Many people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. But sustainability is actually much broader, encompassing all the future-oriented practices that promote the continued flourishing of individuals, cultures, and life on earth. Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers have sought not only to make education a tool for sustainability but to make it a sustainable activity itself.
In the episode of the Chalk Radio podcast embedded below, Dr. Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers describe how they created the Sustainability and Climate Change Across Learning Environments (SCALES) project, a curated repository of open-source, easily adaptable educational resources, many of them originally adapted from course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare. These resources, which are categorized according to a set of six main pedagogical approaches and six chief competency areas, draw from a surprisingly wide range of academic fields, but each was selected for its potential to support sustainability in the classroom and in the world. After all, Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers say, sustainability is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, one that can inform–and be informed by–teaching in nearly any field of study.
