Purpose of this book

Welcome to our exploration of education for sustainability! This book delves into the concept of education for sustainability and its significance. We aim to illustrate the integration of sustainability principles into the curriculum of various academic disciplines.

We intend to offer introductory guidance for educators in order to intersect sustainability in their courses in a meaningful way through a toolkit, disciplinary perspectives, and best practices for embedding sustainability.

Recognizing that some faculty members are already significantly incorporating sustainability in their teachings, we also intend to provide information on the latest trends in literature supportive of continuing the work on education for sustainability.

How to use this book

Navigation

To move through the book, you can use the ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons located at the bottom corners of every page. To jump to a specific part or chapter, you can open the Table of Contents at any time by pressing the ‘Contents’ button in the top-left corner of this book.

Quick-start guide

If you are unsure where to start in embedding sustainability in your courses, the Quick-start guide is a good first step. We’ve laid out the main concepts in a step-by-step format, linked out to more detailed sections that you can explore at a later time.

h5p activities

This book features multiple h5p activities for more opportunities for interaction and learning. These activities are designed for you as the educator to learn about various concepts introduced in the book, but can serve a double purpose as a teaching tool directly embedded into Moodle. For example, the change agent self-assessment tool is a great tool to reflect on your own journey of becoming a change agent, and it can be used as a start-of-term survey for your students as well. You can copy and edit any h5p activities directly into Moodle by pressing the ‘Reuse’ or ‘Embed’ buttons in the bottom-left corner of the activities.

Text boxes

Throughout the book, we are making use of different types of text boxes to help draw your attention to important pieces of information. We explain the types and purposes below:

Summaries

Some text-heavy pages will feature a summary box at the top to help you glean the main focus of the chapter before diving in.

Examples

Some chapters will feature example boxes to illustrate a concept in more detail.

Discipline-specific resources

We’ve developed chapters that delve deeper into specific disciplines and curated resources such as pedagogical approaches, activities, and teaching tools that complement them. Currently, we have pages for Mathematics & statistics and English, and more discipline-specific resources that intersect with the Intrapersonal competency.