ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

part I|38 pages

Comprehensive sustainability education perspectives

chapter 1|14 pages

The Challenge Ahead

Prioritizing sustainability education

chapter 2|9 pages

This is Zero Hour

Students confront educators

chapter 3|13 pages

Opportunities for Re-Enchantment

Exploring the spirit of place

part II|197 pages

Theory to practice

chapter 4|16 pages

An Education that Heals

Purposes and practices guided by the Great Work

chapter 5|14 pages

‘Ways of Being Free’

Finding ‘pulses of freedom’ in the border zone between higher and public education for sustainable development

chapter 6|17 pages

Sustainability Education

From farms and intentional communities to the university

chapter 7|13 pages

Learning from Traditional Wisdom in Papua New Guinea

The value of indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge in higher education

chapter 8|15 pages

Sustainability Education from an Indigenous Knowledge Perspective

Examples from Southern Africa

chapter 10|17 pages

Theravada Buddhist Ways of Thinking

Reflections on sustainability accounting education in a public university in Sri Lanka

chapter 11|15 pages

Education for Sustainability in Early Childhood Education

Sustainability transformation through collaboration

chapter 12|14 pages

Boundary-Crossing Learning in ESD

When agricultural educators co-engage farmers in learning around water activity

chapter 13|15 pages

A Future that is Big Enough for All of US

Animals in sustainability education

chapter 14|16 pages

Developing a Curriculum for Sustainability Education

Lesson planning for change

chapter 15|14 pages

Sustainability Role Models for Transformative Change

A great turning in higher education

chapter |4 pages

Conclusion