provided by our variable attendance, as no instructor was present in class for all thirteen weeks. This confusion led to students questioning “how much connection the professors had between themselves” and to what extent instructors “took it seriously.” Although excited about the “spectrum” of perspectives among instructors, students reported surprise and lack of comfort with instructors' failure to present a “united front” on difficult questions posed during class dialogue:

With instructors unable to agree amongst themselves — ahead of time — about all the challenging issues which evolved during each class and were in no way predetermined, students were struck by a sense of ‘to each person his/her own.’ A sense of a clearly charted course through the morass of ideas, beginning from a common point of origin to forked alternative perspectives and chains of consequences with clear implications for sustainable building, was sorely missing for some students. Two students expressed their heart-felt preference for “the talking head model” of instruction, followed by independent work on a paper that is submitted to the instructor for review and feedback. We can consider the diverse experience of students with the unique classroom composition in AGB as a reflection on their different levels of self-directed learning (Grow, 1991). The classroom model demanded a high degree of student selfdirection. During the course, students and instructors met together one evening a week, in the midst of their hectic schedules, and there never seemed enough time to prepare for and digest after class. Additional preparation and reflection time was demanded by the course because both students and instructors were expected to assume different roles during AGB class time than those they played during the remainder of the week. For students, their role was more empowered, more active, involving more collaborative leadership and vision. For instructors, our role was more facilitative, less based on leadership or expertise, and contingent on the other instructors and stakeholders present. For both groups, the environment was radically interdisciplinary. All of these differences required considerable personal direction and attention to make the shift successfully. The course attracted students with a pre-existing interest in pursuing sustainability and/or green building. A number of students commented that what drew them to the course was the feeling that their energies, in their academic or professional lives, were being misplaced and poorly spent. They arrived in class as a stop on their personal quest to better define and direct their contribution to sustainability and/or green building. This common feeling, amplified by the course itself, was expressed by one student this way: “I really don't want to work anymore for things that don't push sustainability. My energy is too important.” It should be noted that for at least three students who were offered professional jobs as a result of connections made during the course, the ability to act on this sense was achieved. The personal quest for sustainability did not correspond in all students to a high level of self-directed learning. For some students, the difference this made was problematic. Alex, a student in engineering, where, even at the graduate level, many courses are structured for dependent learners, expressed that:

There were times in our AGB class that difficult questions came up. And the instructors couldn't deal with them,

…this [AGB] is a pretty different course … I'm used to lectures and projects. One or the other. Lectures are sort of

When I was doing my Bachelor's in industrial design, we were a bunch of industrial designers together working on a project … we had the same expertise and it doesn't complement each other … Teamwork is good, but it is so much richer when you come from different perspectives. Because you can really make something that's whole-some, as opposed to something really specialized, from a certain discipline. The major project's teamwork model was meant to demonstrate not just good classroom practice but good practice in the workplace, as well. Students were not naïve to the fact that a team-based approach to projects happens more frequently in many work environments than in the university. Students like Tanya, an urban studies student, recognized in this a skill that she would be able to apply in her career: What was interesting was opening the dialogue to think … outside the disciplines. And invite stakeholders in and have professors from different institutions. I liked that collaboration attempt … because I feel it is more realistic … outside of school, you … find that you are constantly trying to work with different kinds of people and different organizations … people shy away from collaborating, I find, even in the regular work force. And if you are taught to collaborate from the beginning, then there will be a higher propensity towards it, I think.

