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Introduction to TLRs

The TALESSI project aims to promote interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and values awareness in environmental higher education (EHE), especially in environmental science/studies and geography. It seeks to do this principally through the development and dissemination of teaching and learning resources (TLRs) for use across the HE sector. Specifically, these TLRs are designed to enhance students' abilities:

• To integrate knowledges derived from traditionally separate and distinctive disciplines - this is considered more problematic than is commonly acknowledged, insofar as those disciplines tend to have very different ideas about what 'counts' as knowledge.
• To think 'critically' about environmental knowledges, particularly where 'knowledge claims' advanced by stakeholders are subject to uncertainty and contestation.
• To examine the value judgements which underlie many environmental knowledge claims, including the unacknowledged values which may call into question some disciplines' and stakeholders' claims to objectivity.

Format, Content and Learning Outcomes

Each TLR is self contained, and most are presented in terms of a standard format which specifies, inter alia:

• aims and intended learning outcomes
• proposed learning activities
• stimulus materials and/or other resources required
• academic level of the TLR, along with pre-requisite knowledge/skills
• preparatory and follow-up activities, including recommended reading and related TLRs.

TLRs are variable in the scale of their proposed learning activities - from, for example, those which might form the basis of a single seminar (along with preparatory and follow-up work), to those which provide for an extended project-based learning experience. Key texts or other stimulus materials are normally provided, but additional print-based and/or electronic sources may also be proposed.

The subject 'content' of TLRs is to some extent less important than the 'generic' educational qualities - of interdisciplinarity, values awareness and critical thinking - that they seek to promote. Nonetheless, the range of topics covered broadly reflects current EHE curricula, albeit with an emphasis on those which are 'located' at the environment-science-society interface. Several TLRs focus principally on a specific academic skill (more so than on a topic per se) - which is then developed from the perspective of critical thinking, or in other ways of relevance to the TALESSI project.

Many TLRs are intended principally for students operating at academic level 3. However some allow for 'differentiated outcomes' - that is, they could be used by students operating at a variety of levels, provided tutors' expectations are adjusted accordingly. Furthermore it recognised that the TALESSI project's educational aims should ideally be cultivated continuously from level 1 onwards.

Not unrelated to the previous point, some caution should be exercised in introducing these TLRs - which adopt a 'problematic' (or 'critical') view of knowledge and learning - into any educational experience which, tacitly or otherwise, posits knowledge and learning in essentially 'unproblematic' terms (as may, for example, tend to be the case with predominantly scientific programmes of study): to transmit such educationally 'mixed' messages may be to invite a compartmentalised response from students. (This, along with related - e.g. curriculum development - implications, will be explored in the staff development workshops.) Ultimately, judgements about the suitability - and possible need for adaptation - of TLRs should be made in the light of 'local' circumstances, and with reference to the stated pre-requisites.

Pedagogic Considerations

Most TLRs are based on 'active', or student-centred, learning - for example, seminar discussions, role plays and problem-based exercises. Aside from the general arguments which are increasingly heard in favour of active learning, 'student-centredness' is considered integral to the educational philosophy and aims of this particular project. Specifically, the TALESSI project starts from a recognition that many environmental issues are beset by a knowledge base which is uncertain and contested - either scientifically and/or in terms of values - by the various (commercial, political and even academic) stakeholders. In these circumstances, it seems important that students should develop a critical and questioning approach to knowledge - and, in particular, to make informed judgements about how much authority and credibility attaches to any particular 'knowledge claim'. Hence we advocate students' active - rather than passive - engagement with the knowledge base of their subject. But, to take the argument one step further, this activity of 'claims making' is not confined to commercial, political and other stakeholders. Our students are also, in effect, making knowledge claims when they produce their essays, dissertations and examination answers - whether those claims be advanced principally on the basis of secondary source materials or of primary research findings. In assisting students to think critically about others' knowledge claims, therefore, we can (and should!) simultaneously assist them in thinking critically about their own such claims - and thereby, in making their academic writing itself more critically aware and authoritative.