Changing Education to Meet Today’s and Tomorrow’s Challenges: A Case by Richard L. Wallace

Education organizations should be organized to cultivate capacities to solve problems amid cognitive, physical, and societal challenges. New thinking is needed to formulate education to respond to increasingly chaotic environmental changes that pose such challenges. In this chapter, I address a policy problem of higher education, focusing on the types of environmental programs and curricula needed for integrative and problem-oriented learning. Using the intellectual tasks of the problem orientation, I identified conditions and recommendations that aim to help orient environmental studies and sciences education in university to empower students with agency and give them the knowledge and skills to be constructive citizens and leaders of society as they learn to address diverse, growing environmental and societal challenges.