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… confined to them telling you information and you asking questions, if you have any. Whereas this is … you may or may not be asking questions, because you are generating the topics, you are making the conversation. Andrea, a planning student, remained skeptical of the unfamiliar classroom model, commenting that: My background is … about …the professor taking a stronger role, and providing knowledge, providing tools, providing a frame … the idea of a process-oriented thing where, um, there isn't a hierarchy in the room and the students bring just as much as the teacher, I haven't seen enough of that actually working to have faith in it or understand …what the intended outcomes are. Only a few students were open to the different kind of work and learning expected of them by the self-directed nature of the course. Tanya understood the value this way: As students we tend to look to the instructors for guidance, … perhaps we needed to empower ourselves more…or take more responsibility for ourselves … it is also about you taking responsibility for your own education. At the far end of the spectrum, public policy student Matthew's remarks on the self-directed nature of Angles on Green Building represent pure appreciation for this aspect of the class and the opportunities seized to further continued learning: I really enjoyed the fact that we had instructors who enjoyed learning from students. So they didn't just stand up there and lecture, lecture, lecture, lecture, lecture, … The contacts that I made [in AGB] will be very useful…some of the panelists and CIRS folks are going to be panelists in my research, now. For my thesis. This is very useful… Students' reactions to this unfamiliar aspect of the course were thus multilayered, ranging from an unabashed preference for traditional dependent learning activities such as expert-led lectures and discussions, to disappointment in themselves or their classmates for not rising to the opportunity of empowerment the course had offered them, to thrill at the collegiality and maturity with which they were treated. Sometimes all three types of reactions were expressed by the same student.

4.2.

Course structure, power and control

The number of instructors and the variability in involvement of each reinforced the intent for a course design in which traditional student–teacher hierarchies would be flattened. The open learning environment, abstract structure, and student-led format of the course constituted a striking and different experience for all students interviewed. Students commented on the “abstract” and even “pie-inthe-sky” but “interesting” nature of class dialogue, that allowed contributions from “many different fields and from different institutions, which was great” (Tanya). As the course

eschewed lectures on pre-defined topics and opted instead for round-table, panel and small group discussion formats, students were pushed to realize a new level of empowerment and authority over their own learning process. There were students who realized from this format that they are “real time” learners, able to engage fully in an open-ended and organically-developing dialogue: I did learn about how I learn. I find it much easier to absorb info when you are involved in the conversation and not just busy writing notes … this is much different from your other courses … there is still either the student giving the lecture or the professor giving the lecture and then some discussion afterwards and you still spend time writing it all down and spend time integrating things after you write. When I write notes, that info sits in a bubble, by itself, and that article or lecture or whatever feels somewhat separate … I don't have the meaning or the time to connect to other things. I don't figure out how all those ideas that I am writing relate to other parts of my life. I find that when you are involved in critical discussion, you can understand the relations between things better … not just sit and write. (Tanya) This learning environment thus works against the conventional “bank deposit” model noted by Freire (1970, 58) in which “Instead of communicating, the instructor issues communiqués and makes ‘deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” While for students like Tanya, the value of the dialogic structure was the opportunity this method provided for her to tie classroom discussion to real life, for other students, the value of this structure was the sense of engagement as an equal with instructors in a dialogue in which there is learning value for both parties: [The instructors] would introduce discussion and the discussion would just keep going … I like to learn by having discussions with people, that's the way I learn best, and by doing things hands on. The course emphasized that for me. (Matthew) There were those who saw this readiness to engage in their classmates and admired it, though they did not feel up to the challenge of dialogue themselves: Some people were just [snaps fingers] on it, and could just … reply and synthesize the information right then and there. (Alex) It seemed like they could all talk the talk, and I … didn't know what to say all the time. So I sat back and listened … It was kind of intimidating. But I learned a lot … I started talking more, like in my [other courses'] tutorials … raising my hand and stuff. I wasn't doing those kinds of things before.” (Beth) Finally, students like Alex, an engineering student, recognized the synergistic outcomes of this kind of dialogic learning: “[I would] synthesize, take notes, not really know

