AASHE Curriculum Convocation

AASHE Curriculum Convocation: Sustainability as a Learning Platform

Sunday, October 14
Time: 1pm-4:30pm
Host: AASHE
Fee: $75
Audience: Open to Educators who are Faculty, CAOs, Sustainability Coordinators/Directors

Sponsored By

Facilitators and Presenters:

• Tom Kelly, Chief Sustainability Officer, University of New Hampshire
• Maria Alessandra Woolson, Middlebury College
• Cynthia Thomashow, Education Manager, AASHE

Agenda

1pm – 2pm Introductions and Overview
2pm –2:20pm Learning Outcomes and Perspectives of Sustainability
2:20pm – 3:25pm Interactive experiences with a diversity of pedagogical approaches linked to EfS learning outcomes.
3:30pm to 4:30pm Synthesis and Applications

Description

What will 21st century colleges and universities look like when sustainability is the curriculum? When students leave institutions of higher learning with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to meet challenges wrought by climate change? When communities are seamless collaborators with higher education? When students enter business, politics, industry and social venues knowing they can solve 21st century problems?

The convocation will explore learning outcomes and curricular approaches that prepare learners for living in a sustainable world and that explicitly help each learner deeply understand the interactions, inter-connections, and the consequences of actions and decisions.

Tom Kelly suggests, “The sustainable learning community is an intentional effort to assess critically the complex web of relations that constitute our learning community and, where our interpretation of sustainability leads us to alter those relations, in and across our curriculum, operations, research, and engagement, to do so.” (The Sustainable Learning Community, John Aber, Tom Kelly and Bruce Mallory, Editors, U of NH Press, 2009)

Each academic discipline, professional, technical and workforce development program has a unique and essential contribution to make. The readiness of students to enter society relies on the articulation of learner outcomes, choreographed for educational practice, using the campus as a sustainable living and learning laboratory.

• Do pedagogical approaches cultivate the kind of thinking and action necessary for meeting 21st century challenges?
• What shape does learning take when it fully integrates the social, economic and environmental consequences of personal and professional decisions?
• How do we prepare and support students to be agents of change?

The convocation will be highly interactive and participatory. The facilitators will actively engage participants in examining learning outcomes and pedagogical approaches that integrate the complex knowledge and interactions inherent in the transformation to a sustainable society.