Climate change: building leadership capacity within a higher education institution

Abstract

Learning how to address climate-change and live more sustainably is a 'social learning process' which is in its infancy and in which the University, its graduates and community will need to assume significant leadership roles. This exploratory paper reflects on the experience of a cross-disciplinary group of researchers and educators from an Australian university, who came together in 2009-2010 as a community of practice to research cross-disciplinary leadership capacity building for learning and teaching sustainability within our university. The group worked on the premise that the scale of change needed and the complexity of sustainability demands a more broadly based approach than that offered by traditional disciplinary arrangements within the University. We engaged in a collaborative learning process focusing initially on developing a common agenda and establishing some preliminary learning outcomes for the development of cross-disciplinary 'sustainability literacy'. On the basis of these initial outcomes, a review of the literature and our own reflective process, we developed an applied model for collaborative learning based on Scott's (1999) Workplace Action Research Framework. Our intent is to build on this groundwork to develop an engaged, problem-based cross-disciplinary university-wide learning program that develops leadership in sustainability in our students, in us as academics and the wider university in its regional partnerships. Our paper ends by enumerating the lessons we have learnt and some speculative future directions for where we plan to take this research