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what to do with all the information, then once [we] got into the smaller groups, with my project … we'd be talking, and then boom, something that had been said in the panel would come up and be completely relevant. And I would use it there.” Through these and other similar activities, students took the opportunity of the disorienting classroom experience to try out new roles, build self-confidence and reintegrate new ideas into their perspectives (Mezirow, 1995). The dialogic format was seen also as a guard against intellectual laziness. On the negative side, some students were disappointed to leave the course confused about the best and most promising actions to take and research to conduct toward sustainability. Below, Andrea describes the particularly difficult experience she had with the flat hierarchy of knowledge within the classroom. This contributed to a feeling of leaderlessness and a lack of boundaries for sustainability dialogue, what she called the lack of accepted “goal posts within which we could discuss sustainability”: For me it was very frustrating … you take my most serious interest and bring it into an environment where pretty much anything goes … Personally and intellectually and academically, it was very challenging for me. [Interviewer: Do you think that in itself was a positive experience?] Yeah. [Interviewer: Why?] I've reflected on that and I've thought that … everyone in that room, because they were interested … lack of consensus in that room actually was less extreme than what is going on out there [in the world] … in this classroom … we all kind of agree that there is a problem, but we will not agree on what any of the solutions are or what the conditions to move ahead are … On the one hand, if it's just me and a stack of books, and I know how serious the problem is I can feel like I can start moving towards it, but I have to realize that not everyone is there, and I might be wrong, and that it is also going to be about mutual learning and trying to get along with the other people that are interested in the subject as well. (Andrea) Although, for this student, the classroom experience crystallized a preference for a more structured and hierarchical learning model, it also opened her eyes to the daunting challenge of devising ways to work toward, through, and with other people to advance sustainability: What I gained was a realization of how important the process was going to be and how social learning happens … it made me feel worried that the content that is out there is under threat because of the lack of consensus, so it kind of set me back in some ways but it certainly made me understand … the learning that happens, hopefully, when people get together. (Andrea) Grow (1991, 142) makes the point that high levels of selfdirected learning require an intricate set of skills that, for many, are not easily acquired. He further cautions that teachers can find it difficult to foster self-direction: “Don't underestimate how difficult it is for a teacher to move from being a requirement to being just one among many choices in

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how to learn.” Perhaps the needs of the learner are best stated by Tanya: The students need some structure. There is definitely a balance between guidance and empowerment… With students from a wide range of core disciplines, familiarity with concepts of sustainable development came from different contexts and sources. In part to respect the validity of coming around to sustainability from any starting point, be it engineering, design or anthropology, and in part to lose no time in arriving at the rich, transdisciplinary discussion of the way forward, the course provided little in the way of orientation to the core models, origins, and approaches of sustainable development. Lecturing was avoided in favour of panel discussions, open dialogues, small group discussions, and skills workshops as a means to enliven the course and cast aside associations of lecture format courses with passive learning on the part of students, in which instructors are ‘talking books’ and students, ‘empty vessels.’ In retrospect, lecturing should perhaps not be rejected completely, but should be conceived as telling stories from instructors' individual and professional perspectives, even if the main purpose of this “stick in the sand” is to give students something clear to disagree with: Storytelling is ancient, as ancient as we are as human beings. Everyone wants to hear a story. So if I think of myself as telling a story when I'm up there … And who am I if I can't tell my stories? But maybe the storytelling … is a way to refine the understanding of the story. (Duane) A number of students described the course as feeling ‘abstract,’ which was initially troubling to instructors considering the active attempt to avoid abstract theorizing and engage students directly and deeply with practice-based projects. Upon reflection, the instructors recognized this student perception as an artifact of precisely this absence of theoretical specification, giving the course what was described later as its ‘elliptical’ nature: I would describe the course as somewhat elliptical in the sense that we're asking them to have opinions about stuff they got partly from some readings but largely based on their own initiative … And I saw this wheel spinning because — ‘I don't have initiative on this yet because I don't know what this course is really trying to provide me.’ (Duane) One way to think about it is: we didn't provide the abstract, we made them provide it. So they had to provide a context of evaluation, say for the design criteria, a way of thinking about sustainability. So in a sense, by us not providing the abstract, we forced them to come up with it. (John) The value of initial lectures related to the motivation and theory of sustainable development in a course like AGB would also be to encourage novel questioning of accepted tenets of the literature. To begin a course like AGB confident in

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students' ability to understand and gain from a series of sustainability lectures, regardless of their starting point or depth of expertise, and confident in the level of common understanding that could be initiated this way, would be of considerable value.

4.3.

