Higher Education (2006) 51: 105123 DOI 10.

1007/s10734-004-6379-4

Springer 2006

University lecturers understanding of sustainability

ANNA REID & PETER PETOCZ
Institute for Higher Education Research and Development C4C, Macquarie University, North Ryde NSW 2109, Australia (Phone: +61-2-98509780, Fax: +61-2-98509778; E-mail: Anna.Reid@mq.edu.au) Abstract. This paper describes the results of a research project that investigated the ways that academics understand sustainability within their own disciplines. It describes a range of ways in which academics view sustainability in the context of their teaching, and a range of ways they suggest that sustainability could be integrated into their teaching. Its genesis was an industry/university forum held at Macquarie University (Australia) that identied the need to integrate ideas of sustainable development within university curricula in all disciplines to prepare students for their professional roles. At a global level, participants in the 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit emphatically endorsed the proposal that sustainable development needs to be an integral component of all levels of education. Environmental bodies have often focused their attention on development of materials to support sustainable development within specic environmentally focused disciplines. In contrast, the present project acknowledges that issues of sustainability need to span the whole range of subjects and extend to the development of appropriate curriculum. Real change in thinking about sustainability requires creative pedagogy which acknowledges the dierent ways that people think about sustainability and provides spaces in which their ideas can be developed. Keywords: lecturers conceptions, professional preparation, sustainability and curriculum, teaching for sustainability.

Introduction Currently, industry, community and university groups have limited knowledge of how tertiary educators understand and use the ideas of sustainability within their teaching programs. Indeed, sustainability is widely perceived to be the domain of environmental educators: advocates of sustainability in higher education have tended to come from the elds of environmental studies, education, and facilities management (Fien 2002, p. 244). Exploring the ways in which academics involved with the teaching of a wider range of courses understand these issues within their own discipline area is a rst step towards integrating these ideas as higher-order graduate attributes (or contributing to students professional formation). Researchers involved in sustainable development hold the underlying assumptions that teachers addressing sustainable

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development within their programs consider, as Wals and Jickling (2002, p. 227) put it, that teaching about sustainability includes deep debate about normative, ethical and spiritual convictions. The results of the research described in this paper suggest that while many teachers are aware that sustainability has some role to play in their teaching, some of them view that role in quite limiting ways. Qualitative research studies that focus on variation in the ways people experience or understand a situation (in this case sustainability) indicate that limiting conceptions of a subject are often related to limiting approaches to teaching that subject, whilst expansive or holistic conceptions lead to a broader approach to teaching and learning (Petocz and Reid 2002; Prosser and Trigwell 1997). Moving the locus of control from the realm of environmental educators to a more central position in university studies has been a long and as yet incomplete aair. The very idea of sustainable development is relatively new. The words are intended to embrace a broader view of a solution to world needs than was previously provided. Dieleman (2004) describes it thus: Sustainable development is a sensitizing concept: impossible to dene but it creates certain sensibilities and specic characteristics of the problems at hand. We suggest that some academic groups have a language with which to discuss sustainable development, and others such as Dieleman in the context of art education nd the idea nebulous. Sustainable development found its origins in the Stockholm Declaration (UNESCO 1972) where it was positioned as pertaining only to the environment. Wright (2002) indicates that this environmental focus enabled a swift contribution of signatures to policy documents, ensuring the enhancement of green activities in some universities and colleges around the world. The focus shifted towards sustainability in a broader sense with the Talloires Declaration (UNESCO 1990), where university administrators signed their commitment to sustainable development. This action encouraged universities to become proactive in the development of sustainable university resources. Issues directly related to education for sustainability were not articulated until the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where Agenda 21 (United Nations 1993) was developed. This stated explicitly that an educational focus could include the reorientation of education towards sustainable development, the increase of public awareness of environmental issues and the promotion of environmental training among educators, as well as the more obvious and basic suggestion of improving provision of basic education (see Wright 2002 for a fuller description).

