Education for Sustainable Development - Learning to See the Bigger Picture

Educating students for the VUCA world means teaching sustainable study and work practices, as well as the ability to recognise their own needs and the needs of others. Learning to see this bigger picture can also help students (and graduates) make connections between different fields of knowledge, helping them develop the skills needed to address the ‘wicked’ problems confronting us all. In the Scottish education system, the value of trauma informed practice (Scottish Government, 2021) is increasingly recognised. Trauma informed education takes account of the contexts and histories that children bring to learning, situating what happens at school (or in preschool settings) in the wider context of the child’s life, particularly with regard to challenges that children may be facing. Trauma informed educators are slow to judge, acknowledging the range of pressures and challenges children and young people engage with. Against the backdrop of neoliberal ideology found across the whole UK education sector, we believe that trauma informed approaches have much to offer HE teachers searching for sustainable practices. It has been argued (for example, by Roberts-Holmes and Moss, 2021) that rather than submitting to the inevitability of neoliberalism, spaces for resistance can be identified. Trauma informed practice offers such a space for resistance and for supporting students to develop their own opportunities to work in different ways. This presentation will outline key ideas from trauma informed practice, illustrating potential relevance to HE teaching practices, and contrasting this thinking with neoliberal attitudes. Building on this theory, and generating resonances with presentations from previous IUT conferences, we will argue that principles of community, context and care should be central to university teaching, as well as earlier stages of education.