Water Education for Sustainability in Higher Education

Abstract

This special issue on water education is dedicated to our colleague, Peter Oliver, who died on November 20th, 2012. Peter was a leading and passionate water and environmental educator in Australia. His photograph appears on the cover. We would like to honor Peter by talking about how his life and work embodied and epitomized many of the key themes of this issue. Peter was a highly experienced educator and academic, with an approach to water education developed out of three decades of teaching in secondary schools, universities, community contexts, and professional workshops. Many of Peter’s insights grew out of first hand teaching in classrooms, field trips, community meetings, and forums, of listening to and interacting with people from schoolchildren, through commercial fishermen and farmers, to water professionals from around the world. Certainly, Peter reflected critically on his educational practice and related it to academic knowledge and theory, as his papers in this collection discuss, but his approach was born from and centered on practical, thoughtful doing. Peter was continually involved in a process of learning how to be – and aspiring to be – a better educator. Peter believed in getting students into the field: out into the environment where they could engage with it and the local people who knew it best, see and experience environmental issues first hand, be challenged to analyze those issues and think about responses and solutions. This is the immersive education that Bill Dennison and Peter write about in this issue. Experiential education was his stock in trade: field trips to investigate water resources issues in places like the Brisbane River, Stradbroke Island near Brisbane, the Mary River, the Murray Darling Basin, and the Kalgan River in Western Australia. For Peter, experiential education in the environment was closely linked with problembased learning – learning through engagement and analysis of actual problems in real-world contexts rather than classrooms. Getting out into water catchments and river basins enabled students to see and experience development impacts and environmental changes first hand. Learning in the field was one of the best ways to enable students to see and experience the complex relationships between people, water, and development. Field experiences pose real-world problems that require analysis from a range of different disciplines and the integration of those different knowledges. Field experiences require cooperation among students in groups, learning from different stakeholders, and consideration of technical and management solutions in relation to actual contexts. Peter believed that problem-based learning was one of the best ways to enable students to integrate a range of disciplinary knowledge, social perspectives, and ways of thinking about water management problems into their work. Peter felt strongly that universities and university courses did not “do” integration very well. He was deeply skeptical about formal courses teaching integration or transdisciplinary methods. He would say, “The moment you put integration in a specific subject, you’ve killed it, it’s not integration anymore!” Integration and making 1