We are proud to share that our team member, Rosemarie Desmarais, has published a review of Stephen Sterling’s latest book in the Australian Journal of Environmental Education.
The review is open access and offers a clear, thoughtful summary of the book’s key insights and contributions.
Read MoreIn a recent Q&A with Ten Strands, Jaimie reflects on her transformative journey in sustainability education over the past three decades. She shares how her early experiences in global education shaped her journey, the evolution of Education for Sustainability, and what gives her hope for the next generation.
Read MoreCelebrating Big Ideas
EfS Benchmarks for Individual and Social Learning
Big Ideas are also known as “Enduring Understandings”. They operate at the level of principles that are transferable. They describe the concepts that students will understand, and that will have lasting value in the real world over time.
The EfS Benchmarks for Individual and Social Learning recognizes the processes that include a whole system of dynamic and interconnected elements considered essential to educating for a sustainable future. The Big Ideas collectively frame the other essential elements of EfS and distinguish EfS from other fields of study.
Read MoreLiving and Breathing Education for Sustainability - Sequoia Group Singapore EfS Podcast. In this podcast Jaimie discusses creating awareness, fostering commitment and guiding actions towards a healthy, secure and sustainable future.
Read MoreThe EfS Reservoir is a multi-media repository of exemplars aligned to the EfS Benchmarks. The exemplars include quality curriculum units, courses, assessments, performance criteria, student work samples and eventually stories, interviews, discussions, images, narration and film that will illustrate the contexts and the impact of this work in schools and communities. Register for free to access the collection.
Read MoreHow can we remain creative and hopeful in these crazy times? Jaimie has been thinking deeply about this question for the past few months. Her recent blog posts, Game on or Game over? (with video) and Easier Done than Said: Move from Fear to Action by Educating for a Sustainable Future address this topic and encourage us to get to work. In her recent webinar, Staying Hopeful: Gathering strength for the work ahead, Jaimie asks the question, “Why should we be hopeful?” She offers up three big ideas that have been a source of inspiration during this time of negativity and chaos. These concepts are useful, natural occurrences that can serve, both as metaphor, and as examples of how life organizes towards life on our spaceship called Earth.
Read MoreIn my experience, it is harder for people to think about what it will take to educate for sustainability, than it is to actually educate for sustainability. This makes sense, given that change of any kind is threatening to our reptilian brains. We have a biological fear of change. Add to this the fact that most educators think of “sustainablizing” as an add on to an already packed life, curriculum and to do list. Given the flavor of the month way that schools often operate, it seems like just one more thing to do. It isn’t. It can’t be. It is the thing we all must do if we want to thrive over time.
Read MoreFor the past three years, I’ve taught a required graduate course on the Ethics of Sustainability in the Design for Social Innovation Program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. During this time, I’ve witnessed the unintended results of educating about unsustainability. Although my students come from all over the world, they have at least a few things in common at the beginning of the year. These young people report feeling depressed, hopeless and guilty. Many of these students, believing they hold degrees in sustainability, have become experts in its opposite--unsustainability. They are nervous at first at the thought of discussing the ethics of sustainability. They tell me that their professors were very effective at pointing out that it’s too late, that we’ve already exceeded too many critical thresholds and that there is no way back. Game over?
My response to them is always the same, “I think what your professors have actually been saying is that they cannot imagine and they don’t know how we are going to pull off the mid-course correction that is required if we want human and other life to flourish on Earth indefinitely. I think this has more to do with their imaginations, mental maps and knowledge base than it does our fate.” Game on.
Read MoreI have been working with Kapalama Middle School at the Oahu campus of Kamehameha Schools for the past seven years. We would like to continue our work together, but for now, the contract has been completed. How can we know if the work we have done together to educate students for a sustainable future will last and will be improved over time? We can’t. What we can do is create favorable conditions for it to flourish over time—just like everything else we want to sustain. As I always say, there is no such thing as “sustain-guaranteed” but there is such a thing as “sustain-able”.
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