Sustainability and Higher Education

Critical Reading Response
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Critical Reading Response
Summary
Institutions of higher learning should serve as centers of innovation and knowledge advancement. Any country whose interest is to stabilize its economy has to invest in its institutions of higher education. These facilities have played an essential role in transforming societies by training decision-makers, leaders, academicians, and entrepreneurs (Lozano, 2013). Despite these assertions, several questions have lingered over the quality of education that the universities provide. The main question that has served as a source of debate has been whether these institutions play their expected role of leaders in developing sustainable development mental models or whether they react to stimuli from society by initiating changes only after experiencing the impact on society. A critical analysis of the article by Pappas, Perrakos, and Nagel's article helps show the extent to which an organization is meeting its expected role. 
In the article "Using Bloom's Taxonomy to teach sustainability in multiple contexts," the authors look at four sustainability contexts: social, environmental, economic, and technical that are considered in an engineering curriculum design. Engineering is one of the famous courses in the institutions of higher learning, and one of its goals is to ensure sustainability in the above four contexts. The authors utilize a developmental approach using Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to assess the effectiveness of instructional activities towards ensuring sustainability in the four contexts. The authors note that most curricula perceive sustainability in the environment and at the expense of other factors. The researchers then conclude that increasing the learners' awareness or attitudes towards sustainability alone will not guarantee behaviors that promote sustainability. 
Analysis
I agree with the authors' assertion that most of the courses in the modern institutions of higher learning have not been effective as leaders in sustainability studies. One of the authors previously defined a sustainable society as having the potential to continue surviving and prospering indefinitely in all aspects of life, rather than in only a single context. Sustainable economies are those industries that can sustain their operations without posing a risk to the limited resources available. Such level of sustainability demands a comprehensive planning strategy that borrows from the existing situations to predict the future. In this study, the researchers utilize Bloom's taxonomy, an approach that classifies educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. These models categorize the learning objectives into cognitive, affective, and sensory/psychomotor. This technique helps to promote higher-order thinking in education, which opens up the learners' minds to engage in processes affecting the environment and how to use this knowledge to obtain solutions. 
The author undertakes an excellent job at analysing social, environmental, economic, and technical sustainability. According to the expectations, an institution of higher learning has to predict a...