Education for Sustainability

How Can We Get from Here to There?

What kind of education is relevant to the transition to a sustainable society? What will people need to know to live responsibly and well within the means of nature? What skills, abilities, values and character traits will be useful and/or necessary for the transition ahead? What are we already doing? What will we have to do differently? We invite you to learn with us.

We Are All Part of an Integrated System.

If we want to develop in our children "the capacity and ability to create a remarkably different economy, one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security" (Hawken, 1993) then we must examine current academic and professional research, experience, wisdom and debates across the disciplinary spectrum and compare the knowledge, skills and processes that are being learned and argued in the "real world" with what is being taught in our schools.

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves. And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their decision." ~Thomas Jefferson

 

An Emerging Understanding of Education for Sustainability

Education for Sustainability is a dynamic system of core content, competencies and habits of mind coupled with a pedagogical system that is learner centered and inquiry based (just two of the instructional attributes that characterize it). The best way to engage with teaching and learning for sustainability is through the development of learning communities that develop over time. We say this because, though we know a lot, we do not know enough - and, we don't know what we don't know. Therefore, we must create new knowledge and new ways of thinking, we must be able to analyze synthesize and transfer knowledge from various fields, we must be able to work with others and learn from their perspectives and we must be able to think and act "outside the box" to create new understandings and new behaviors that complement the enduring common sense with which many of us are still familiar. Education for Sustainability (Stephen Sterling) and Education for a Sustainable Future (Wheeler and Byrne), are both comprised of articles that contain case studies, research, and proposed frameworks. The chapters we wrote for the Environmental Law Review entitled, K-12 Education for Sustainability captures the history of Education for Sustainability in the United States and a great deal of our thinking - though we are always learning. See the Staff Reading List for the growing list of champions that inform our work.

More specific frameworks, some tied to particular projects, have arisen. Various organizations have evolved and refined their own set of principles and standards for sustainability education. The current trend of implementing standards-based education has necessarily shaped the effort to implement education for sustainability in the US. While only one a few states (Vermont, Washington, Oregon) have adopted the explicit goal of fostering an understanding of sustainability amongst its students, many current content-area and performance standards support the skills and understandings detailed in Agenda 21, Chapter 36. Social studies, geography, and science standards for example, all mandate that students understand the interconnections between people, place, the planet, and technology; social studies standards also dictate the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives. Sustainability educators design units and courses of study that address these standards - therefore have a justifiable place in US K-12 classrooms. Those who wish to educate for sustainability thus find ample support in content and performance standards. Go here to read The Cloud Institute's 9 EfS Core Sustainability Standards.

Grounded in the pedagogical traditions of progressive, experiential and constructivist education, EFS is a "whole system of inquiry" that combines the best of what we know about teaching and learning, with the content, core competencies and habits of mind we need to advance in order to move toward a sustainable future.

Habits of Mind

(Download Rubric Overview)

Understanding of Systems as the Context for Decision Making: The extent to which one sees both the whole system and its parts as well as the extent to which an individual can place one's self within the system.

Intergenerational Responsibility: The extent to which one takes responsibility for the effect(s) of her/his actions on future generations.

Mindful of and Skillful with Implications and Consequences: The extent to which one consciously makes choices and plans actions to achieve positive systemic impact.

Protecting and Enhancing the Commons: The extent to which one works to reconcile the conflicts between individual rights and the responsibilities of citizenship to tend to the commons.

Awareness of Driving Forces and their Impacts: The extent to which one recognizes and can act strategically and responsibly in the context of the driving forces that influence our lives.

Assumption of Strategic Responsibility: The extent to which one assumes responsibility for one's self and others by designing, planning and acting with whole systems in mind.

Paradigm Shifter: The extent to which one recognizes mental models and paradigms as guiding constructs that change over time with new knowledge and applied insight.

What are Schools Already Doing?

Applied Research on Instructional Methodologies:

  • Brain Research
  • Multiple Intelligences
  • Learning Styles
  • Constructivist Approaches to Learning
  • Student-Centered Learning
  • Creative Problem-Solving
  • Cooperative Learning
  • Inquiry-Based Learning
  • Critical Thinking and Analysis

Conceptual Frameworks

Utilizing the Community as a Resource

  • Service Learning
  • Project-Based Learning
  • Place-Based Learning
  • Authentic Instruction and Assessment
  • Big Picture Schools

Physical Plant (Green Schools)

Networks

The Connection between Sustainability and Education

Systems thinkers assert that the interconnected social, economic and ecological ills of the world (the accumulation of which is producing an unsustainable situation for us all) seem to emanate from mental models, paradigms, assumptions and mindsets that are antiquated, incomplete and misguided. If shifting and evolving mental models and paradigms are, indeed, the most effective place to effect change in a system; and if making positive change requires new ways of thinking, than it follows that new ways of teaching and learning in our schools are required.Education for Sustainability is an essential tool for change.

Why is it Important to Educate for Sustainability

Almost every professional sector has embarked on the move toward sustainability. Most notably, business, architecture and design, urban and rural planning, agriculture, local and state governments, non-governmental organizations and higher education.

The young people in our country are required to spend the bulk of their daytime hours for at least thirteen formative years being "schooled," and then many go on to college or university for more. As a result, K-12 education has a profound effect on our society's present and future prospects.

