Five More Sustainability Curriculum Consortium Webinars in March!
“advancing curriculum and faculty development for sustainability in higher education”
SCC Update – March 5, 2018
– Upcoming SCC webinars this month
– Registration opens this week for SCC Faculty Conference
– Online SCC Curriculum Dialogue begins this month
Upcoming SCC Webinars
Tuesday, March 13 —”Using Campus and Community
as Sustainability Living Learning Labs”
Weston Dripps, Executive Director of the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability and an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Furman University
Kelly Grant Purvis, Associate Director of Sustainability Programs at Furman University
Laura Bain, Associate Director of Sustainability Assessment at Furman University
*** This webinar is the first in SCC’s series with AASHE showcasing the work of their “Sustainability Across the Curriculum” regional centers. Other AASHE regional centers will be featured each month.
Envision your campus and community as a sustainability pedagogical opportunity, a chance to infuse sustainability across your curriculum and provide applied, real world sustainability experiences for students. In collaboration with the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), Furman University has run and will be offering again this summer an interactive idea-generating workshop for sharing and establishing best practices to utilize the campus and surrounding community as Sustainability Living Learning Labs. The workshop is aimed at faculty and sustainability staff who are currently using Sustainability Living Learning Labs on their campus or in their surrounding community and focuses on building a shared framework for developing, institutionalizing, expanding, and maintaining Sustainability Living Learning Lab programs both on campus and in the surrounding community. This webinar will share our experience from the workshop and the ideas gathered for supporting, enhancing, and refining campus and community Sustainability Living Learning Labs.
Weston Dripps is the Executive Director of the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability and an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Furman University. The Shi Center is an interdisciplinary academic center fostering collaboration among faculty, students, and community leaders around real world sustainability challenges on campus, in the Greenville community, and nationally. At Furman, in addition to directing the center, Wes has taught a wide variety of undergraduate introductory and upper level courses in Earth Science, Environmental Science, Sustainability Science, and Water Resources. He has heavily been involved with the university’s sustainability efforts, including help write the University’s Sustainability Strategic Plan.
Kelly Grant Purvis is the Associate Director of Sustainability Programs at the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability at Furman University. She works with student fellows, faculty fellows and faculty affiliates, university staff and local community organizations to education and inform on a wide variety of issues related to sustainability. Kelly Grant received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the Ohio State University in 2001, giving her a foundation in art. Purvis spent the first decade of her professional career focused on sustainable architecture and green building working with local governments, non-profits and private companies. This experience created an interest not only in the elements of the built environment, but also in the ecological side of urban planning and developed landscapes. She pursued a Master’s degree at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC to focus on the relationship between the built environment and the natural elements within that landscape.
Laura Bain is the Associate Director of Sustainability Assessment at Furman University. She holds a BS in Biology from Furman University and a Masters in Environmental Management from Duke University. She spent nine years working at a regional land trust serving as Stewardship Specialist where she enjoyed getting to know landowners and exploring some of South Carolina’s most beautiful protected lands. In her current role in sustainability assessment at Furman, she enjoys working with students, faculty, and staff to implement creative solutions for meeting the university’s ambitious sustainability goals.
Monday, March 19 — “One Planet Leadership:
The positive contributions of business education”
Jonathan Gosling, co-founder of One Planet Education Networks
and of the One Planet MBA at Exeter University
***This webinar is the first in SCC’s series on “International Perspectives” with host Kim Smith of Portland Community College and the Greater Portland Sustainability Education Network (GPSEN). Other international leaders in sustainability in higher education will present to the SCC audience each month.
Business is the primary means for creating wealth from natural resources, for innovation and organising human labour to these ends. It is also where many people earn a living, contribute to social goods, and establish an identity and standing in society. Yet its legitimacy is widely contested because it so often undermines these same goods – harming nature, concentrating wealth in the hands of those who already have it, rewarding selfishness and treating people as mere instruments of production. The reform of business is urgent and important – and many are calling for changes to the moral compass of business leaders, stricter regulation, or re-balancing of labour and trade laws. This requires business people with a more integral understanding that is systemic, life-enhancing and morally robust; and also with technical knowledge and skills in domains of investment, finance, accounting, operations, innovation and strategy. The webinar will focus on the latter part of this – a recommended curriculum for business education, and for leadership development in established businesses.
