Blane Harvey is convinced that tackling the complex problems of climate change requires transforming environmental and sustainability education.
“Problems of this scale demand that we educators focus not just on accumulating knowledge. Instead they call on us to help learners to act in innovative ways based on the core principles that we have accumulated in the university community, in society and in our own lives,” said Harvey, an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education.
Over the past four years Harvey, who also heads the Leadership and Learning for Sustainability Lab, has worked with students at different stages in their academic careers, as well as with members of the larger community, to develop new approaches to creating environmental education courses and delivering them to future educators.
“Collaboration and co-creation of knowledge are core princiles of sustainability education, helping learners engage across disciplines to build a shared understanding and drive informed action,” he said. In a recently published a study, Harvey and his team describe how the have been applying those principles in designing new courses in McGill’s Faculty of Education.
Over the past four years, Harvey has worked with graduate and undergraduate students, as well as schoolteachers and community members, to co-design (and later co-teach) a series of courses on environmental and sustainability education. This approach is quite different from traditional course design, where a single lecturer (or academic team) typically chooses all of the reading material and determines all of the assignments. While more and more university courses use co-teaching to introduce learners to more diverse perspectives, Harvey notes that co-designing sustainability courses with students and community members remains rare.
Stephanie Leite, a PhD candidate and Vanier scholar, was involved in co-creating three of the four courses that the team developed and in teaching or co-teaching two of them.
She underlined the importance of bringing together people with different backgrounds, expertise and attitudes to create and teach these courses, given the multi-faceted nature of the issue.
“Sustainability isn’t just a scientific issue, it also evokes strong emotional and psychological responses, especially among youth facing eco-anxiety and depression. It raises justice concerns too, as those most affected by climate change often contribute the least to it. Understanding and responding these complex challenges requires diverse voices and perspectives,” Leite said.
Including people with varied perspectives in the course-design process yields more diverse course content and reading lists; as well, the collaborative approach to course design leads to a wider range of interactive classroom activities (because the lecturers try to model the benefits of collaboration in the classroom), Leite added.
The researchers say that, given enough institutional support, this novel approach to co-creating and co-teaching classes in sustainability education has the potential to be successfully replicated in other departments and faculties across the University. They point to the Sustainability Education Fellows program as an example of a McGill initiative where people design or redesign sustainability courses with inputs from their peers, from their own field and beyond, with positive results.
Harvey said the group will continue to explore this model of practice and hopes to work with the University and Faculty leaders to study and address structural barriers they encountered. These include difficulties around obtaining University funding to pay for co-design partnerships, cross-listing courses in multiple departments and at different levels, and rigid marking guidelines.
Harvey acknowledges wryly that for faculty members, embracing this approach to sustainability education can be somewhat challenging since it entails giving up some of your own academic authority and making space for quite different ways of looking at issues. However, he doesn’t plan to back away from it anytime soon. Quite the contrary. He has recently received a grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to lead an international study of campus-wide initiatives that support new approaches to teaching and learning for sustainability.