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McKeown and Hopkins (2003, p. 124) have recently asserted that: In theory, every discipline can contribute to ESD [Education for Sustainable Development] from its current repertoire of lesson plans and curriculum units. Each discipline can provide knowledge, skills, perspectives and values, that when woven together will help create a holistic ESD program . . . Fortunately, every educator in every discipline has some existing expertise to bring to ESD. In this approach, the strengths of each traditional discipline can be used and leveraged with the strengths of other disciplines to convey knowledge, issues, skills, perceptions, and values associated with searching for and progressing towards sustainability. Indeed, the Thessaloniki Declaration (UNESCO 1997) seemed to indicate that all subject areas must address environmental and sustainability issues, an idea recently endorsed and amplied by the Economic Commission for Europe (United Nations 2004). More realistically, Jenstrom (2000, cited in Wright 2002, p. 210) when analysing Goteborg Universitys (2001) approach to sustainability, acknowledged that many university sta members and even university policies do not hold sustainable development as a core value, and that for change to occur people with dierent views are simply by-passed. Unfortunately, the results of our own research seem to be in line with this less optimistic view. In order to answer the world-wide call for the integration of sustainable development within university curriculum, we need to nd out how those responsible for teaching about sustainability especially in areas that do not traditionally focus on sustainability actually understand what it is all about. Warburton (2003, p. 44) indicates that these concerns raise questions about the need for innovative educational approaches that facilitate real cross-disciplinary thinking. Amongst those innovative educational approaches, we need to investigate the dierent ways that academics struggle (or dont struggle) with the problems of sustainability, and how they seek to integrate ideas relating to sustainable development into their curriculum.

Research context An industry/university forum held at Macquarie University (Australia) as a lead up activity to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development identied the very real need to integrate ideas

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of sustainable development within university curricula in order to prepare students for a variety of dierent professional roles. This study is a component of a project (Tilbury et al. 2003) jointly funded by Environment Australia and Macquarie University. Here, we investigate the ways in which university lecturers understand sustainability, teaching and the relations between them. The study comprises a series of interviews with university academics who are involved in teaching postgraduate students, asking them a series of questions about sustainability and their teaching. These data are analysed using a phenomenographic approach, exploring the variation and range in the academics understanding. There is an assumption, both academically and amongst the general community, that education for sustainable development is located within the domain of life sciences. For instance, our own university has a group dedicated to the exploration of aspects of sustainability, the Graduate School of the Environment (2004). These groups, and others like them (UNSW 1999; UTS 2004), prepare graduates with a specic focus on sustainable development. However, the participants in the Johannesburg Earth Summit made it clear that sustainable development needs to be located in all educational and disciplinary domains. Some of the relevant recommendations published in the Summits report (United Nations 2002) are: 1. We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, assembled at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 2 to 4 September 2002, rearm our commitment to sustainable development. 5. Accordingly, we assume a collective responsibility to advance and strengthen the interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development economic development, social development and environmental protection at the local, national, regional and global levels. 11. We recognise that poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns and protecting and managing the natural resource base for economic and social development are overarching objectives of and essential requirements for sustainable development. 116. Education is critical for promoting sustainable development. 121. Integrate sustainable development into educational systems at all levels of education in order to promote education as a key agent for change.

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124. Support the use of education to promote sustainable development, including . . . (d) recommend to the United Nations General Assembly that it consider adopting a decade of education for sustainable development, starting in 2005. With recommendations like these, it is clear that universities must respond with an approach that is appropriate to the higher education sector, and one that will enable all students and teachers to encounter and consider the implications of sustainable development for their own and others future. As a result, the focus of this research has been on the dierent ways in which academics in a variety of disciplines understand sustainable development and how they go about integrating it within their teaching program and enhancing the professional formation of their postgraduate students. The industry/university talks that preceded the research identied the very real need of university to prepare students for professional work so that they were able to contribute to their industries in ways that go beyond simple disciplinary expertise. Sustainability, creativity and air, and communication were some of those aspects of professional formation that were considered to be essential.

