Sustainability and Higher Education

Critical Reading Response
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Critical Reading Response
Summary
Institutions of higher learning should serve as centers of innovation and knowledge advancement. Any country whose interest is to stabilize its economy has to invest in its institutions of higher education. These facilities have played an essential role in transforming societies by training decision-makers, leaders, academicians, and entrepreneurs (Lozano, 2013). Despite these assertions, several questions have lingered over the quality of education that the universities provide. The main question that has served as a source of debate has been whether these institutions play their expected role of leaders in developing sustainable development mental models or whether they react to stimuli from society by initiating changes only after experiencing the impact on society. A critical analysis of the article by Pappas, Perrakos, and Nagel's article helps show the extent to which an organization is meeting its expected role. 
In the article "Using Bloom's Taxonomy to teach sustainability in multiple contexts," the authors look at four sustainability contexts: social, environmental, economic, and technical that are considered in an engineering curriculum design. Engineering is one of the famous courses in the institutions of higher learning, and one of its goals is to ensure sustainability in the above four contexts. The authors utilize a developmental approach using Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to assess the effectiveness of instructional activities towards ensuring sustainability in the four contexts. The authors note that most curricula perceive sustainability in the environment and at the expense of other factors. The researchers then conclude that increasing the learners' awareness or attitudes towards sustainability alone will not guarantee behaviors that promote sustainability. 
Analysis
I agree with the authors' assertion that most of the courses in the modern institutions of higher learning have not been effective as leaders in sustainability studies. One of the authors previously defined a sustainable society as having the potential to continue surviving and prospering indefinitely in all aspects of life, rather than in only a single context. Sustainable economies are those industries that can sustain their operations without posing a risk to the limited resources available. Such level of sustainability demands a comprehensive planning strategy that borrows from the existing situations to predict the future. In this study, the researchers utilize Bloom's taxonomy, an approach that classifies educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. These models categorize the learning objectives into cognitive, affective, and sensory/psychomotor. This technique helps to promote higher-order thinking in education, which opens up the learners' minds to engage in processes affecting the environment and how to use this knowledge to obtain solutions. 
The author undertakes an excellent job at analysing social, environmental, economic, and technical sustainability. According to the expectations, an institution of higher learning has to predict a problem likely to occur in the future and establish ways to mitigate it before it causes losses. Each of these contexts has an impending crisis that will lead to unprecedented effects if not handled carefully. Social sustainability focuses on the role of individuals, the relationship among the social groups, the family, and the collective behaviour that defines society. The authors' discussion concerning social sustainability does not present a clear picture of how the modern education systems fail to meet this objective. It would also have been essential for the researchers to consult more updated sources as their references for the discussion on social sustainability are over ten years old. Such old sources do not provide a clear image of the actual situation. 
In the discussion of environmental sustainability, the authors introduce the concept but do not provide a clearer perspective of their discussion. However, I agree with the authors that sustainable engineering design in modern institutions is not geared to treat the environment as subject to continuous increases in natural resource use, increases in the goods produced, and increases in waste products. In a real sense, nature has always been subject to overexploitation, excessive consumption, and an increasing amount of waste products daily. The authors also highlight the significant role of both economic and technical sustainability in the learning process. 
In the literature review section, the authors consent that efforts to integrate sustainability into the engineering curricular have been unsuccessful because of resistance from the faculty. The faculty members do not embrace change because of the fear of being displaced or being made uncomfortable. The resistance shows the unwillingness of the institutions to adopt change unless compelled. These findings apply not only to the engineering sector but many other courses in different institutions. There may be efforts to ensure that systems serve society's needs and prevent disasters from occurring. However, the main question remains whether the institutions are ready to be change drivers or reactors to the events happening in the society. 
Bloom's approach is an interesting approach to me as it integrates the students' learning process in the courses they learn at the institutions. According to the source, the taxonomy has six hierarchical levels that explain the learning stages. The first stage is the knowledge phase; the second is comprehension; the third is an application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Unfortunately, many learning institutions do not exhaust these stages. Instead, most of the learners prioritize knowledge attainment and hence the focus on academic performance. Society's acknowledgment of grades as the only measure of success makes the leaders prioritize knowledge attainment at the expense of the rest of the thinking processes. Teachers encourage this basic level of thinking by directly examining only concepts learned in class, rather than posing exams requiring students t...