Place-Sensing through Haptic Interfaces: Proposing an Alternative to Modern Sustainability Education

Viktor Swillens,Joris Vlieghe,Joke Vandenabeele,Mathias Decuypere

doi:10.3390/su13084204

Abstract

In this article we address the issue of how an instrumental approach to sustainability education has dominated the scientific debate of the last 20 years. By conducting interviews and focus group interviews, we have investigated a community arts initiative in the Flemish city of Antwerp in which artists together with local inhabitants engaged in activities around two art installations and address the sustainability of a particular living environment. Our empirical study of this place-based initiative that we call a ‘critical zone observatory’ has been enriched by the work of Bruno Latour, Richard Sennett and Hans Schildermans. We conclude that a temporal and spatial shift in sustainability education (research) is needed from (1) development (a steady movement towards a planned future) and (2) human stewardship (the capability of people to shape their passive living environments) to (1) what we call co-sperity (a collective hope in the present) and (2) inhabitation (an attached and undetermined engagement with the dynamic of one’s habitat). By proposing a collective study pedagogy as an alternative to individual training, we suggest a need for future research on critical zone observatories.

Highlights

We are globally confronted with sustainability issues that influence our quality of life in an intrusive way, e.g., toxic air pollution affecting the physical health of many citizens, climate change forcing thousands of people to flee their homes in the Global
A community worker that we interviewed in the course of our case study mentioned how the current situation contrasts with that of the last decade: many local inhabitants, like himself, became ‘out of touch’ with their habitat, i.e., they had become unresponsive and unreceptive to what happened in this place, which itself resulted in a lack of attention to the deteriorating condition of the complex: The site was in the past a kind of an empty space to me
As discussed in the introduction, education nowadays is mainly understood as an individual training process in which experts aim at imparting knowledge and skills to learners who are subsequently expected to become the future sustainability stewards of their daily environment

Summary

Introduction

We are globally confronted with sustainability issues that influence our quality of life in an intrusive way, e.g., toxic air pollution affecting the physical health of many citizens, climate change forcing thousands of people to flee their homes in the GlobalSouth and an increasing amount of public spaces that are being privatized for commercial ends. In response to the global call for tackling the challenge of sustainable development, international organizations such as UNESCO [1] have started to advocate the deployment of educational programs in which people “acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development” This increased emphasis is visible in the international field of educational research, e.g., [2,3,4,5]. In this paper we argue, in line with a growing number of educational scholars [7,8,9], that one of the main reasons for this deadlock is the fact that sustainability education is more often than not approached in an instrumental way It is mainly conceived of as an instrument for the imparting of predefined sustainability competences, i.e., passing on a particular set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are formulated by scientific and educational experts, e.g., [3,4,5]. It can be argued that education is conceived of as individual training, i.e., as a vehicle for supplying a stock of competences

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