Education

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Education is a Solutions page in the Knowledge Base that is designed to help the Planning pillar of goBEYOND. Contribute to our Knowledge Base by adding the education initiatives, policy, or teaching models that are used on your campus.

Post-secondary institutions are crucial grounds for turning our present into a more sustainable and prosperous future. Why? –They bring together diverse expertise, have large economic impacts, and are cradles of innovation. Post-secondary institutions draw together communities, government, and the private sector and shape their responses to new ideas. Most of all, post-secondary institutions educate our future leaders and community members, and in doing so, inform the decisions they will make in a rapidly changing world.

This is why goBEYOND’s Education pillar is working to establish curriculum that is engaging, community oriented and that will create regional climate change solutions in all spheres. We envision an education system that connects the classrooms to the community to deliver knowledge with practical applications. We envision an education system that acts as hubs for local solutions to climate change. And we want to connect with you to make that happen.

Contents

goBeyond Education Pillar

Education is one of the five pillars of goBEYOND [1]. The Education Pillar focuses on fostering interdisciplinary sustainability education to work on climate change solutions.

In our first year goBEYOND focused on organizing two teach-ins, one in the fall of 2008 and one in the spring of 2009. The goBEYOND Teach-In sparks a dialogue between students and their professors that examine their discipline's role in fostering regional climate change solutions.

Please see the 2009-2010 Program Planning section below to learn more about goBEYOND's education plans for this year and get involved.

Courses

  • Teaching and Learning-ES480 - a backgrounder produced by a 4th year class in Environmental Studies at UVic.
  • AASHE's Courses on Campus Sustainability ASSHE's List of Courses
    • This resource lists courses that focus on "campus sustainability." Students in these courses conduct research on and implement projects that advance sustainability on campus. Examples include performing a campus sustainability assessment, researching green building options, and designing a campus bike share program. Online syllabi are linked where available; otherwise please contact the instructor for a copy of the syllabus. The courses are listed alphabetically by institution.
    • To suggest your course be added to this list or to update your entry, contact resources@aashe.org. Please only send courses that include a direct focus on campus sustainability as they are unable to post general sustainability courses.

Programs

The following is a list of educations programs with a strong focus on sustainability. As with everything else on this wiki, we invite you to please add any programs that you think should be shared.

Organizations and their Key Resources

Resources

This is only the beginning of a list of resources that we would like to expand to include general information and discipline-specific support. As with everything else on this wiki, please help us to expand it.

Integrating Sustainability:

Problem-based Learning:

goBEYOND 2009/10 Program Planning

Lessons Learned

We have identified the following as core lessons that we have learned from our experience with the first year of the Education Pillar:

  • Engaging faculty requires a lot of leg-work, and is best done by their students
  • Faculty need things to be simple
  • Students can produce very high quality research for their communities with the right support
  • Central support can significantly reduce the stress and workload on local groups

Broad Framework

Goals and Objectives

2009/10 Education Pillar Goals and Objectives:

Results Goals:

  • Provide research and education on climate solutions for regions
    • Objective: # of entries in the Regional Solutions grids
    • Objective: # of classes working on the Regional Solutions Project
    • Objective: # of municipalities and regional governments that are provided with research in a format useful to them
  • Engage faculty to participate in Invent the Future
    • Objective: # of faculty that incorporate Invent the Future into their curriculum
    • Objective: # of faculty that mention Invent the Future to their classes

Process Goals:

  • Connect students and faculty around a shared interest in climate and sustainability solutions
    • Objective: # of faculty engaged by the Teach-In or Regional Solutions Project
    • Objective: # of students engaged by the Teach-In or Regional Solutions Project
    • Objective: # of students and faculty that meet at the train-the-trainer workshop
  • Train faculty to incorporate sustainability in their curricula and train them to train other faculty
    • Objective: # of faculty that attend train-the-trainer workshop
    • Objective: # of faculty that participating faculty train
    • Objective: # of faculty that incorporate sustainability and climate change into their curricula because of these trainings

Education Timeline

  • Invent the Future with a local and regional beyond climate-neutral focus which is also incorporated into classes in the fall
  • Regional Solutions Project will invite students and faculty to contribute to regional solutions for climate change in BC, producing maps to a climate-neutral 2050
  • Winter teach-in that focusses on local solutions to climate change, maybe of a national or international scale and including events inside and outside the classroom, promotion of teach-in begins after fall mid-terms
  • Train-the-trainer workshop in May 2010 for faculty to learn about teaching climate change and sustainability

Programming Elements

The following are the core programming elements:

2010 Teach-In

  • Focus of teach-in is regional climate solutions and climate justice at the national and international level
    • The question needs to be simple to understand and complex to apply. For example, for the regional solutions: How can our region become climate-neutral by 2050? And for the national and international question - What is our (Canada's) role in creating a just and climate-neutral world by 2050?
  • The Teach-In will be a culmination of a process that allows for several different ways for students and faculty to be involved, including through assignments in their curricula
    • Different tiers of involvement will allow some to be very involved and others to be less involved
    • Make a tool-kit geared towards different subject areas, Amber would be willing to put energy towards this
    • Develop a guide for facilitating discussion in a way that will help people to make the linkages
  • The Regional Solutions grid will provide a mechanism for "getting everyone on the same page" and reporting in the results
    • Need to provide online and organizational infrastructure to get research from students and faculty and make it available - this will be a key motivator