Jonathan Gosling is co-founder of One Planet Education Networks and of the One Planet MBA at Exeter University where he is Emeritus Professor of Leadership. He is currently supporting malaria control and elimination efforts in Southern Africa and is faculty of The Forward institute in the UK. He holds visiting positions at universities in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, India and Slovenia, and recently completed a study of leadership development in healthcare in these and other countries (including the USA). He has designed and directed top-level international programs for airline, aerospace, private equity, logistics and humanitarian organisations. He was a member of the UK Higher education delegation to RIO+20 and is currently a member of the NGO Major Group contributing to achievement of the SDGs. He is co-author of “Sustainable Business: A one planet approach” (Wiley, 2017), which will be the basis for this webinar.
Thursday, March 22 — “Assembling Customized Teaching Plans and Materials on Sustainability and Climate Change from the Internet”
Mark Trexler, The Climatologists and
Visiting Scholar, George Washington University
Mark Trexler been inventorying climate change education materials on the web, and here’s what he has found and organized to date: Hundreds of links to relevant websites, organizations, and resources; links to more than 300 courses, mostly online and mostly free; and hundreds of video and text modules from free courses, often developed at great effort by leaders in their fields, and seen by a few hundred people on YouTube. This is a great example of Carla O’Dell’s “If only we knew what we know” admonition. Imagine the incredible amount of work reflected in those courses, materials, and videos. Imagine if all of that work could be made available, not as full courses that few people will watch, but as mixed and matched collections of potentially “actionable knowledge” targeted at the decision-making needs of individuals, executives, and policy-makers. Or of students in all kinds of relevant classes, taking advantage of existing materials rather than having to reinvent the pedagogical wheel! This webinar will: i) introduce the scope of on-line climate education resources via the Climate Web; ii) illustrate how specific resources can be organized for individuals’ purposes via the on-line Climate Web; and iii) show how teachers can actually get desktop access to these resources for much easier and customizable knowledge work and delivery.
Dr. Mark C. Trexler has more than 30 years of regulatory and energy policy experience, and has advised clients around the world on climate change risk and risk management for more than 25 years. Mark joined the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC in 1988, where he worked on the first carbon offset project, the CARE Agroforestry Project in Guatemala. He founded Trexler Climate + Energy Services (TC+ES) in 1991, working extensively with electric sector and other energy clients, as well as with governmental and NGO clients, on risk mitigation and adaptation strategies, including the development of a wide range of climate change decision-support tools such as carbon market models and carbon offset quality scoring systems. Mark directed EcoSecurities’ Global Consulting Services Group from 2007-2009 after EcoSecurities acquired TC+ES, and was Director of Climate Risk for the global risk management firm of Det Norske Veritas from 2009-2012. He is widely published on business risk management topics surrounding climate change, including in the design and deployment of carbon markets. Mark has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and holds graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.
Wednesday, March 28 — “VERGE: the intersection of sustainability and high-tech”
Elaine Hsieh, VERGE program
GreenBiz Group
As part of its annual year-end survey of influencers and partners, VERGE recently asked the question: What technology or development makes you hopeful for sustainability in the year ahead? Here’s what experts in clean energy, transportation systems and emerging technologies believe could take flight. The rise of the electrification of cars, trucks and buses in combination with an increasingly cleaner power grid was a common refrain among most. Other inspiring market-driven actions in energy, cities, water, buildings and even solutions via emerging tech such as the blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence hold promise in 2018 and beyond. This webinar will explore how, in an interconnected world, technology is accelerating sustainability solutions.
