Prioritizing Sustainability Education: A Comprehensive Approach

Description

Prioritizing Sustainability Education presents theory-to-practice essays and case studies by educators from six countries who elucidate dynamic approaches to sustainability education. Too often, students graduate with exploitative, consumer-driven orientations toward ecosystems and are unprepared to confront the urgent challenges presented by environmental degradation. Educators are prioritizing sustainability-oriented courses and programs that cultivate students’ knowledge, skills, and values and contextualize them within relational connections to local and global ecosystems. Little has yet been written, however, about the comprehensive sustainability education that educators are currently designing and implementing, often across or at the edges of disciplinary boundaries. The approaches described in this book expand beyond conventional emphases on developing students’ attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors by thinking and talking about ecosystems to additionally engaging students with ecosystems in sensory, affective, psychological, and cognitive dimensions, as well as imaginative, spiritual, or existential dimensions that guide environmental care and regeneration. This book supports educators and graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in the humanities, social sciences, environmental studies, environmental sciences, and professional programs in considering how to reorient their fields toward relational sustainability perspectives and practices Cover Half Title Title Copyright CONTENTS List of figures List of tables Foreword Contributors Introduction PART I Comprehensive sustainability education perspectives 1 The challenge ahead: prioritizing sustainability education 2 This is Zero Hour: students confront educators 3 Opportunities for re-enchantment: exploring the spirit of place PART II Theory to practice 4 An education that heals: purposes and practices guided by the Great Work 5 ‘Ways of being free’: finding ‘pulses of freedom’ in the border zone between higher and public education for sustainable development 6 Sustainability education: from farms and intentional communities to the university 7 Learning from traditional wisdom in Papua New Guinea: the value of indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge in higher education 8 Sustainability education from an indigenous knowledge perspective: examples from Southern Africa 9 Walking into the heart of the landscape to find the landscape of the heart 10 Theravada Buddhist ways of thinking: reflections on sustainability accounting education in a public university in Sri Lanka 11 Education for sustainability in early childhood education: sustainability transformation through collaboration 12 Boundary-crossing learning in ESD: when agricultural educators co-engage farmers in learning around water activity 13 A future that is big enough for all of us: animals in sustainability education 14 Developing a curriculum for sustainability education: lesson planning for change 15 Sustainability role models for transformative change: a great turning in higher education 16 Education for sustainability and the search for new stories to live by Conclusion Index