Theresa Ashford

Social and ecological issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, inequality, and COVID-19 have changed and are changing the world. These realities have profoundly impacted peoples’ perspectives about the future and our human-nature relations. Adding to this mix of disruptions COVID-19 has changed student engagement with sustainability agendas. COVID-19 has increased sensitivity to borders, control, containment, personal health, and wellbeing. This shift in focus and attention to the individual moves against the sensibilities observed in sustainability education. It is at this juncture this paper offers reflections by three Australian sustainability educators who taught during COVID-19. We have come up with three provocations to think with disruption: phronesis, world views and entanglement. These themes, critical to the pedagogies of sustainability educators across the globe, allowed us to pivot around the implications and opportunities presented as we taught our way through this period.

It is impossible not to be affected at some level when watching, even just the highlights, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. The endorphin-pumping procession enrolled multiple music cultures, spectacular and theatrical light shows, and played to Paris’s sardonic historical relations and geographical strengths while generating a ‘spectacle’ that would be hard to match or forget (even if we wanted to). This truly was a city that gave itself up and delivered a spicy ‘full-court press’ for the Olympic imagination. However, closer to home, in the wake of the emerging controversies with the development cycle for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics and Paralympics and the cancellation of the 2026 Summer Commonwealth Games by the Victorian government due to projected cost overruns, we feel that more conversation should be occurring around what the Olympic model should be into the future. We offer four propositions or thinking points that are not necessarily new, but collectively suggest, a re-visioning in light of the realities of the poly crisis that looms. The propositions circle around a shift towards a fixed site for the Games.

Academic integrity (AI) is a complex problem that challenges how we view action, intentions, research, and knowledge production as human agents working with computers. This paper proposes that a productive approach to support AI is found at the nexus of behavioural ethics and a view of hybrid app-human agency. The proposal brings together AI research in behavioural ethics and Rest’s (1979) four stages of ethical decision-making which tracks the development of moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and finally moral action combined with insights taken from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This framework, bluntly named the Academic Integrity Model (AIM), positions AI as an effect of an entangled hybrid of human-technology actors moving through distinct but related steps towards ultimately mobilising (un)ethical learning behaviours. This model highlights the importance of developing socio-techno responsibility in students and suggests that approaches to address academic integrity performances such as contract cheating, collusion and plagiarism should include considerations of the complex nature of app-centric students.