Course positioning: connecting classroom to practice

At the same time as it perplexed and excited with its abstract, open and dialogical structure, and tossed expected student– instructor hierarchies into the air, the course provided students with a unique bridge to the world of practitioners and industry. Panelists from a range of private, public, and nonprofit sector organizations visited the class not to impart information so much as to share questions and discuss challenges in the present and future of their practice. Practitioners spelled out the help they needed specifically by designing the major projects for the course; students selected from among these projects and worked with the project's designer as their group's ‘client.’ This structure was considered valuable and unique for providing “a realistic situation for students,” for being “hands-on” and for creating “a nice networking opportunity.” Students took this expression of demand for cutting-edge research in the green building sector to heart and some saw a place for their major projects as well as their future work within it: It was actually the first class where I felt that it had an ability for future impacts, come to think of it. My other classes … there is just the information that I received for me, which will further whatever I want to do with it. But I think it was effective for industry to be able to come into higher education, because they had an opportunity where they may not have otherwise been able to come out like that and have … really idea-generating conversations. (Alex) I found that especially with respect to our project … it was a big project that brought four people together who had all these diverse experiences, and it was overwhelming … how much work we had actually done, in a school class, … in most classes you have a term paper, or you have an exam at the end, you write a couple short papers through the middle, and they are your own papers … your prof reads them … it doesn't really go anywhere, it doesn't really do anything, it's only good for you. Whereas this I think builds something for the community … this CIRS project is actually going to help the CIRS project team get to where there will be no parking on site … they're using our work. (Matthew) The open format of the “idea-generating conversations,” in which professionals visiting the classroom came to engage in conversation about practice rather than provide an expert presentation, made clear to students that the value of bringing real-world cases into the classroom was two-sided. This is to say that students were convinced of the value that they were providing to the professionals and real-world projects under consideration as well as the value being provided to them. Students like Matthew saw this direct work

with industry as exactly the bridge needed between industry and educational institutions and saw also the pragmatic unlikelihood that this connection could happen in the absence of a course like AGB: Our course was good because our panelists … were people from engineering firms, architectural firms, the city … who were actually implementing projects … Having some kind of a relationship with an educational institution, or maybe a class or a program, is another relationship to manage, it's another time slot, it's just another thing. And the same thing with the professors, they are busy, they have 100 emails to read everyday, so no, I would say that most classes don't do that, but that is a bit of a drag, because you get all these people who come through every year and learn all these things and come across all these problems and think about them, but they don't necessarily get them into practice unless an individual goes and takes them, works directly for an organization that they study. The link from real-world projects to research was clearer than the link to real-world sustainable outcomes for some students. Students saw the structure of the course as ideally suited for learning to solve problems in the real world, and providing needed inputs to orienting practice toward sustainability: “I'm not sure where the linkages have to be in order to integrate with the actual building sector but we have to do it, just because the industry has had 400 years to become green and they haven't done it on their own. So it is a logical role for … educational institutions” (Matthew). However, not all students saw the structure as leading to problem-solving toward sustainability. As Tanya expressed, “I didn't think it was anything particular to sustainability in terms of the format, but if you are going to find solutions, you need to use this format. It is open and allows for flexibility and integration.” Just as the instructors disciplined themselves away from giving lectures, so the visiting experts were invited to class to push students to question their own understanding of best practices and highest priority demands in green building and sustainability practice. Thus, visitors were encouraged to share with students insights directly from their practice, guided by students' questions. This format enhanced the value of the course as a hub for the emerging network of professionals in the green building sector. This was seen as a key factor that made participation worthwhile to Janice, a green building planner: “one of the things that was helpful to me about the AGB course, that really didn't have a lot to do with academia, was the fact that it was almost a network hub for the green building industry, at a time when there aren't very many network hubs.” The nature of the networking offered by the course differed from what was available at other more strictly social forums, given its orientation toward learning. This was seen as a meaningful way for professionals to wrest benefit from the university environment. Again, as expressed by practitioner Janice: “Because it was educational for the students, it was updates for me, what was going on … the university has the capability to bring a lot of people together.” As Brian, a