Research approach This research study aimed to explore the dierent ways in which academics in a variety of areas understand sustainability. As such, it allowed them to come up with their own denitions of the term, rather than supplying a denition from the literature or the researchers point of view. The focus was on exploring their thinking about sustainability in relation to their teaching environment, not on their classroom actions or their teaching artefacts (such as course unit outlines, assessment tasks or student learning results). We therefore chose an approach to research that enables the exploration of ideas, and allows the researchers to nd the emerging dierences amongst various views. Phenomenography looks at how people experience, understand and ascribe meaning to a specic situation or phenomenon (Marton and Booth 1997). The approach provides a rich description of the object of study through an emphasis on describing the variation in the meaning that is found in the participants experience of the phenomenon. The outcome of a phenomenographic study is a hierarchical set of logically related categories, from the narrowest and most limited to the broadest and most inclusive. These categories and the relations between them provide the outcome

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space for the research. They are usually reported in order of their inclusivity and sophistication, and they are dened by their qualitative dierences. The categories dened in this paper describe the qualitative dierences between one conception of sustainability and another. Phenomenography examines the experience of each participant and recognises that each persons experience is an internal relation between the subject and the object, in other words, between the participant and the phenomenon. However, it is the structure of the variation across the group that emerges through iterative readings of descriptions of the experience and provides the outcome space for the phenomenon. Phenomenography is a qualitative orientation to research that takes a non-dualist perspective and is often used to describe the experience of learning and/or teaching (Bruce and Gerber 1995; Prosser and Trigwell 1997). This means that learning and teaching are seen as a relation between the person and the situation that they are experiencing. Phenomenography denes aspects that are critically dierent within a group involved in the same situation. It is these dierences that make one way of seeing the situation qualitatively dierent from another. This method has also been used to identify dierent ways of experiencing academic disciplines (rather than the experience of teaching or learning in the discipline). For instance, Lyons and Prosser (1995) looked at variation in the way students understood electricity, Hazel and Prosser (1994) looked at variation in the way students understood photosynthesis, Davey (2001) looked at the way nurses understood competency in neo-natal nursing, Reid and Petocz (2002) looked at students conceptions of statistics, and Reid et al. (2003) looked at variation in the way that mathematics students understood mathematics. In one component of sustainability, phenomenographic research in environmental education (Loughland et al. 2002; Petocz et al. 2003) has shown that school children and people in the general community understand the environment, and their relationship with the environment, in limiting and expansive ways. Each of these studies has had (or is having) the extended outcome of informing curriculum change to develop quality student-focused learning environments. Data are typically collected through a series of in-depth, open-ended interviews that focus on allowing each person to fully describe their experience (Bowden 1996; Dortins 2002). Here, we focus on exploring the relations between lecturers understanding of sustainability, and how that understanding relates to their teaching environment. Interviews were carried out with 14 volunteer lecturers from the three colleges at Macquarie university which teach postgraduate students. The study was approved by the Macquarie

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University Ethics Committee, and each participant gave informed consent. The lecturers came from a range of disciplines: business, management and psychology; philosophy, music, language and literature; geology, geography and marine science. Academics who were already involved in ecological and environmental sustainability were deliberately not selected, as the aim was to investigate views from a broader range of areas. The participants were mostly early-career academics (levels A and B, associate lecturer and lecturer in the Australian system) although two participants were from higher levels. Early-career academics were targeted in order to nd an interested group that may want to continue their engagement with an action research phase of the project, and continue with their own research in the area. The participants volunteered to take part following a general invitation to participate oered to all early-career academics. Many volunteered specically because they had an interest in the topic area and may have been looking towards such further research. The academic community at Macquarie University is currently grappling with the development of graduate attributes and skills across the curriculum. Hence, our research approach was oriented towards presenting the ideas of sustainability and creativity as two higher-order attributes critical to a learning environment. The use of words like environment and development were deliberately not included as it was the conjecture of Environment Australia that, by now, most academics would naturally be aware of the close connections between these words. The interview protocol allowed for in-depth questioning of responses where the extent of the participants understanding of the ideas of sustainability and creativity was uncovered. Each interview lasted for about an hour and was transcribed verbatim and labelled with a pseudonym to avoid identication of individual participants: together, they form the raw material for our study. In a phenomenographic study, the questions posed are designed to encourage participants to think about why they experience a phenomenon in certain ways and how they constitute meaning about the phenomenon. In this case participants were asked to respond to the following key questions/statements: What do you understand sustainability to be about? How do you understand creativity within your discipline? How do you include the ideas of sustainability and creativity in your teaching? Each of these key questions was followed up by appropriate questions depending on the participants responses. Although they do not

