Читать книгу The Wiley Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education Learning and Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 28

Time management was a key issue for students living in the SSH, whether juggling competing demands between academic studies, personal issues and the SSH project, or competing demands of a myriad sustainability‐related projects. Time pressures were articulated as being particularly severe when SSH residents were in the final year of their degrees.

The initial year of the project involved greater set‐up time than in later years. As a result, one interviewee acknowledged that his academic work was negatively affected by his participation. However, he saw that learning through the project could compensate for any negative educational impacts:

Provided the [garden foundations] were in, I knew future years would have an easier time. They'd still struggle but they'd have an easier time. But you know, that's part of the learning curve, understanding how you have to integrate sustainability with everything else you are doing, even as students. So I think if it does affect people's grades in the future I think it compensates for the skills it gives. The only problem is there's no quantification for those skills that are learnt in a project like this other than references or fitting it in somewhere and talking about the key skills you have developed, but there's no qualification for it.

(Student 2, Year 1 of project)

This student acknowledged that the learning that took place was informal, unquantified, and potentially unrecognized. Because there is no formal recognition of this learning, students must rely on their ability to articulate it, first to themselves, and then to others.

It is notable that this student, who appeared willing to sacrifice individual academic achievement for the project, expressed his goals for the project through language clearly aligned with activism. He highlighted students' rights to grow food, and the desire to drive long‐lasting change through a project with temporal continuity.

As this project sits purely within the informal curriculum with no real accountability other than to each other for project achievements, it is unsurprising that for many students the SSH took a backseat to other commitments. For many, trying to find a workable balance between the project's goals, their academic studies, and normal student social life seemed elusive.

Although burnout was not mentioned by any students interviewed, the subtext of the interview with Student 3 (Year 2) hinted at symptoms of burnout. We have also observed burnout in students involved in this and other sustainability activist projects in later years, including seeing the negative implications to their academic studies. In the context of activism, burnout can be described as “the end result of a process in which idealistic and highly committed people lose their spirit” (Pines 1994, p. 381). Many studies of youth activism have highlighted the dangers of burnout (e.g. Gagnon 2020). In addition to their activism, student activists are faced with academic pressures, leading to risk of more immediate and intense burnout (Gagnon 2020). Although acknowledging the learning and growth that can occur as a result of engaging in activism, activism takes students’ time and energy away from activities that lead to educational benefits and college experiences (Linder et al. 2019) and can result in negative physical, emotional, and mental health consequences (Vaccaro and Mena 2011). Burnout in young activists can mean that, without finding the right support systems, they might fail to meet their potential (Gagnon 2020). Furthermore, activist burnout can lead to the destabilization of activist movements (Gorski and Chen 2015). Although we believe that activist learning is a good thing, without proper support and care it can come with problems, which may be exacerbated by the combination of: deeply rooted passion and motivation; lack of formal structure, support, and accountability; diverse motivations and expectations; and diverse and competing time pressures. Academics supporting student activism need to consider effective mechanisms to support student activists through both the formal and non‐formal/informal curriculum.

We have explored some of the challenges of the SSH project and student activism in general, set against some of the learning such projects enable. In Section 2.4, we will explore the implicit and articulated learning and development of students from participation in the SSH project.