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Sustainability Education Across Learning Environments with Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers

Apr 5, 2023

In this episode, Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers discuss the concept of sustainability, emphasizing its broad scope. They describe the Sustainability and Climate Change Across Learning Environments (SCALES) project, a curated repository of open-source educational resources. Sustainability is seen as an interdisciplinary subject that can be integrated into any field of study. The importance of continuous learning, real-world connections, and the remixing of teaching materials is also highlighted.

15:13

Creator website

Episode guests

Liz Potter-Nelson

Sarah Meyers

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Sustainability education encompasses a broad range of topics beyond recycling and climate change, including education, poverty, women's rights, and partnership between institutions.

Scales provides open resources and curriculum materials from MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative to promote sustainability in classrooms by incorporating real-world connections, embracing small changes, and emphasizing trust and flexibility.

Deep dives

Teaching sustainability in a sustainable way

Teaching sustainability goes beyond recycling and climate change. It encompasses a broad range of topics, including education, poverty, women's rights, and partnership between institutions. Sustainability education is interdisciplinary and aims to create sustainability-literate individuals with knowledge, skills, and dispositions to live sustainably. To promote sustainability in classrooms, educators can incorporate practices such as collaborative small group learning, inquiry-based learning, experiential learning, service learning, play-space learning, and culturally sustained learning. These practices foster holistic and multidisciplinary approaches to sustainability education.

Introduction

2min

Exploring Sustainable Development, Sustainability Education, and Systemic Change

4min

Promoting Sustainability Education through Scales Project

5min

Continuous Learning, Real-World Connections, and Remixing Teaching Materials

4min

Many people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. Our guests for this episode, Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers, point out that sustainability is actually much broader, encompassing all the future-oriented practices that promote the continued flourishing of individuals, cultures, and life on earth. Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers have sought not only to make education a tool for sustainability but to make it a sustainable activity itself. In this episode, they describe how they created the Sustainability and Climate Change Across Learning Environments (SCALES) project, a curated repository of open-source, easily adaptable educational resources, many of them originally adapted from course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare. These resources, which are categorized according to a set of six main pedagogical approaches and six chief competency areas, draw from a surprisingly wide range of academic fields, but each was selected for its potential to support sustainability in the classroom and in the world. After all, Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers say, sustainability is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, one that can inform–and be informed by–teaching in nearly any field of study.

Relevant Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare

The OCW Educator Portal

Dr. Potter-Nelson’s website

Sarah Meyers at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative

Teaching with Sustainability resource on OpenCourseWare

The SCALES Project

Dr. Potter-Nelson’s white paper on sustainability education

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions

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