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visiting design practitioner, expressed: “this is project-based, so it's learning through design. So we're doing the exact same thing that the students are doing. We're getting together to try and create something and through that process of having an actual goal you're learning and connecting in a much different way than just coming together randomly to kind of hang out and talk about whatever.” This mutual value helped to close the gap the practitioners perceived between the interest of students and the academic world and their own interests. While this format contributed strongly to the students' feeling that the course was integrally connected to the demands of practice, instructors recognized a perception among some students that “they were surrounded by experts but they weren't getting any of the expertise.” (Duane) One of the instructors' reflections was that more time should have been provided and guidance given to the guests to allow them to present their model of sustainable building in practice, as a necessary prelude to the kind of mentoring relationship we were hoping to foster amongst stakeholders and students. An additional intention of the visits to class from outside stakeholders was to allow the input of practitioners to connect in students' minds the first graded exercise, an evaluation of the CIRS design goals, and their workplan for their practicebased final projects. The stakeholders' input into the design of the final projects was central to the ultimate success of these projects and was a key part of their unique value. It is also true that this difficult transition from abstract goals to concrete projects is a key early part of any real-world design or architectural project. However, from the instructors' point of view, handing over this difficult work to outside experts or to the students themselves was probably asking too much in the context of a single course. One instructor reflected: I think there was that lack of connection — they could see the design goals for CIRS but they couldn't see how those design goals actually went in to the project — so they spent all their time looking for that in their own projects and they came up with it and they did a pretty good job. But had they had a better idea of how to make that connection, then the projects really would have contributed [to practice]. (Susan) The visiting practitioners offered a valuable insight into this aspect of course outcomes, suggesting that the expectations of a student group project were vastly different from those of a professional project. These project types differed in ways that could never be completely addressed through attention to classroom design, as Rachel, an engineering professional, expressed: I feel there's such a huge gulf between classroom projects and consulting work, they just seem like completely different animals to me. Why is that? I think partly in engineering there's a sense that people who are principals, senior, experienced people set the direction and everybody else carries it out … students are … missing something in order to actually do that project well … [in professional practice] they wouldn't be on their own the way the

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students are on their own, because they'd have all … sorts of support because in a consulting firm, someone with a degree, a university degree, is expensive time.

4.4.

Course atmosphere: passion and responsibility

The experience of passion and deep commitment for the subject of sustainability, from classmates, instructors, and visitors to the classroom, marked a fourth major difference of this course from others at students' home institutions. Course atmosphere can be considered an emergent property of the three previous components: classroom composition, structure, and positioning. Some students enrolled in the course to find a place to share their existing passion for sustainability and green buildings, such as Andrea, who has “been desperate to get into classes where sustainability is in the title” and Beth, an environmental science major, who claimed “all I wanted to do was be in a room of people that knew about green buildings.” For others, the passion of the classroom came as a surprise but was infectious: “[The course] had a lot of passion. And that passion transferred over into my group work … I've never been in a class where everyone felt so strongly about the subject… The panelists … furthered that intense passion because obviously they were all in it.” The shared passion permeated a sense of awareness, enthusiasm and sociability through the classroom's diverse mix of participants. For those new to this environment of impassioned sustainability, like Alex, the feelings aroused were driven by the awkwardness of increasing awareness: I felt guilty driving my car to the class … it is easier to be complacent … when there aren't people around you everyday who are really … passionate about it. … But I recycle now … and I compost more. I'll turn off the lights, all that kind of stuff, so I can drive… [The course] would bring up conversations between my roommates and I. And my roommates don't go to school … they wouldn't know the issues behind [public affairs related to sustainability]… the conversation would go to places that it otherwise could not have gone before. And I would think that they are more aware now as well. Mezirow (1995, 50), in his seminal study of transformative learning, found “self-examination with feelings of guilt or shame” to be a key part of the learning process, following a disorienting dilemma such as Alex experienced in the course. Sustainability awareness seems to have led Alex to certain actions that he is satisfied offset the damage he now feels that his driving does to sustainability. With reference to the green, humane, and smart dimensions of sustainable building used as organizing themes for the course, different points of this triumvirate had particular relevance for different students. For Matthew, the course made clear the need for the “smart” dimension of sustainable building more generally, meaning the dimension of technological advancement as well as learning and continuous improvement. This distinguished the romantic view of sustainable living in small settlements, cob houses, and locally self-reliant economies from the global imperative for sustainable development that uses the best of

