When nationally recognized sustainability expert Jamie Cloud visited Ossining High School Thursday, she got more than she bargained for. And she couldn’t have been happier.
Read MoreBy Lori Braunstein
As a member of the 2008 inaugural class of NJ Learns, forty other people and I from across the state spent a total of 8 days learning how to talk to my community about sustainability. Because of my role as community leader, in the years since, I’ve spent time crafting my own skill at sharing the concepts of Education for Sustainability more informally. In the last three years, I've used NJ Learns tools in my interactions with community members, elected officials, senior citizens, students and others. The variety of audiences to whom I’ve presented hasn’t just allowed me to tailor my presentation skills, it’s also been fundamental to creating a shared understanding about sustainability across these distinct audiences, opening pathways for me and for them to make more connections, find common interests and work together toward our shared goals.
By Chris Bickel
I graduated from the New Jersey Learns program in 2009. I didn’t know it then, but my understanding of sustainability as it related to environmental literacy would drastically change. I’ve moved away from compartmentalizing my ideas and actions, seeing instead their inter-connections and interdependence in a more fluid way. Now, I look for broader and higher level ideas and stewardship. For example, early on I co-chaired two large environmental fairs and a compact fluorescent bulb distribution in the township of Livingston, NJ. I thought each separate event was a success. I “checked” it off my list and told myself, “You are doing your part, Chris.” However, NJ Learns taught me to think “upstream” and go to the source of the problem. I decided to bring my learning back to my position as a Supervisor of Social Studies for grades K-12 in Livingston NJ.
Learning About EfS From An Intern’s Perspective
“Well, I knew nothing about sustainability at all!” Nozomi Sakata explains when asked how she decided to apply for an internship at The Cloud Institute a few weeks ago. It turns out that she is simply graceful at stumbling. Happening on the Cloud Institute through an email from her school’s internship program, Nozomi was mainly interested in the fact that it produced innovative curriculum platforms; the Institute’s focus in Education for Sustainability presented, more than anything else, a foreign concept to explore. In that same happenstance way, she recently happened to see that Jaimie Cloud was presenting a two-day workshop called “The Essentials of Sustainability Education Workshop” at Columbia University Teacher’s College, where Nozomi is a student. The opportunity was, she explains, “a chance to learn about the ideology of EfS from an introductory perspective
Nozomi isn’t an anomaly. All the interns here at the Cloud Institute have different motivations and reasons as to why they were drawn to this office, providing an interesting window into the many facets of EfS.
Read MoreThere are beautiful moments in education when learning about the world around us also teaches us about ourselves. A scientific study about bumblebees’ spatial relationships and color perception, published in the December issue of the Royal Society’s Biology Letter and written and devised entirely by a group of 8-10 year-olds, is an example of just such an opportunity.
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Last summer, I had the pleasure of taking one of the most productive professional development workshops in my sixteen years of teaching.
The Cloud Institute had asked participants of their Education for Sustainability Curriculum Design Studio to come prepared with a lesson plan or unit which would be worked on and viewed through the lens of the EfS standards. This made all the difference. I chose our fall science unit on Water/Salt Marsh Ecology.
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Educators for sustainability never begin a conversation by defining sustainability. We don't define it because that is not the best way to understand what we mean by it. Many great concepts and processes share this particular difficulty--grace and democracy among them. At the Cloud Institute, we prefer educating for sustainability to talking about sustainability. Having said that, people still ask us "what is sustainability?" So, the following is a list of definitions we have collected from various experts within the field.
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