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 The TALESSI Project:

Promoting Interdisciplinarity, Critical Thinking and Values Awareness

in Environmental Higher Education 

Paper presented at the Teaching and Learning at the Environment-Science-Society Interface conference, University of Greenwich, 2-3 April 1998

Peter C. Jones and J. Quentin Merritt, School of Humanities, University of Greenwich

Introduction

We want to set the stage for today’s and tomorrow’s discussions, by introducing the project from which this conference derives - namely Teaching and Learning at the Environment-Science-Society Interface. We shall be explaining the project’s aims and objectives, and saying something about HEFCE’s Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) - which provides the greater part of TALESSI’s financial support, as well as the wider strategic framework within which this project operates. We shall also be trying to make some connections between TALESSI and FDTL on the one hand, and wider debates about higher education - including environmental higher education - on the other. (Shirley Ali Khan’s paper which follows will, I anticipate, further illuminate some of these points.) Most importantly we shall begin to develop the case for promoting interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and values awareness, by exploring - albeit briefly - their educational value and the connections between them, and by examining the current limits to their attainment. (Some of these themes will, I’m sure, be developed more fully in several of the papers which follow, including those by John Foster and John Bradbeer; our own paper tomorrow morning also endeavours to extend this analysis in one particular direction.) Finally, we shall offer some indications as to how the educational principles we espouse are being operationalised in the development of teaching and learning resources.

Project Aims 

The TALESSI project, then, is concerned with interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and values awareness in environmental higher education (EHE). In other words, it seeks to enhance students’ abilities:

• to integrate the knowledges derived from traditionally separate and distinctive disciplines

• to think ‘critically’ about complex environmental issues

• to integrate philosophical insights with the supposedly ‘value-free’ knowledges of the sciences and some social sciences; and to explore the ‘hidden values’ which may undermine those disciplines’ self-proclaimed objectivity.

We consider each of these aims to be educationally beneficial - but also to be educationally elusive. They can, furthermore, be seen as interconnected.

Project Objectives

Before examining these aims in greater detail, I should briefly summarise the main objectives of the TALESSI project. These are:

• working with members of the EHE community, to develop a range of teaching and learning resources (TLRs) which promote interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and values awareness

• to pilot these TLRs in a cross-section of HE institutions and, following feedback, to amend and then disseminate them for use across the EHE community

• to provide support for their adoption and use, in the form of staff development workshops

• to engage the EHE community in a debate about teaching and learning.

These objectives reflect the TALESSI project’s origins and funding. HEFCE’s Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning was established "to support projects aimed at stimulating developments in teaching and learning, and to encourage the dissemination of good practice across the sector" (HEFCE, 1997: 1). There is a clear link between FDTL and HEFCE’s Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) role, inasmuch as:  

• The drive to disseminate good practice (FDTL) reflects HEFCE’s wider concern for quality in teaching and learning (TQA)

• Only (TQA-recognised ) ‘centres of excellence’ in the teaching of their subject qualify to bid for FDTL funding.

Following publication of the Dearing Report (National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education, 1997), and the HEFCE Board’s response to it, FDTL now features in two out of HEFCE’s five main strategy points for teaching and learning (Bekhradnia, 1997) - namely:

• to explore the possibilities for rewarding teaching excellence, through the core teaching grant to institutions and through specific initiatives such as FDTL

• to disseminate and embed innovation and good practice - for which FDTL is one of HEFCE’s major programmes.

In total, there are now 63 FDTL projects operating in HEFCE institutions, including five which relate to the Environmental Studies subject area, and slightly more in Geography. (Some, like our own, are operating to some extent across more than one subject area, as defined by HEFCE).

Interdisciplinarity

It is, of course, something of a truism to assert that the multi-faceted nature of many environmental problems calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Whilst acknowledging the worth of single-discipline environmental study (based, for example, in physics or philosophy) - not least, perhaps, from a research point of view - we nonetheless concur with (amongst others) Toyne (1993), Ali Khan (1996) and HEFCE (1995a, 1995b) in both recognising the value, and lamenting the current dearth, of interdisciplinarity in EHE. For example, HEFCE’s overview report of the 1994/5 teaching quality assessments in Environmental Studies argues that interdisciplinarity fosters "the distinctive, integrative skills deemed so important for environmental research and employment" (1995a: 3) - whilst observing that, in spite of widespread claims to the contrary, "many providers actually run multidisciplinary courses which lack the coherence ... of true interdisciplinarity" (op cit: 1).

At the risk of over-simplification, then, we equate multidisciplinarity with the juxtaposition - but not the integration - of disciplines (for a much fuller discussion, see Huber, 1992). Multidisciplinarity may be especially problematic educationally, if students are confronted with unconnected perspectives or pockets of knowledge which are - as we shall argue more fully tomorrow - frequently incompatible one with another.