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play a central part in this paper, the questions about creativity were included in the investigation due to the identication of creativity as an important aspect of professional formation, and in order to investigate its connection with sustainability. The participants were aware of the range of questions prior to interview, and understood that their responses to the questions would be probed and that their responses would be condential. Results Academics conceptions of teaching for sustainability are related and multidimensional. We will describe their conceptions rstly of teaching in the context of sustainability and then of sustainability in the context of teaching: these complementary ideas provide the phenomenographic structure of the analysis. The rst dimension concerns their understanding of teaching: this provides the structural dimension of the analysis. This means that academics understanding of teaching can be seen in terms of the situation of their teaching the complex relation between themselves as discipline experts and as teachers and there are a range of qualitatively dierent ways in which they understand teaching in the context of sustainability. The second dimension concerns their understanding of sustainability: this provides the referential dimension of the analysis. This simply means that they focus on sustainability in relation to their teaching endeavour sustainability represents their internal horizon. The structural and the referential dimensions, or as Marton and Booth (1997) say, the how and the what, are component parts of the entire conception. Here, we present the outcome space of conceptions in terms of categories that rst describe teaching (in the context of sustainability) and then sustainability (in the context of teaching). A further dimension is the academics intentions for their students, and it is apparent that creativity is seen in the context of application of the conceptions and is used to enable some sort of integration between teaching, sustainability and learning. In each case, the entire transcript and the complete collection of transcripts were used to develop the categories describing these conceptions. In order to illustrate the categories, we have selected quotations that are indicative of each category: these quotations are typical of the material in the transcripts, but are only isolated examples rather than complete records of an interview. In each case, the aim of the quotation is to illustrate the conception rather than to categorise the individual respondent.

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Conceptions of teaching (in the context of sustainability) Teaching (in the context of sustainability) represents the structural dimension, since it describes the aspects that the academics have control over, i.e. themselves. Here, there are three hierarchical conceptions: (1) Disparate in this conception, teaching and sustainability are seen as two completely unrelated ideas. Teaching focuses on the content of a subject and covering a syllabus, sustainability is seen as keeping something going or the green approach. Harry: There is a whole range of dierent possibilities, encourage women to stay in the workforce more and encourage productivity improvements, so there are twenty dierent variables that will aect the sustainability of retirement incomes for future generations . . . I dont think we really include a lot about sustainability from an environmental perspective, we do teach, I mean we do look at socially responsible investments of super funds, thats in my other course that I teach. So we look at policy issues and we do look at investment practices of super funds, but not because we want to encourage our students to think about sustainability, but just because a lot of people in the community are interested in investing in those types of funds . . . I mean it is not looking at the survival of the planet but looking at the survival of a nancial institution. Harrys focus is on the subject area, accounting and superannuation funds. His teaching focuses on the content area and he provided lots of detailed examples of this and he refers to sustainability but does not see it as part of the teaching engagement. Anita: Im not sure I have ever thought about it in those terms. In fact I have never really thought about sustainability in terms of teaching, except in broad level both in terms of my position as a teacher. It sometimes feels, in terms of the students, being aware that while theyre doing the course for me they are doing the course for other people. And they are increasingly, they are also working, so that they have issues around how much eort they can put into a course. There are issues around how much eort I can put into the course, so I suppose at that level I have thought about sustainability and teaching bearing in mind that students like everyone else are kind of limited in time and energy to get the best results from them without being unrealistic in expectations.

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Anita is asked about how she includes sustainability in her teaching, and she quite openly expresses the view that these are disparate activities, which only come together in a notion of keeping education and learning going. (2) Overlapping in this conception, the notion of sustainability overlaps to an extent with the activity of teaching; teaching is seen as ensuring that students understand the substantive content of the course; teachers see that specic ideas such as environmental or cultural sustainability could be incorporated in their teaching (as examples, etc.) but only to the extent that the situation allows. Patricia: I mainly teach in postgraduate studies in early childhood policy. The course is really trying to get students to think about the long-term implications of the types of policy structures we have in place and what alternative policy structures we could develop that would produce more benecial long-term outcomes. /. . ./ What can you do as a teacher within your school or long day care centre or pre-school that creates a better environment for children here and now that will have better long-term outcomes. /. . ./ I dont include them [sustainability and creativity] explicitly and they are probably included in the types of issues I try and get students to think about and the way in which I try and get them to envisage something new. Sandy: Sustainability, you know I did think about this on the bus on the way in today, I dont explicitly mention it, more I would say I try and get across what I consider the importance of understanding where our resources come from. /. . ./ I give a couple of lectures on nuclear waste disposal. And obviously linking it in by more or less starting by saying well look here is this beautiful fuel, it doesnt cause greenhouse gases and so on but we have this enormous problem that we have radioactive waste and what are the various potential ways of actually removing that waste from the accessed environment, from our environment and from the whole worlds ecosystem. In these quotations, each participant is talking about ways in which sustainability may be used within their subject area, early childhood education or geology. They both say that they dont talk about sustainability explicitly, but point out that it appears in some of the examples and problem situations that they use. (3) Integrated in this conception, sustainability in all its guises is an essential component of teaching; teaching is seen as encouraging the

