14. Sustainability as an Outcome of Transformative Learning

Abstract

Universities in particular have a responsibility to create space for alternative thinking. They have a profound role to play in developing students’ dynamic qualities or so-called competencies. They will need these qualities to cope with uncertainty, poorly defined situations, and conflicting or at least diverging norms, values, interests and reality constructions. The development of these dynamic qualities and related competencies sets higher education apart from institutions that provide training or conditioning, and makes the prescription of particular lifestyles or codes of behaviour or convergence towards a particular set of privileged values and interests problematic. Such prescription stifles creativity, homogenizes thinking, narrows choices, limits autonomous thinking, and minimizes degrees of self-determination. In this paper we will focus on dynamic qualities for transformative living, and on the kinds of learning processes and university structures that are conducive for their development