Elaine Hsieh is director of the VERGE program for GreenBiz Group, leading the global event series that focuses on how technology accelerates sustainability solutions across cities and industries, including energy, buildings, transportation, supply chains and agriculture. She has almost 20 years of experience consulting with Fortune 500 companies on sustainability, green building and technology issues. Elaine has a solid technical background with understanding of the energy, construction, biotechnology, education, retail, manufacturing and finance industries. She has been featured in Mashable, Green Economy Post, Reuters, the Guardian and other publications for her social media influence within the green building, business and sustainability communities.
Isabel Rimanoczy, Convener LEAP!, PRME Working Group on the Sustainability Mindset
Research has been showing over the past decade the profound transformation of individuals who for a variety of reasons faced their inner landscape of unsustainability. They experienced a personal breakthrough, an expansion in their consciousness that changed how they saw themselves and the world around them. The transformational shift also was the fuel for action, a persistent, inside driven motivation that spurred creativity. This transformational process happened not because of the information they had about statistics, data, or benchmark of innovators. The process took place on another level: on the being dimension. And yet, what are we educators doing in our classrooms? We are teaching the external landscape of sustainability, seeking for the latest cases in the news that can spark engagement in our students. We cater to the heads, when the most powerful leverage point is in the heart: connected to purpose, to values, to the examination of the anchors of our identity, to who we are, in the simplest and most profound way. This webinar will introduce the research that originated the concept of Sustainability Mindset, the elements that compose it, and how it can be developed. Isabel Rimanoczy will share about how it is being brought into courses in higher education around the world and she will share about LEAP (Leverage resources, Expand awareness, Accelerate change and Partner), a network of academics in 75 universities in 35 countries promoting a new mindset, anchored in the being.
Isabel Rimanoczy, Ed.D. has made it her life purpose to promote change accelerators. Aware of the complex challenges our planet (and us in it) are facing, she works alongside those who can make an impact on a greater scale. She developed the Sustainability Mindset, a concept she researched by studying business leaders who championed corporate initiatives with a positive impact on the environment and the community. What inspired these leaders to act in a business-as-unusual way? She created LEAP! an international cohort of 83 academics from 72 universities on five continents promoting a holistic sustainability mindset with their students. The professors foster a new paradigm, social action and consciousness. LEAP was officially designated the PRME Working Group on Sustainability Mindset in June 2015 at the Global Forum of UN PRME in New York, and the members are researching the Sustainability Mindset in their context and culture, writing papers, and presenting at conferences. She facilitates a Faculty Training on the Sustainability Mindset for this network. Isabel is the Global Academic Ambassador for AIM2Flourish, the international initiative to promote businesses as agents of world benefit. A2F is supported by the United Nations PRME and Global Compact. The Prizes are an international showcase of entrepreneurial innovation working towards what needs to be our global agenda: the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. She is a Strategic Sustainability Adviser for One Planet Education Networks (OPEN), a Fellow of the Schumacher Institute, UK, and a Senior Partner with Leadership in Motion LLC (LIM). She has worked in North and Latin America, Europe, Asia and Middle East.
We are announcing the launch of the SCC Curriculum Dialogue. Following the SCC Faculty Conference in Philadelphia on June 26-27, the SCC team carefully reviewed feedback from the attendees, including a request for a mechanism to facilitate an ongoing discussion. The conference included a well-received session on “Sorting Curriculum at the 100, 300, and 500 Levels,” in which presenters offered 4 different perspectives. The suggestion was made that we continue that discussion in greater detail. We agreed. Therefore, in March 2018 we will convene an online dialogue focused on curricular options. The dialogue will be structured and facilitated by several SCC Advisory Council members as well as presenters from the SCC Faculty Conference. The results of this dialogue will inform the joint SCC-NCSE-CEDD workshop on sustainability competencies to be convened in Pittsburgh in late June 2018.
To receive an invitation which will allow you to opt-in to the SCC Online Curriculum Dialogue on our Collaborase platform please use the sign-up form here.
SCC BASICS
The Sustainability Curriculum Consortium is incorporated in Maryland as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
SCC is aligning its activities around three key themes:
• Pedagogy: Innovative approaches for ESD educators
• Substantive Content: Building capacity and sharing resorces on both fundamental topics and emerging trends
• Leadership: Understanding the significance of leadership in the ESD context
