Education to Create a Sustainable Future | Smithsonian Voices

Our Shared Goal

Begin with the top in thoughts individuals say. Educators take this to coronary heart when utilizing strategies like itemizing important understandings and studying targets to preserve centered on their desired finish for a class or unit. But take a step additional again and also you begin to ask, what’s the finish we would like for studying basically? My reply: schooling for a sustainable future – the aim of serving to everybody to be taught to create a higher future for themselves and for us all.

Determining and creating a sustainable future is just not the motion of 1 particular person, it requires collaboration of individuals around the globe. Just like sustainable options stability social, financial, environmental, and moral views, schooling for a sustainable future additionally balances these totally different wants. Of course, schooling fills an financial want, educating younger individuals wanted expertise to survive and thrive in a quickly evolving financial system. It can even fill an vital social want, offering a discussion board for individuals to be taught to talk, construct consensus, and collaborate on shared targets. Importantly, it could assist fulfill the environmental want to train respect and safety for our shared dwelling, planet Earth. And at all times, if we would like to create a higher future, we should assist younger individuals to see the ethics in all issues, to take into account: what is true, what’s honest, and what’s the future we would like?

Surveying the Terrain

Knowing the place you need to go is one factor, understanding how to get there may be fairly one other. What are the important attributes that younger individuals will want for the longer term and the way do they develop them? As a Smithsonian Research Fellow in 2018, I took on the problem of attempting to reply these questions as a part of the Smithsonian Science for Global Goals venture. Just a few issues grew to become clear rapidly as I labored with the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) staff:

• Active, not passive: The future is unsure and might be modified by the alternatives we make. Creating a shared sustainable future is just not about passively implementing a pre-determined set of steps. It is an act of collective innovation. So quite than metaphorically studying their ABC’s, younger individuals want to create a entire new alphabet. This means they have to be given the chance to examine the world round them, make selections, and act upon their concepts. Taking motion, reflecting, iterating, and performing once more permits younger individuals to construct expertise and confidence that encourages them to tackle an lively position in creating change of their native and international communities.

• “Yes, and…” not “either/or”: There are many disciplines, pedagogies, and folks that have to be concerned in creating a sustainable future. Rather than decide one set of concepts and ignore all of the others, drawing collectively a various set of ideas and views is the most probably means to discover sustainable options. Thought areas equivalent to inquiry-based science, civic schooling, youth participatory motion analysis, place-based schooling, international citizenship, and plenty of extra permit for a wealth of revolutionary approaches. Using them in live performance offers a full toolbox for educators and younger individuals confronting the complexity of world challenges.

• Global Goals: A sustainable future includes everybody on the planet. Education with this purpose should embrace as many individuals as doable, no matter location, tradition, capacity, or id. Young individuals want to really feel a sense of world belonging and be taught to concentrate on collaboration, not competitors, with native and international friends. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are a wonderful framework to assist younger individuals discover totally different features of a sustainable future. 

Mapping the Learning Journey

Specific expertise and attitudes information youth to take an lively, solutions-oriented method to the issues they determine on the earth round them. One consequence of my analysis was the creation of the Sustainability Mindsets, a instrument to articulate these key methods of considering and doing.  The 4 mindsets are Empowerment and Agency, Open-mindedness and Reflection, Equity and Justice, and Global-Local Interconnection. Together these mindsets assist us bear in mind our aim to develop the abilities and attitudes vital for optimistic participation in creating our shared future.

With these Sustainability Mindsets in thoughts and drawing collectively academic analysis and frameworks from many alternative thought areas, I led an effort to map the journey in the direction of schooling for a sustainable future. This map, the Global Goals Action Progression, reveals a course of younger individuals can comply with to change into lively collaborators in creating a sustainable future.

Young individuals start with what they already know: how they be taught greatest, their cultural context, and their background data. By acknowledging the individuality and sources younger individuals deliver to studying, they enter the educational course of from a place of energy and respect. They are then systematically guided to a place the place they’ll take self-determined, knowledgeable actions.

First, they query and examine their native and international communities. They make sense of what they discover out utilizing vital reasoning and systemic understanding. Then, they synthesize their concepts to suggest options and construct consensus. Finally, younger individuals act by implementing their concepts and reflecting on their actions. Further particulars about this course of and the way it can assist younger individuals contribute to a sustainable future might be present in my just lately printed, freely accessible e book, From Ideas to Actions: Transforming Learning to Inspire Action on Critical Global points.

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