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students to make a personal commitment to the area represented by course content, including sustainability as part of that. Leslie: I would be pretty condent that we are now in much better ways opening up a debate, a dialogue about sustainability and to a lesser extent creativity. But certainly sustainability what it means, what its ramications are, what kind of educational elements it has. I think weve started to do that pretty well in our teaching. /. . ./ But increasingly at the senior or postgraduate levels we will try to open a situation where we involve engaging dialogue around these issues of sustainability and creativity but we set up facility for them to do their own thing, to actually do research, even if it is limited in scope. But we actually engage our students from the earliest possible time in doing their own research and thinking through why they want to do the research this way and how they do it, what there ethical obligations are to the subjects of their research and what subjectivity is. Katrina: I guess it would be something that youve started, some new idea or innovation, creative idea that you introduce and then there will be long term benets not only for the recipient of the idea but also the creator of the idea. /. . ./ Like for example, if I introduce a new idea in the classroom for example an idea of life-long learning, that people learn how to analyse the problem, recognise the problem, rather than the symptom. That they then can carry that skill with them for I guess the rest of their career. It could be 1520 years. They then build on that and keep the sustainability going on their own initiative. These participants come from quite dierent subject areas, but they each regard sustainability as a key aspect of their teaching. Leslie, in human geography, views the concept as an essential professional component and encourages students to incorporate it in their research planning. Katrina, in management/accounting, focuses on the type of learning that contributes to the professional and educational development of her students and stays with them throughout their careers. In each case, sustainability and teaching are intrinsically connected. Conceptions of sustainability (in the context of teaching) Sustainability (in the context of teaching) gives the referential dimension, since it focuses on ideas or thinking what sustainability means, rather than the actions that comprise it. Here again there are three conceptions:

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(A) Distance in this conception, sustainability is approached via a definition (maybe a dictionary denition of keeping something going) but essentially to keep the concept at a distance and avoid engagement with it. Ron: Sustainability just means that something can continue, that is literally all it means. /. . ./ Well, it just means is something going to last or not. Thats all sustainability means, and everything is either going to last or its not going to last. Whether it is a relationship, or you know, literally it could just be a social dimension, 50% of marriages are sustainable in Australia. William: Well, that is a good question. Well it is developing, but it is allowing the development to proceed but without destroying the environment. So that the, yeah, right oh, Ill stop there. /. . ./ Having the conditions for activities, so the activity can be sustained over the long-term. Each of these respondents relies on a basic denition of sustainability, and although they each go on to give examples, the essential aspect of their response seems to be a desire to avoid further engagement with the concept. (B) Resources in this conception, sustainability is approached by focusing on various resources, either material (minerals, water, soil), or biological (sh, crops), or human (minority languages, populations, economies). Anita: I suppose in broad terms by sustainability I understand the idea that an awareness of resources and how one continues to produce something without using up the resources for the future. /. . ./ I suppose again in broad terms, things like water, energy, coal, and fuel. I suppose thats the rst things that I think in terms of sustainability, natural resources which are nite, life, where you just cant keep making them. Ron: So if I stick to shing, most sheries are not what we call ecologically sustainable, they may be economically sustainable or not economically sustainable at current levels but then when food becomes rarer then they can become economically sustainable again because the prot per unit goes up. So it is a relative term. It is not an absolute. Mark: The issue of sustainability is one which actually engages and narrows in line with my research around cultural sustainability particularly in small Pacic communities. My main research focus is on the cultures, particularly the music and dance cultures of the

