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CONVERSATIONS: Practising Sustainability Science: Challenges in 
Teaching and Research 
 

Sustainability: Challenges in Teaching 
 

Seema Purushothaman  
 
Sustainability could very well be the vantage point from where we can look 
at anything and everything- be it food, farming, forests, water, industry, 
livelihoods, lifestyles or civilisation itself. This universal applicability comes 
with a prerequisite for a pluralistic but integrative lens. I join others in this 
conversation on the need to have interdisciplinary teams and people 
undertaking co-enquiries in the interface of development and environment. 
At Azim Premji University, we are working on a project on these lines with 
the adivasis of central India.1  

‗Sustainability‘ has an obvious difference from its close and widely used ally 
—‗Sustainable Development‘ (SD), enshrined in Our Common Future 
(WCED 1987). Prominently anchored in neo-classical welfare economics, 
the SD approach has churned out monetary values of environmental 
changes, greenwashed business strategies and ushered in initiatives like 
Payment for Ecosystem Services and carbon markets. The meek presence 
of ‗inter-generationality‘ in SD was translated into bequest values in several 
economic valuation exercises. Nevertheless, SD for whom, at what cost and 
who bears the cost are questions at large. What could ‗sustainability‘ as a 
concept offer and stand for?  

While SD in Our Common Future is perceived as closer to sustainable 
economic growth (Carruthers 2001), ‗sustainability‘ is nuanced and 
sophisticated and more difficult to handle as a subject in both teaching and 

                                                           
Azim Premji University, Pixel park, PES campus, Hosur road, Bengaluru, 560100; 
seema.purushothaman@apu.edu.in 

Copyright © Purushothaman 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.73  

1 Adaptive Skilling through Action Research is undertaken in parts of Jharkhand and Madhya 
Pradesh, in collaboration with PRADAN, a development organization. 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.73


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [34] 

research. Evidently, it has shed the suffix - development. It could thus 
freely manoeuvre from the sustainability of the planet towards that of 
human society.2 In that sense, ‗future‘ is inbuilt in ‗sustainability‘, as it can 
choose to be sensitive to all biotic and abiotic entities as well as to 
distributional equity within and across generations. Thus, it could be 
conceptualized as pertaining to ecosystems; to a social normative (much like 
justice or democracy); a way of life or a means leading to diverse ends; a 
new religion or even as the evolution of new cultures. These approaches 
involve conversations among diverse stakeholders while negotiating 
development trade-offs.  

This note reminisces on the learning from designing and teaching 
sustainability at APU.3 Unlike the notes by Nitin Rai and Rashid Hassan in 
this section, this write up focuses on sustainability education in an 
interdisciplinary Masters‘ programme aimed at moulding reflective 
development practitioners. The commonality in sustainability education at 
Masters‘ and PhD programmes is the need to instil a holistic but 
questioning and ‗people first‘ attitude. 

APU offers a perspective that identifies sustainability with its intrinsic 
elements of social, ecological, political, scientific, technological and humane 
sensibilities (Purushothaman et al. 2016). Teaching and learning such a 
versatile concept envisage innovative approaches. The first course begins 
with sharing of learners‘ initial understanding of sustainability and ends by 
sharing their transformed definitions of the concept. The curriculum 
emphasises interactive learning and considers the classroom as learning 
‗commons‘.  

There is a caveat here; the classroom needs to reflect diversity in the society 
while being not too large to enable the chosen pedagogic tools and to 
accomplish the learning objectives. An essential requirement for our MA 
students has been the need for trans-disciplinary interpretations and 
explanations using a simple vocabulary of disciplinary academic evidence 
from contexts that are closer home. This often requires intra class 
translations of conversations into multiple vernacular traditions.  

Classroom deliberations engage with both abstract and tangible 
interpretations of the concept, as well as empirical real-life topics around us. 

                                                           
2 There are many definitions for a sustainable society, starting with the one by World 
Council of Churches (1974) 

3 Basically, two courses of three credits each—―Sustainability- an Interdisciplinary 
Exploration‖ offered in the third semester and ―Sustainability in Planning and Practice‖ in 
the fourth semester of the MA Development programme. 



[35] Seema Purushothaman 

Lived experiences of people in the class, as well as structured debates 
around questions arising from deliberations, are used as pedagogic tools in 
the first course. Structured and graded debates happen in identified outdoor 
premises of accessible institutions engaged in practicing sustainability—for 
instance, selected residential collectives, educational institutions or 
agricultural interventions around Bangalore. While debates bring to the fore 
the inevitable complexity and divergence, exposure to experiments 
diminishes the abstraction and complexity of the concept.  

Student feedback on the course reflects the transformative experience, 
beginning with unlearning pre-conceived notions by engaging with rich 
conceptual analysis and finally coming to terms with the reality of inevitable 
complexity - both in concept and in practice. By mid-semester in the first 
course, students tend to think about sustainability as an oxymoron and by 
the end of the course, they deem it as a conscious work in progress.  

While the first course on interdisciplinary approaches undertakes 
conceptual disambiguation, the course on planning and practice in the 
following semester familiarises learners with challenges in different sectors. 
The second course involving field work connects individual students with 
interdisciplinary approaches to issues like waste management, urban 
mobility, water commons, etc. Technical skills are imparted in optional 
courses, including those on social-ecological systems, economics, law and 
justice, water, land change, agriculture, forests and urban commons, all of 
which follow the sustainability framing originating in the first course. 

The challenge has been to engage with the following questions: if 
sustainability is eclectic and lending itself to various interpretations,4 then 
how do you define, conceptualise and articulate it for the common person? 
Does the concept allow itself to be pinned down to a clear proposition and 
hence to be taught as a textbook subject? Can studying and teaching 
sustainability confine to unpacking the complexities or does it inevitably 
entail questioning and adapting one‘s own way of life?  

The teaching approach distances itself from the bandwagon of sustainable 
development, though it evades paralysis at the hands of complexity and 
vagueness. The primary accomplishment is to unravel sustainability as a 
multi-dimensional normative to be pursued despite complexity and 
vagueness.  

 

                                                           
4 For instance, as the ability of human civilization (as we know/ want it to be) to sustain into 
prolonged—if not infinite—-time period or defining it as context-specific adaptive abilities 
(e.g. in sustaining a water body, crop productivity or biodiversity). 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [36] 

REFERENCES 

Carruthers, D. 2001. ―From Opposition to Orthodoxy: The remaking of 
sustainable development.‖ Journal of Third World Studies 18 (2): 93-112. 

Purushothaman, S., C. Ravi, H. Nagendra, M. Mathai, S. Mundoli, et al. 2016. 
―Sustainability in Higher Education for the Global South: A Conversation across 
Geographies and Disciplines.‖ Sustainability in Debate 7(1): 156-173. 
https://doi.org/10.18472/SustDeb.v7n1.2016.17424 

World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Report of the World 
Commission on Environment and Development - Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press. 

World Council of Churches. 1974. Report of Ecumenical Study Conference on Science and 
Technology for Human Development. Geneva: World Council of Churches. 

https://doi.org/10.18472/SustDeb.v7n1.2016.17424