"We will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." ~Baba Dioum, Senegalese Ecologist

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end your lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog." ~Mark Twain, Speech 11/23/1900

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." ~H.G. Wells

The Connection between Education for Sustainability, Hope, and a Sense of Place and Purpose for Our Young People

Teachers all over the world, teaching in all kinds of communities, report again and again the two concerns they have for their students: "They feel disconnected" and "They have no hope." Indeed many of our youth have a deep intuitive sense of the disastrous direction in which we are headed, and as a result have little or no hope for the future. A recent Gallup Poll found that 70% of 16-24 year-olds believe the world was a better place when their parents were their age - and over half are convinced it will be worse for their own children. The costs of such a despairing view are immensely high on many levels; such pessimism prevents many youth from ever reaching their potential, and it seriously undermines participation and constrains us as a society.

Yet there is good reason for hope, and educators for sustainability can help restore that hope. Education for sustainability has a central role to play in advancing the social, economic, scientific and ecological literacy of our young people. It can also play a vital role in stimulating in them visions of hope, opportunity, responsibility and a sense of place and purpose that have the power to reverse these trends of disconnection and hopelessness and to lead the way to a sustainable future. The Cloud Institute, together with our project partners and funders believe that youth education, especially in the contexts of citizenship and entrepreneurship, are essential in fostering hope by encouraging active participation in local communities toward a sustainable future.

We cannot afford to waste our most critical and creative minds on crafting innovative downstream solutions to systemic problems addressed out of context.

Our schools need to prepare students to design and implement long-term visions and solutions to our current crisis of un-sustainability. They can do that by giving youth the knowledge, skills, beliefs and the "habits of mind and heart" that will enable them to fashion a sustainable world. It is imperative that schools be prepared to adopt this mission.

We need to prepare teachers to understand sustainability and see its relevance and importance to what they teach and to their educational mission; we need to connect students to real-world efforts to bring about sustainability through curriculum and instruction; and we need to fund the effort and the research needed to educate for sustainability broadly and well.

Can education which does not explicitly teach the content and pedagogy of sustainability prepare our young people for the leadership and participation it requires to invent a sustainable future?

What is Sustainability?

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for)."
~Aldo Leopold

"No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."
~Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison 1789

"...you will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on."
~Benjamin Franklin, 1786, commenting on the health dangers of lead paint

If you are paying attention, you probably know that all living systems upon which our lives depend are in decline on this planet. Deep down we know that our children are paying the price. Many have already given up hope. We call this unsustainable. It doesn't have to be this way.

If you are driving toward the edge of a cliff, slowing down will not solve your problem (although it might buy you some time). You must turn and go in a different direction.

Sustainability demands turning and charting a new course that will improve the quality of our lives and the lives of our children while restoring the gift of natural systems upon which our lives depend.

It is our turn.

“... the limits are real and close, and… there is just exactly enough time, with no time to waste. There is just exactly enough energy, enough material, enough money, enough environmental resilience and enough human virtue to bring about a revolution of a better world.”
~Donella Meadows, Beyond the Limits

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us… We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humanity and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
~Wendell Berry

Educators for sustainability never begin a conversation by defining sustainability - we do not define it because that is not the best way to understand what we mean by it. Many great concepts/processes share this particular difficulty - grace and democracy among them. At The Cloud Institute we prefer educating for sustainability to talking about sustainability. Having said that, the following is a collection of definitions of sustainability. Send us yours. We will add it to our collection (if it improves it).

Definitions of Sustainability

"Improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems."
~Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living. (Gland, Switzerland: 1991). (IUCN - The World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Programme, World Wide Fund for Nature).


"Sustainability is 'long-term, cultural, economic and environmental health and vitality' with emphasis on long-term, 'together with the importance of linking our social, financial, and environmental well-being.'"


"Sustainability encompasses the simple principle of taking from the earth only what it can provide indefinitely, thus leaving future generations no less than we have access to ourselves."


"Sustainability may be described as our responsibility to proceed in a way that will sustain life that will allow our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to live comfortably in a friendly, clean, and healthy world."


"Sustainability is meeting the needs of all humans, being able to do so on a finite planet for generations to come while ensuring some degree of openness and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances." ~Jerry Sturmer, Santa Barbara South Coast Community Indicators


"Sustainability is a dynamic condition which requires a basic understanding of the interconnections and interdependency among ecological, economic and social systems. Sustainability means providing a rich quality of life for all, and accomplishing this within the means of nature." ~Jaimie P. Cloud, Cloud Institute


"A sustainable society is one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support." ~Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Sustainability Institute, "Beyond the Limits"


"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. (Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8. (Frequently referred to as the Brundtland Report after Gro Harlem Brundtland)


"Sustainable Development is positive change which does not undermine the environmental or social systems on which we depend. It requires a coordinated approach to planning and policy making that involves public participation. Its success depends on widespread understanding of the critical relationship between people and their environment and the will to make necessary changes." ~Hamilton Wentworth Regional Council

"Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations." ~Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

 


"The key to moving toward a sustainable future is the marriage between best pedagogical practices that produce critical thinkers and self regulated (people who have learned how to learn) life long learners, with the content of education for sustainability."
~Giselle Martin-Kniep, Author, Consultant