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our technological advances to accommodate and create decent living conditions for at least three billion additional people. For Jennifer, the humane dimension of sustainability was emphasized, as for her the scale of the building facilitates consideration of more sociable human interactions and relationships, by contrast with the alienating urban experience more broadly. For Andrea, these nuances of sustainability within the context of sustainable building served to obfuscate what to her is the single non-negotiable concern of sustainability practice: “establishing ecological goal posts which society must operate within.” In order to build habits in tracking their own learning progress, students maintained a journal of their learning process and submitted these reflections weekly. Critical reflection is considered the distinguishing characteristic of adult learning as “the apperceptive process by which we change our minds, literally and figuratively … the process of turning our attention to the justification of what we know, feel, believe and act upon” (Mezirow 1995, 46). Graded simply for participation and completeness, these reflections accounted for 20% of the final grade. Alex and Andrea illustrated the range of opinion on the utility of the reflections, with Alex considering them unhelpful and Andrea wishing there had been more emphasis placed on them. The reflections were a lot of marks … it was not necessarily a waste of time, but … if anything, the reflections should have been a bonus … mark. And they seemed like a burden at the time, and I'm not sure who's going to get much out of them … mainly they were me venting … I don't necessarily know how that really helped my learning. (Alex)

We did keep journals, they did mark them, and that was good to keep on top of our learning process … it would be interesting to [have] done that in a more formal way [with specific questions such as]: Did you learn anything? … Did you get less confused? … Like there's a progression … like we all started as a group and we all came out the other end as a group. So did the group change at all? (Andrea) A common outcome of the course was students' sense that they were better positioned and better equipped to bring about change. Students came away from the course with a sense of how change fails to happen in the building industry, perhaps more than a sense of the theory and technical aspects of green building. This sense of being able to diagnose institutional and structural problems in the sustainable building sector and to be a part of treating and improving the situation was felt by several students: People have been building things for years and years the same way … and these fresh minded students might be able to help make change happen. They have the capacity to make changes. (Beth) The industry must constantly solve problems around cost and change but it is also very — once you learn how to do it one way, you just keep on doing everything the same way, every single time. You never question anything … you

[need to] actually take someone on the policy side or on the thinking side … to try to think of better ways to do things and continually improve. (Matthew) By learning from change-willing practitioners as well as academics about sustainable building, students gained a sense of the professions. This helped them to appreciate their own value in the change process as new minds, trained in new ways, entering new careers, and the value of the kind of work they were able to do in their classroom projects as well, separate from the stringent demands of real-world deadlines: With sustainability, you have to have people pushing the agenda, because people are really reluctant to change … you can go beyond that because it's a project and it's not necessarily as rigid as something that would be implemented tomorrow … we can push the boundaries and expose people to creative projects that might happen in ten years as opposed to … tomorrow. (Jennifer) With passion lifting students' sense of purpose, and with the emphasis on practical applications and broader relevance of learning, instructors' evaluations of the academic progress of students were an area of considerable disappointment. Students were asked, as their first graded assignment, to provide a written evaluation of the CIRS design principles at the course's half-way point. The assignment was presented to students with detailed instructions: write a critique of the CIRS design principles, and the green, smart, humane framework for CIRS as a sustainable building, based on class discussions and readings to date. The instructors' intentions for this assignment were to enable part of the course grade to be based on individual work, to provide students with an opportunity to summarize their learning from the first half of the course before moving ahead to major project work, and to give instructors an interim sense of students' learning progress. The assignment, however, was not very successful. The submissions received were speculative, creative, and in large part considered unacceptable by instructors for their lack of analytical structure. One student, for example, provided an impassioned argument for the need to assess a building's impacts on improving housing availability in the developing world as part of assessing its performance in the ‘humane’ dimension, drawing strong criticism from instructors who interpreted the humane dimension much more narrowly. Seizing the opportunity that the course's open structure and passionate environment provided to voice personal values and vision, students pushed themselves in this assignment to express these feelings. As is all too common in a classroom setting, this airing of emotion was dealt with awkwardly by the instructors, as we found ourselves instinctively clinging to a separation of emotion and cognition. The challenge left for future iterations of the course is to recognize the functions of emotions as filling the “gaps left by ‘pure reason’ in the determination of action and belief” (de Sousa, 1991, 195). Instructors met outside class time to consider the submitted assignments. The framework that was provided defined sustainable building as smart, green and humane. This

