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 discretion."

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 (Albert Einstein's quote is useful here), 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 chapter 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 have learned a lot since then. 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 state (Vermont) has 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.

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. 

For a diagram of our framework for Education for Sustainability, click here for a visual presentation.

What Habits of Mind will Students Demonstrate? Click here for a draft rubric designed for educators to recognize degrees of quality of each habit of mind that follows.

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 Core Content will Students Study?

Ecological Literacy
Science principles and natural laws that help us to understand the interconnectedness of humans and all of the Earth's systems...

System Dynamics/"Systems Thinking"
Understanding systems as the context for decision-making...

Multiple Perspectives
Truly valuing and learning from the life experiences and cultures of others...

Sense of Place
Connecting to and valuing the places in which we live…

Sustainable Economics
An evolving study of the connections between economic, social and natural systems...

Citizenship (Participation and Leadership)
The rights, responsibilities, and actions associated with participatory democracy toward sustainable communities...

Creativity and Visioning
The ability to envision and invent a rich, hopeful future...

Selected Fields of Study that Contribute to Education for Sustainability

• Sciences
  • Environmental Science and Education
  • Science Education (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science…)
  • System Dynamics and Systems Thinking Education
• Economic
  • Sustainable Economics
• Social
  • Global Education
  • Ecological Design and Architecture Education
  • Holistic Education
  • Future Studies
  • Organizational Learning and Change
  • Environmental Ethics and Philosophy
  • Ecological Psychology
  • Conflict Resolution Education
  • Game Theory

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
  • Character Education
  • The Virtues Project
  • Environment as an Integrating Context
  • Habits of Mind (Costa)
• Utilizing the Community as a Resource
  • Service Learning
  • Project-Based Learning
  • Place-Based Learning
  • Authentic Instruction and Assessment
• Physical Plant, Green Schools/Greening the Campus
• Networks
  • US Partnership for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainability
  • Coalition of Essential Schools

Why is it important to educate for sustainability?

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

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.

"If you plan for a year, plant a seed.
If for ten years, plant a tree.
If for a hundred years, teach the people.

When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests."

Kuan Chung (645 B.C.)

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.

The connection between education for sustainability, hope and a sense of place and purpose for our young people (and ourselves)

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?