Critical Thinking

Critical ‘thinking’ (or ‘reasoning’, or ‘analysis’) "is centrally concerned with giving reasons for one’s beliefs and actions, analysing and evaluating one’s own and other people’s reasoning, devising and constructing better reasoning. Common to these activities are certain distinct skills, for example, recognizing reasons and conclusions, recognizing unstated assumptions, drawing conclusions, appraising evidence and evaluating statements, judging whether conclusions as warranted" (Thomson, 1996: 2).

Whilst the value of critical thinking is now widely acknowledged across higher education (see, for example, National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education, 1997: 16), we suggest that these qualities may be both more important and more difficult to foster in environmental higher education, compared with many other subject areas. Why should this be so?

Many environmental issues are beset by a knowledge base which is partial, uncertain and contested - not to mention its association with a range of disciplines which have different ways of producing and validating knowledge. In these circumstances, it seems particularly important that students should be as clear as possible about, for example, the type - or probably types - of reasoning and evidence they are dealing with; and about how much certainty or uncertainty - not to mention how much authority and credibility - attaches to any particular ‘knowledge claim’. It seems important also that they should understand something of the highly-charged atmosphere in which environmental knowledge is frequently produced, and in which it is debated in public and political arenas; and that they should be able to able to formulate policy and other responses which reflect all of these things. So many of the major environmental problems of our age display some or all of these characteristics: I’m thinking, for example, of ozone depletion and global warming; of the BSE crisis; of the controversy and uncertainty surrounding organo-phosphates and oestrogenic chemicals.

To locate these arguments in relation to current debates about higher education for a moment, I would argue that TALESSI is addressing many of those ‘cognitive’ and ‘learning to learn’ skills which are recognised by Dearing (see ibid) and others, as being of importance to the ‘learning society’. But whereas for Dearing (and, indeed, most participants in the current debate) the chief problem seems to one of putting students in contact with the information sources required for effective resource-based learning - for example through more effective IT training, and through the development of new resource-based learning materials - for us, the challenge is to equip students with the skills to understand what kinds of knowledge they are dealing with in this brave new world of higher education: how to select, interpret and evaluate knowledge - and, indeed, how to make authoritative knowledge claims in their own academic writing. In other words, ours is a ‘knowledge’ - rather than an ‘information’ - agenda; and knowledge is more problematic than information. To cite a simple example, we want students to surf the net, and to use electronic sources to supplement our institutions’ increasingly inadequate print-based materials. But we also want students to select and use those sources critically - with questions of certainty and uncertainty, authority and credibility etc, in mind. We don’t want any more essays based on Encarta-type sources - which, in the environmental field, at least, seemingly portray the world as being knowable through the undisputed ‘facts’, and through the ‘facts’ alone!

Militating against such a critical approach to learning, however, is the persistence of higher education’s strong ‘didactic’ tradition - wherein teaching is viewed as an essentially unproblematic exercise in information transmission, from expert to initiate. Caricatures notwithstanding, there is reason to believe that this tradition is particularly strong in those scientifically-oriented fields in which knowledge itself is most commonly considered by its practitioners to approach objectivity, certainty and truth. To the extent that environmental higher education is heavily influenced by these same disciplines, we would see the didactic tradition as an impediment to the development of critical thinking skills.

One group of authors (Handal et al, 1990: 325), writing in the European Journal of Education, associate the didactic tradition in teaching with the wider practice of so-called ‘instrumentalist’ thinking and action. Drawing an analogy between education and medicine, they write:

To act instrumentally does not work in the same way when ‘motivating’ a patient for strenuous physical rehabilitation as it does in the operating theatre with a sedated patient. It is possible to force the patient to act as prescribed so long as control can be exterted. When left on his own, the patient will act on his own terms.

I suspect that the idea of the ‘sedated student’, passively assimilating our educational life-blood transfusions, is one to which most of us can relate ...

One implication of this view is that students willingly accept the passive educational role which didacticism ascribes to them. Tony Becher and Ludwig Huber (1990: 237) view student-teacher relationships - and, indeed, student-discipline relationships - as the outcome of an acculturation process: "not ... involving the explicit transmission of rules or learning of roles, but rather as a tacit understanding gained by participating in the practices of a particular field". This largely unconscious process of acculturation may be unhelpful to the development of critical thinking. But it would seem to be multiply problematic in circumstances where students are expected to grapple with - and indeed integrate - several disciplines with differing perspectives on knowledge and the learning process.

Values Awareness

From the standpoint of interdisciplinarity, questions of ‘value’ arise principally in the need to integrate philosophy and ethics - which deal explicitly in considerations of what we do (and, perhaps, should) value - with those purportedly ‘value free’ science and social science disciplines which form the core of much environmental higher education.

