Education of Sustainable Development

The education of sustainable development is an important topic that should be taught to everyone as it is us who can affect the environment. This should include teaching people about how to use non- renewable sources more efficiently as over consumption is at a high at the moment. Now is a good a time as any to start this process.

2005-2014 is set to be the United Nation's decade for education into sustainable development. The aim is to teach people to respect others (present and future generations) and the planet (flora and fauna). This will hopefully encourage people to change their behaviour and encourage them to make better decisions to secure the future of the planet. The educational approach involves visual and holistic learning as well as multi-methods such as drama, art and written. This makes it more interactive rather than lesson based, hopefully capturing more attention.

The DESD want to change the current educational approach with the goal being;

"...to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning. This educational effort will encourage changes in behaviour that will create a more sustainable future in terms of environmental integrity, economic viability, and a just society for present and future generations.'"

There are 8 themes covered by the UN for sustainable development, these are; gender equality, health promotion, environment, cultural diversity, rural development, peace and human security, sustainable urbanization and consumption. All of these are important in sustainable development issues, for example ill health of workers can be a burden on social and economic development. Globalization has increased the importance of cities with relation to sustainable issues as now 1/2 the population live in cities and the others depend on them for economic, social and political progression. This shows that as the majority of the population live in cities, this is a good place to start school education into sustainable development as the youth have a huge influence and need to be taught before the damage to the environment is done.

I think that geography is a good subject to teach sustainable development in as it covers humans and the environments affects to the earth already. However it is also good to teach aspects of it in other subjects such as the sciences as this captures lots of different people. Therefore I can not really agree with Haigh 2005 who states "geography is the best place to deliver sustainable development curriculum" as there are clearly both positives and negatives to both sides of the argument.

So far this year I have enjoyed the module as it is completely different to anything I have studied before. I find the module quite unique in the way that it is looking into the future and how we can affect things, where as most other topics e.g. physical geography look at the past and how we have affected the environment. Sustainable development, although is technically only taught in this module it does relate to other modules in geography I'm studying at the moment which shows that it is at the heart of geography.

https://webmail.northampton.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=27234%26URL_DO=DO_TOPIC%26URL_SECTION=201.html