Train-the-trainer Workshop

  • Facilitator for the Sustainability Education Intensive and the equivalent from BCIT talked about workshops and what went well and what they're doing
  • Sean has put together a video showcasing a previous workshop
  • Currently working on a survey for professors accros the province to see who would be interested in participating
  • General consensus is that we don't want to just do one, we want to do them all over the province tailored to local needs
  • goBeyond's role is to do the survey and gather the results, start working on a tool-kit, we are the main host organization
  • Possibly connected with Sustainable Campuses Conference
  • International university teaching conference will provide experience about how to incorporate climate change in education
  • Also, need to incorporate the results from the 2010 Teach-In to build up to a robust Regional Solutions Project for the fall

Regional Solutions Project

  • Develop a regional solutions that students and faculty can fill in
    • The main grid has the areas that we need to get to climate-neutrality for rows, sectors for columns, and within the boxes the actions and dates
    • In addition, we will incorporate a triple-bottom sustainable lens to the solutions, with a focus on business oportunities, social justice, and ensuring that we don't cause unsustaianble ecological damage
  • The idea behind the grid is that it would be a visual map to climate-neutrality, and that from the high-level map people could click-through to greater and greater levels of detail and debate
  • In addition, we will build bridges between the campuses and their local and regional governments to facilitate that relationship and make sure that the research and education is useful for all parties

Case Studies

Working Group Workplan

Invent the Future

  • Complete the report from the first teach-ins
  • Develop and distribute an invitation to incorporate Invent the Future in curriculum - with a focus on regional climate solutions, include the report from the first teach-in

2010 goBeyond Teach-In

  • Develop an advisory group to review proposals for the next teach-in
  • Develop options for participation, with a focus on making the project work for low-capacity groups
  • Develop materials for integrating the Regional Solutions grid, with a particular focus on the ease of reporting
  • Create local working groups to lead the local research and reporting
  • Develop the marketing and outreach materials to engage students and faculty

Regional Solutions Project

  • Develop the Regional Solutions grid and get feedback on it
  • Develop the online mechanisms for contributing to the grid and discussing it
  • Invite students and faculty to begin preparing the background information for the teach-in during the fall

Train-the-Trainer Workshop

  • Determine the structure of the train-the-trainer workshop. In particular, how it wil be both centralized and decentralized and how it will connect with a proposed Sustainable Campuses Conference
  • Survey professors to see who would be interested in participating in the train-the-trainer workshop
  • Develop the curriculum for the train-the-trainer workshop with partner groups and with consideration for following up on the Regional Solutions and climate justice work from the teach-in

Remaining Teach-in Issues

  • Do we need BC specific questions? If so, what are they?
    • I'm wondering if the the whole regional solutions project will need to be separate from the 15 minutes-of-class-time teach-in. From my experience, the kind of loose, free-ranging discussion that the previous teach-in generated is not conducive to what we're trying to do with the regional solutions project. If we don't expect the class-time teach-in to produce input for the regional solutions project, then we're probably fine with just the national questions. (Spencer)
    • I agree with Spencer that free-ranging discussion may not be particularly conducive to the regional solutions project. Instead we can provide it as an option within the tiers of involvement, like Spencer listed below. (Angela)
    • I think we could have BC specific questions, but ones that are under the hood of climate justice. I think the Teach-in needs to be focused so that it is has a strong topic base. So, we could let professors decide if they want to (a) keep it a broad discussion about the teach-in theme, or (b) focus in on more specific issues in BC related to climate justice that are perhaps more related to the course. (Angela)
  • What are the "tiers of involvement"?
    • We've batted around a few ideas for this: 15 minutes of class, whole class, assignment, climate-related projects. It think those are all great, but we've got to do more than offer instructors the idea of doing climate-related teaching and then taking credit when do it. What are we actually offering them? (Spencer)
      • Regional solutions project. We'll do ground work that profs wouldn't do on their own.
      • Resources. I don't think it's realistic to offer instructors one-on-one support, but we connect them with already existing resources or even create some of our own.
      • Peer support? Somebody mentioned the idea of creating support circles among instructors. This might be valuable and could be done easily. My only question is whether this is too much of a stretch for academic culture. (Spencer)
        • Tying in the peer support and resources idea, we could develop a simple database that would collect assignments/class activities/projects that professors have already developed (via individual submission, or us asking for them). So if professors were interested in doing something more than a 15min class discussion, they would have real examples to get ideas off of. And like Spencer said, we could develop our own resources, too. (Angela)
  • How do we build support for the Regional Solutions Project? How do we ensure that the results are used?
    • I'd like to bring municipal staff and campus planners in on the development of this as soon as possible. That should ensure that what gets designed will be valuable to them. (Spencer)
    • Where we don't have contact with them in development, asking volunteers to meet with them in first semester could be really valuable. (Spencer)
    • I agree! We could approach MetroVancouver?! Although they only represent the lower mainland and Vancouver, they've made great commitments to sustainability and would surely be excellent sources for canvassing regional issues. (Angela)
  • Is the teach-in suitable to low-capacity student groups? If not, how do we adapt it to them?
    • The regional solutions project might not be suited to low capacity campus groups. Perhaps we should think about making just our same old 15 minute teach-in an option for low-capacity groups. (Spencer)
    • I agree that the regional solutions project might be too much for low-capacity groups, but I think that if we had resources to supply the various tiers of involvement (excluding regional solutions project) it wouldn't be too hard for them to accommodate the idea. (Angela)


      • A note on the Regional Solutions Project - may be something to pilot this year with a few professors at high capacity schools, and refine before launching provincial. Worried about taking too much on....
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