Associate Professor Samuel Mann
There’s an old saying that 'it ain't easy being green' and when it comes to sustainability and education, Dr Samuel Mann can recite a litany of reasons why it’s supposedly true.
After two years of interviewing academics and studying the barriers they face integrating sustainability into education and professional practice, Dr Mann, Associate Professor of Information Technology at Otago Polytechnic, has heard every excuse in the book.
"This should be a separate, specialist fi eld of study"… "Unless we transform entirely it's not worth the effort"… "We should wait until the science is sorted"… Mann says that the plethora of issues raised by his interviewees need to be addressed individually and in detail. He is releasing a book this year, targeted at educators, that proposes a range of creative and conceptual solutions to each of these problems. "A major part of overcoming these barriers is about acknowledging them, discussing them and even utilising the strength of the reasoning behind them," Mann says. "For instance, one of the issues I've come across is the idea that discussions about sustainability are negative and without vision. This leads to the idea that perhaps we need to stop hammering people over the head with pictures of polar bears on melting ice cubes and so forth and start thinking in terms of what we can do to get students thinking positively about their vision of the next 50 years and what their discipline can do to contribute towards that vision." Mann believes that the concept of the "sustainable practitioner" underlying Otago Polytechnic's sustainability strategy is one that could play an important part in helping other educators to incorporate sustainability into their teaching. His book describes the journey taken by the institution to try and realise this concept in the many disciplines it teaches.
"Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world", Mann says, quoting the Greek mathematician Archimedes. "Educators have a very large lever, because we've got the discipline we are working in plus the fact that we're teaching a classroom full of students every year, so what we do has a major multiplier effect. That is why it is absolutely worth working with educators to help them to get past these barriers."