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west Pacic regions so thats a region which has a kind of series of waves of contact with the west right through early colonisation twentieth century new technologies and increasingly tourism. These three quotations illustrate the various aspects of this conception, Anitas focusing on sustainability of raw materials, Rons on animal life and Marks on the sustainability of cultural identity. This conception seems to be the most common one, and some aspect of it was mentioned by almost all participants. (C) Justice in this conception, sustainability is approached by focusing on the notion of fairness from one generation to the following one, or even within one generation. The idea is that sustainability can essentially only happen under these conditions. Kenneth: I suppose I tend to think of it more on the environment side, so I think about environmental sustainability, um, in keeping the earth in a state that we can hand it down to future generations, so that it is still liveable and that there are resources that are there for future generations to use. /. . ./ I suppose you have got to look at the world being made up of people from all dierent areas and people do not have equal access to wealth and to the resources, be it mineral resources in the ground or even farming land or clean water or whatever, so to have a sustainable world as a whole weve got to have a look at the way those resources are distributed and make sure that everybody has got access to the things that they need. Otherwise you are going to end up with some areas that are depleted in relation to others and therefore it wont be sustainable as a whole. Robin: My view of sustainability includes biophysical, economic, social and cultural dimensions and I guess that the issue that Ive focused on in a lot of my thinking about this is that the pursuit of sustainable improvements in ecological sustainability, social justice, economic equity and cultural diversity or the tolerance for diversity are really critically important elements, in part I guess that leads me to an anthropocentric notions of sustainability. But Im not sure that thats actually true about how I think about sustainability because I think that in many ways I view sustainable relations across species as part of that notion of justice, that it is a wider view than just a narrow social justice. The rst part of Kenneths quote illustrates the idea of justice to future generations, and in the second part he adds the notion of justice within a

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generation. Robins quote illustrates an extension to the idea of justice between species.

Conceptions of teaching for sustainability In common with phenomenographic outcome spaces in other situations, the conceptions in each dimension are hierarchical and inclusive. This simply means that the broader conceptions include the narrower ones: so, for example, a person who holds the justice view of sustainability is also aware of and able to use the resources view and is able to give the sorts of denitions that might be used by people with the distance view. However, this does not happen in the other direction: so a person who is holds a disparate view of teaching sustainability will not easily understand the overlapping view and may have no idea at all about the integrated conception. It is in this sense that the broader conceptions are described as inclusive, and the narrower conceptions as limiting. The two dimensions of experience are combined into overall conceptions of teaching for sustainability, and they are shown diagrammatically in Figure 1. The structural dimension of teaching is shown horizontally, and the referential dimension of sustainability is shown vertically. The resulting outcome space shows nine potential combinations. We would expect, a priori, that the diagonal categories (A1, B2 and C3) were more likely to occur than the others. However, the transcripts indicate that the o-diagonal categories also occur (and we have also shown this in a study of students conceptions of learning and teaching statistics, Petocz and Reid 2003a).

The Context of Teaching Teaching Sustainability A.Distance B . R e sources C.Justice 1.Disparate 2. Overlapping 3.Integrated

Figure 1. The outcome space for conceptions of teaching for sustainability.

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Although not a focus of this paper, we point out that the notion of creativity seems to t in down the diagonal, increasing and becoming more integrated as we go across and down. Ethics was not part of the protocol of the interviews, although it was mentioned by some participants, but it could be seen in the same way. In that sense, creativity was seen as an activity that could be applied to A1 for teaching, but only in extreme cases. In B2, creativity was a means of enhancing the integration of dierent ideas such as disciplinary ideas and sustainability. For C3, creativity is considered as a way of thinking that enables individuals (teachers and students) to nd problems, and then solutions that are out of the box. Figure 1 shows the outcome space sitting within an oval representing the context of teaching. Teaching (and indeed learning) happens within academics perceptions of their teaching context. This context can include how they are positioned as an academic in their institution, the sorts of experiences they have had in the past, their expectations for student learning, the role their unit plays in an overall program, the strategic directions a particular department has etc. Although it seems reasonable that any subject area or teaching context could potentially contribute towards education for sustainable development, it seems that dierent subject areas characteristically position the notion of sustainability in more central or more marginal roles. This is an area that we believe needs further research.