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framework was presented in terms of the operational design goals for CIRS, and was the organizing principle for the forum held in week four of the course with industry stakeholders as well as the stakeholder panels held during the first half of the course. Even within this strongest of conceptual themes for the course, the instructors realized through discussion that they did not have agreement on the meaning and implications of each of its components. As one of the instructors reflected: If we sat down right now each to write down what we mean by those three terms, we'd have different things — so we didn't give them any help on the smart, green and humane, I think. And it really came clear. Especially the smart discussions just went all over the map. And why not, we didn't tell them otherwise … So that opened a whole other window to what can be done. (John) The lack of agreed to standard understandings among the instructors presented difficulties when it came to fair grading of students' work. Once instructors had agreed as a group, after the fact, on grading criteria, very few of the evaluations met these criteria of our expectations for graduate level work. Many papers lacked a sufficiently defined conceptual framework for green building within an understanding of sustainability, were written emotionally rather than critically, and did not demonstrate a complete understanding of the CIRS model. The instructors assumed some responsibility for failing to impress upon students the desired standards for submissions and agreed to offer students a chance to revise and resubmit, rather than grade the assignments as they were (three of the fourteen submissions were considered A level work and were graded and returned). The instructor team also committed to provide students with better explanation of what was meant by an A level evaluation.

5. Summary and synthesis: assessing sustainability learning from AGB A major conclusion from this assessment of the learning in Angles on Green Building is that we would all be more effective in our work toward sustainability if we had the opportunity to think more about how we learn — as students, as instructors, as practitioners, as a little of all three. The classroom models most familiar to all of us, whether lecture theatre or design studio, involve next to no reflection on the part of instructors. Yet the clearest way to ensure transformative learning among students is for instructors to be transformative learners themselves (Cranton, 1994). Engaging in greater reflection involves taking on not just additional work but also additional responsibility. In fact, we find that an unanticipated analogy emerges between the kind of additional responsibility central to this course and the additional responsibility that is central to moving toward sustainability. The classroom model raises deep issues of responsibility as we engage with a movement toward sustainability, with fellow members of an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary team, as facilitators of a strong link between the academy and the professional world, and as citizens of a city at risk, a nation

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off-course, a world in trouble. Our involvement in the course gave us a new sense of responsibility to: • Communicate so that a diverse array of others can learn; • Guide and facilitate student access to different academic and professional communities; • Encourage group work, group learning, a group-based understanding of success; • Bring expertise into the classroom in a relevant and meaningful way; and • Impart expertise in a way that does not impose particular requirements about what to think, in the balance of affective and cognitive learning. We can admit only partial success in assuming these responsibilities in the AGB classroom. Transdisciplinarity necessarily means that learners vary from one another in their needs and preferences. This makes it very difficult to give simple answers as to what students learned, and how well they learned it. The partial success we experienced in creating a diverse community of learners is tempered by the need still felt at the course's end to better resolve the mis-match between course structure and pedagogy and the diverse learning stages of students. Both students and instructors celebrated the collaborative and transdisciplinary nature of the course. The course had an element of the “wisdom of the ages” in that it exhibited a wide range of experience, in understanding pedagogy as well as the course's content areas. The course created a community that transcends disciplines. Parallel to the effect the course had in amplifying students' passion for sustainability, it served as an inspiring learning and professional development opportunity for the instructors involved. The unusual experience of working with a strongly interdisciplinary and inter-institutional instructor team attracted the interest of our colleagues, even those not attracted by the model. Instructors reflected that the most personally valuable aspect of the course was “the way we work together” and “the sharing of our experiences” (Duane). The course allowed for a number of memorable “off-line” conversations and ideas to be voiced, one-on-one, both due to classroom structure and atmosphere. One instructor described the combination as being both “visionary and concrete” (John). Another described it this way: The other thing about this course that I think makes it compelling is that it's dealing with this — urgency beyond language, there's an emotional recognition that this is urgent and I think the students all felt they were doing important work. … I felt, while I was in there, this kind of openness and feeling that you don't get with most courses. (Duane) The course demanded that students be highly self-directed — how else can a learning community generate, incubate and refine new ideas? The assumption embedded in the course design was that both students and instructors were familiar with, or could easily transition to, classroom environments of high levels of self-directedness. While not extreme, a mismatch between learner and course expectations of selfdirectedness in AGB is evidenced by statements of student

