Topic 5e. Research and teaching for sustainable livelihoods

Topic 5. Table of contents Transforming education for sustainability Overview [+] a. Sustainability framework for higher education [+] b. Educating for living with the earth [+] c. Learning for change [+] d. Knowledge for a new paradigm [+] e. Research and teaching for sustainable livelihoods. f. Open to society: building sustainability together [+] g. Universities in transition [+]

The scientific and technological breakthroughs of recent years have sometimes led us to forget the purpose, for which they were made in the first place— namely, better quality of life for everyone. Technological success has led to the assumption that we could create a society that was independent from our planet and from biology, in a linear process of ongoing expansion. The challenges of sustainability require a change in those objectives and a redirection of those purposes, putting all scientific, technological and general knowledge efforts at the service of the challenges now facing our planet.

Research should seek solutions to society’s problems and contribute to a great extent to describing, analyzing and improving the emerging world. There is a growing need to question the paradigms of knowledge and innovation that inform the research carried out in various contexts; the relationship between research carried out by HEIs and its application in wider society; and the way that society and human development needs shape the research agenda itself. The incorporation of new contents that can equip people with new tools more suited to the context in which they carry out their professions is unavoidable.

To achieve this transformation, we must foster research on emerging subjects in terms of both their content and the ways in which the research itself is performed, with an emphasis on the social and environmental impacts.

The higher education system is highly fragmented, orientated to the hyper-specialization, with a high valuation of the technical knowledge and slow incorporation of the scientific advances which question the basis on which we have sustained the reality comprehension. There is a great resistance to question ‘the recognized science’ though from the same academy there is research that overcomes what we have given as certain in a definite historical period. Sufficient resources are not invested in researching the impacts produced by the knowledge application; neither there is any knowledge transfer that allows accuracy in the collectively political decision making. This is given in a social context that values tecno-scientific applications and consumption as the fundamental basis for the well-being and the prosperity.

It is necessary to balance the tecno-scientific, human and social knowledge in the academic curricula; and incorporate the scientific advances, modifying the obsolete paradigms, especially in the professional exercise.

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