Implications for further research and curriculum development We have presented a summary of ndings from this study into academics conceptions of sustainability. These are of interest not only from the point of view of pure research, but even more so from the point of view of the overall aim to incorporate the notion of sustainability into the curriculum across all subject areas in order to move towards the goal of sustainable development economic development, social development and environmental protection at the local, national, regional and global levels (United Nations 2002). Moreover, one of the strengths of our study is that it investigates views of sustainability from a diverse range of disciplines, rather than focusing on those that traditionally deal with notions of sustainability (such as environmental studies). Although the ndings from our phenomenographic analysis of interview transcripts are given in summary form only, there are some immediate and important conclusions that we can draw.

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Firstly, for the majority of our participants sustainability and teaching are seen as separate entities (A1), or possibly as ideas that may overlap under certain conditions (B2). Academic thinking at the most limited level focuses on the particular subject area being studied, the techniques important in this subject, and the syllabus that needs to be covered: sustainability is often seen as a bit of a nuisance, and possibly as a sop towards political correctness that interrupts the real work. Obviously, the most integrated and sophisticated ideas (C3) involve an emphasis on student learning that enables the academic to see implications and integrations between several key ideas and how to make those ideas accessible to students. It is the development of academic thinking toward these more integrated levels that should be an aim of further research and curriculum development (such as, for instance, the action research that is presently being undertaken at Macquarie University with some of the academics who participated in the interviews). Secondly, from the perspective of those involved regularly in sustainable development and environmental education, these ndings are surprising. We expected a higher degree of awareness of issues of sustainability and a greater integration into teaching programs. From the results reported here, we conclude that our language for sustainability (including, for instance, acronyms such as EE, SD and ESD) was simply not a part of most academics vocabulary. Indeed, many of the participants used the language in the naivest of ways (sustainability means keeping something going) and held popular environmental views (such as the importance of re-cycling paper). This nding runs in some ways counter to the suggestion of Wals and Jickling (2002, p. 222) who say that sustainability talk potentially brings together dierent groups in society searching for a common language to discuss environmental issues. However, our participants popular views seemed to bear very little relation to their teaching practice. In the subject area of mathematics, for example, we have recently carried out a study exploring the relatively low levels of engagement of academics with sustainability (Petocz and Reid 2003b). Comparing and combining students conceptions of mathematics as a discipline with (academics) conceptions of sustainability indicates that the narrowest views of mathematics (as techniques or components) are likely to coexist with a distance approach to sustainability carried out using a disparate teaching approach. On the other hand, the broadest views of mathematics (as an approach to life and a way of thinking) give scope for views of sustainability that include the idea of justice and can be implemented with an integrated

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teaching approach. The paper goes on to give concrete examples of curriculum that aims at these broadest approaches. Our study identied a range of experiences of sustainability, a range that does not seem to be consistent with the accepted rhetoric of experts in the area of sustainable development. This leads us to believe that this investigation is timely, since the integration of sustainable development within the curriculum can only be done if there is a common language and understanding about its importance. Our research has shown that we are actually a long way from sharing a common language about sustainability, and that our eorts to incorporate it into curriculum are important in order to develop graduate students who can make eective contributions to industry. If one of the aims of Agenda 21 and Environment Australia (and environmental education in general) is to engage learners in formal institutions at any level with issues of sustainability, it would seem necessary to tackle the ways in which the academics themselves the teachers understand the issues of sustainability. This will need to be done not only globally, but also in a discipline-specic manner. Practitioners in each discipline will need to explore the ways in which sustainability can be positioned as core business for the particular discipline rather than peripheral to it: the previous example in the area of mathematics represents our attempt to do this in one specic discipline. The second phase of this particular research project is the implementation of action research projects that support early career academics to develop a curriculum oriented project focused on sustainable development. In this instance, the academics have an opportunity to engage in a research project that is supported intellectually and nancially. The university gains through the curriculum change activities focused on the quality of student learning for sustainability through their disciplinary discourse and also through the opportunity for some early career academics to engage in research projects with publishable outputs. Ultimately, these approaches may result in university graduates who have formed professional values that include a commitment to sustainable development.

Acknowledgements This paper reports on research funded by Environment Australia in collaboration with Macquarie University. The project Action Research for Change Towards Sustainability is directed by Dr Daniella Tilbury

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with Dimity Podger and Dr Anna Reid. Our thanks go also to our excellent research assistant, Kate Henderson.

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