Education

Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking

By Sharon Stein UBC Are our individual and institutional responses appropriately calibrated to the scale and complexity of the moment we are actually in? After all, we cannot “solve” planetary and geopolitical challenges at the level of curriculum, technology, or individual resilience. We cannot, and arguably should not, seek to extend an extractive system indefinitely.Continue reading “Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking”

Recalibration Climate Risk

This wide ranging and impressive report addresses two distinct but interconnected dimensions of climate impacts, each relevant to different decision-makers: (1) economic impacts affecting financial asset values and portfolio performance over investment horizons, and (2) broader social and human welfare impacts, including mortality, health burdens, inequality, ecosystem degradation, and quality of life. The first isContinue reading “Recalibration Climate Risk”

The Coming of the Ecological University

“Universities have been with us on this Earth for at least one thousand years and will surely be with us in the future; perhaps so long as there is life on this planet that has any well-being. There is now something in not just the name of the institution but in the idea of the university that seemsContinue reading “The Coming of the Ecological University”

Biesta: The Beautiful Risk of Education

We seem to be in the process of creating an education system that strives to reduce all risks whilst making ever-greater demands. The new system tells our students they must work harder, be more productive, and aim ever higher, but is not prepared to allow them simple freedoms or opportunities to make choices and toContinue reading “Biesta: The Beautiful Risk of Education”

Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts

The real world is complicated. Let’s give our students the tools to take it on with interdisciplinary education Graduates are increasingly entering a work landscape that demands agility, flexibility and a diverse skill set, and as a result, the value of interdisciplinary education is on the rise. Universities are seeking out ways to expand students’Continue reading “Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts”

TRANSFORMATIVE SKILLS GUIDE

I have written recently that we need a transformative system -wide change process across our education and learning programmes and institutions to tackle the wicked global issues we face. This recently published Skills Guide puts some astonishingly accessible and credible ways to achieve this transformation. It deals with inner skills such as “thinking ,relating, collaboratingContinue reading “TRANSFORMATIVE SKILLS GUIDE”

TRANSFORMING OUR UNIVERSITIES TO MEET THE ISSUES OF THE 21 CENTURY?

How can we overcome our blindness to what is now right before our eyes: heat, storms, fires, floods, desecrated lands, extinctions, and social injustices and what these portend for their lives. Young people are now recognising that there needs to be more urgency and social focus in our educational systems and crucially we need toContinue reading “TRANSFORMING OUR UNIVERSITIES TO MEET THE ISSUES OF THE 21 CENTURY?”

What do faculty owe future generations?

By Sharon Stein, originally published by Resilience.org January 30, 2024 I’m a millennial faculty member. The millennial generation – also known as Generation Y – came of age with 9/11, followed by the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then the 2007/8 financial crisis. While we were growing up, promises of perpetual progress and prosperityContinue reading “What do faculty owe future generations?”