But from a ‘critical thinking’ perspective, questions of value appear in a somewhat different - though not unrelated - guise: namely, as the hidden values which - according to some accounts, at least - threaten to undermine the self-proclaimed objectivity of those sciences and social sciences. We take the view that scientists are socialised human beings, who live and work and produce knowledge in the ‘real’ world, and that what scientists do professionally is unavoidably influenced by the world around them - for example:

• the nature of scientific education

• priorities for scientific research which are set in relation to prevailing economic, social and political agendas

• personal and/or corporate (e.g. commercial or political) interests which may predispose particular scientists toward one interpretation of ‘the evidence’, contested though their view may be

• deeper societal values, of which scientists and others may be scarcely conscious (for instance on the question of whether ‘nature’, as the object of scientific enquiry, is to thought of as possessing ‘intrinsic’ value, or rather as having only ‘instrumental’ value for human societies).

To argue that scientific endeavour is socially conditioned in this way is not to suggest that the knowledge produced is somehow ‘wrong’ in any simple sense of the word - though it is to dispute the claim that scientific knowledge constitutes some kind of absolute, objective truth about the world, the only correct way of knowing the world with certainty.

Synthesis

Rather than viewing the knowledge base of environmental higher education as a store of codified wisdom - unproblematic in terms of its objectivity, truth and certainty - we see it as problematic in all of these respects, and frequently subject to contestation. Further, we recognise academic, commercial, political and other actors who are all in the ‘knowledge claims-making’ business - where academia is far from being an ivory tower, insulated from the wider world in its thinking.

The nature - and, ultimately, the validity - of knowledge claims can be assessed at three levels:  

• first, by asking sociological questions - such as who advances the claims, whose interests are at stake, and on whose authority the reasoning and evidence depends

• second, we can ask methodological questions - for example, about sample size and selection, design of the field or laboratory experiment or model (controls, assumptions, use of surrogates etc)

• third, we can ask philosophical questions - for instance, about how robust the logic of an argument is; or about what its ethical assumptions may be (for instance, the ethics of a conservation programme which involves exterminating large numbers of rabbits in Australia); or about where the ‘burden of proof’ should reside in a contested case (for instance, whether a community subject to industrial pollution should have to ‘prove’ adverse health consequences, or whether the polluter should ‘prove’ that no such risk exists).

These are the sorts of questions which many of our teaching and learning resources are being developed to address. But of course the activity of ‘claims making’ is not confined to those who generate knowledge claims of the kind I’ve been referring to during the last few moments. 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. Two of the draft TLRs on display explicitly apply the principles of critical thinking to students’ own writing.

The approach to environmental higher education that we are advocating, then, does not only involve delivering the ‘traditional’ curriculum in a more integrated, values-aware and critically informed way. We also advocate supplementing the traditional curriculum with some sociology and philosophy of knowledge - and, especially, of scientific knowledge - thereby enabling students to achieve a convergence between the problematic nature of their subject-based knowledge and the ‘study skills’ perspective of critical thinking. In exploring with our students the provisional, uncertain and contested knowledge claims surrounding BSE, or global warming, or oestrogenic chemicals, therefore, we can simultaneously equip them for a more rigorous and systematic approach to their own knowledge claims. This, I think, is the central idea behind the TALESSI project - and this, we believe, is what can make EHE an immensely rich and rewarding experience.

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the invaluable early contribution, both to the thinking behind this paper and to the TALESSI project in general, made by Dr Clare Palmer (currently Research Fellow in Environmental Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Australia).

References

Ali Khan, S (1996) Environmental Responsibility: A Review of the 1993 Toyne Report

Becher, T & Huber, L (1990) ‘Editorial’, European Journal of Education (special issue on Disciplinary Cultures), 25 (3), 235-40

Bekhradnia, B (1997) Opening Speech to Second FDTL National Conference (Birmingham), 18 November

Handal, G et al (1990) ‘The concept of rationality in academic science teaching’, European Journal of Education (special issue on Disciplinary Cultures), 25 (3), 319-32

HEFCE (1995a) Quality Assessments of Environmental Studies (Bristol: HEFCE)

HEFCE (1995b) Quality Assessments of Geography (Bristol: HEFCE)

HEFCE (1997) Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) Phase One: HEFCE and DENI Awards (Bristol: HEFCE)

Huber, L (1992) ‘Editorial’, European Journal of Education (special issue on Interdisciplinarity), 27 (3), 193-9

National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society: Summary Report (London: HMSO)

Thomson, A (1996) Critical Reasoning: A Practical Introduction (London: Routledge)

Toyne, P (1993) Environmental Responsibility: An Agenda for Further and Higher Education