K-12 Content
Identification of Essential Learnings at the K-12 Level

Chair: Jaimie Cloud, The Sustainability Education Center
Co-Chair: Jack Byrne, Co-Director, Center for a Sustainable Future

K-12 education is a major shaper of the truths, attitudes, ethics, concepts, and behaviors of American society.  By reshaping K-12 education in the US so that it systematically and effectively fosters sustainability, we will be able to make great progress towards the achievement of a sustainable world.  While our educational system works to develop many of the discrete skills that future problem-solvers will need to diagnose and solve our global problems, as a nation we lack the systemic understanding that explains these complex threats to sustainability. Thankfully, educators are beginning to find support and guidance in teaching for sustainability inemerging real-world practices. Changes in thinking and behavior that foster sustainability are already underway in our society.  Increasingly, far-sighted leaders in business and government, gleaming the truths of sustainability from their experiences and from nascent trends in the thinking and practices of their fields, are making the connections and taking the steps that enable them to design and implement long-term visions and solutions to our current crisis of un-sustainability. 

Our schools need to prepare students to join this quest, by giving them the knowledge, skills, beliefs and the "habits of the heart" that will enable them to fashion a sustainable world.  Some hard work has to take place if schools are to be able to adopt this mission.  We need to prepare teachers to understand sustainability and see its relevance and importance to what they teach and to their educational mission; we need to persuade society to formally acknowledge the importance of education for sustainability in its educational goals; we need to connect students to real-world efforts to bring about sustainability; we need to create a national infrastructure to develop and support the nationwide practice of education for sustainability in all our schools; and we need to fund the effort and the research needed to educate for sustainability broadly and well.  If we do this, we may succeed in successfully providing US citizens with the knowledge, the skills, and the attitudes needed to foster sustainability in their personal, community, and work lives. When the pursuit of sustainability becomes an obvious and inescapable goal of all our endeavors, educating for sustainability will necessarily become a primary goal of our school systems. 

In this session we will address the core content and performance based learning outcomes, and the standards with which they are aligned, which serve as the foundation for  educating for sustainability.  Content discussions will include Ecological Literacy, System Dynamics and "Systems Thinking", Multiple Perspectives, Sense of Place, Sustainable Economics, Citizenship, Leadership and Participation toward a sustainable society, and Creativity, Visioning and Scenario Development.  Performance based discussions will be integrated with the content discussions and include project based learning, critical thinking and analysis, service learning, cooperative learning, constructivism, inquiry based learning and creative problem solving.

Resources:

• Discussion and Attendees
  Click here to join the online discussion and view the list of attendees registered for this breakout session.