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dissatisfaction. Evidence in subsequent student interviews suggests that many students, even at the graduate level, are not ready to take on the challenge of the Learning City classroom model without help in developing their skills of self-directed learning. To varying degrees, students called for more structure, more authority, and more direction. From the educator's perspective, our desire to create an open, non-hierarchical environment sometimes competed with students' demands for more specific, concrete knowledge from their instructors as a united front of expertise. Our design of a course that avoided lecturing as a means to encourage student leadership and active engagement in all course components also prevented us from demonstrating and differentiating our expertise in a way that was clear for all students. What is open for discussion in the sustainability classroom? Who gets to decide what components are evaluated and in what proportions? As instructors, we admit that we dealt somewhat awkwardly with the loss of power and control over learning that accompanies the empowerment of learners. Disappointed by their mid-term assignment evaluations, for instance, students suggested that grading standards should have been subject to radical revision in the same way that most other aspects of the course were. In thinking more clearly about the play of power in the classroom, we could have taken more explicit ownership of the course's evaluation structure, relating the different components of learning to the nature of the transdisciplinary classroom. In allowing students more power over their own learning, we need to be sensitive to the risk that we may be offering students false choices within the context of their curriculae and, more generally, within the context of accepted academic and professional skills, knowledge and capacities. Otherwise, we are creating a type of moral hazard, in a sense predisposing students toward radically independent thinking, and then failing to formally reward them for this. Looking ahead, these skills of expression and evaluation based on explicit personal values and visions of the future should be included as learning objectives for the course. The success of the sustainability classroom to a certain extent depends upon the transparent development of a coherent model which includes a well rationalized evaluation model. Despite the lack of incentive or reward for this kind of activity, the AGB instructor team has been inspired to run future iterations of the course. In future offerings, the course will be redesigned more boldly to evolve in real time as the course unfolds such that “the delivery of content is in part what happens when we're together.” This pushes the course further into the realm of expecting self-directedness amongst learners. At the same time, we could prepare students more overtly for this challenge, with disclosure and entreaty at the outset to “trust the process … because we know the projects are great.” (Duane) To repeat this course with increased success, we will additionally need to dedicate more time and effort to class activities. Experience in the course led one co-instructor to consider facilitating other members of her faculty to participate in a similar course, “because everybody, now, is looking for a way of educating themselves with respect to sustainability and this is an incredible environment in which to do that.” (Susan) What is next for the sustainability curriculum, given that this course is

disconnected and different from every other course offered at all of our institutions, and has significant faculty workload implications? The AGB classroom model offers reflections toward the revision of our best practice and best thinking on sustainability teaching and learning. To what extent this is a new model, or rather a complementary component to add to existing traditional and disciplinary models, remains to be discovered through practice. We offer an encouraging thought from one student, Matthew, on the value of continuing the experiment: One thing about the class, is that I would not think about it as a self-contained unit. I think that it would be most beneficial to the group of folks at the different institutions who hosted this class, to continue hosting more of these classes in the future … So the students who take the next one…they will still have a class that is interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, sustainability. You as part of the research that is ongoing with the class, it would be nice to bring whatever critiques there were from this class, into the next class. To keep on going, to keep on pushing this kind of learning forward. In addition to prompting us to consider new iterations of Angles on Green Building in the context of broader curriculum-wide changes, this experience has prompted us to return to theories of pedagogy, including learning self-directness and transformative learning, and to attempt to reconcile these with social and organizational learning theories for the pursuit of sustainability. We have arrived at consensus about the components of the sustainability classroom from very different base pedagogical models coming from our different home disciplines and home institutions. We feel keenly the need for additional research to connect research on how people learn with research on pedagogy, or how to teach people how to learn.

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