CONT919: Designing Sustainable Learning Environments
Integrating sustainability into your educational practice and learning environment can be a transformative journey. By exploring BC’s Environmental Learning & Experience Curriculum Maps and the Sustainable Schools Best Practices Guide, you will learn the foundational elements required to design sustainable learning environments in your teaching and educational context.
You'll discover innovative strategies to create sustainable learning environments, effective teaching methods that empower student leadership and collaboration, and ways to drive sustainable choices and initiatives. You'll link environmental, social, and economic sustainability through pedagogy and practical knowledge to inspire local teacher initiatives. Aligned with the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), you’ll connect the dots between sustainability, environmental education, and the broader systems and structures shaping our world.
This course will deepen your understanding of sustainability by exploring its intersections with global societal systems and issues. You’ll conclude the course by putting theory into practice to develop an environmental stewardship action plan as you consolidate your insights from each module.
Learning Outcomes
What You Will Learn and Do
In this course you’ll have the opportunity to
- explore pedagogical strategies to incorporate sustainability into teaching and learning contexts
- acquire an in-depth understanding of sustainability and how it can be integrated into the curriculum using BC’s Environmental Learning & Experience Curriculum Maps and the Sustainable Schools Best Practices Guide
- learn ways to raise awareness and take action about local and global environmental and sustainability concerns in the school community and beyond
- apply your knowledge and skills to address complex environmental and social issues and explore their interconnectedness
- plan activities linked to The Environmental Learning & Experience Curriculum Maps, including the C.A.R.E. principles of experiential learning and the environmental literacy components of awareness, knowledge, attitude, skills, and action
- identify tangible actions for sustainability at the personal, classroom, and school levels that positively contribute to environmental sustainability
Assessments
Module 1
Situating Yourself in Sustainability Education
Module 2
Teaching and Positionality: Power, Identity, and Place
Progress Update 1
Module 3
The Micro
Module 4
The Macro
Formative Assessment
Module 5
Ecological Grief, Emotional Wellbeing, and Active Hope
Progress Update 2
Module 6
Moving Forward Together
Module 7
Developing an Environmental Stewardship Action Plan
Summative Assessment