Green Leaves and Leverage Points
摘要
This book provides sustainability learning models and reflective essays to foster critical thinking and build awareness of a socio-environmental system so complex that it defies human understanding. As members of the extended higher education community, we co-create transdisciplinary and site-specific education and action for sustainability models to address academic divisions and enable collective conversations across campus, in our neighborhoods, and worldwide. Each person, embedded within a shared physical space, impacts and is impacted by ecological, material, and socio-environmental forces in play. We attend to the potential rewards of being sustainability educators and doing the work. Our approach emphasizes (1) systems thinking, (2) shifts in behavior and mindset through storytelling and embodied experience, and (3) constructivist/project-based learning to foster twenty-first-century skills in agency, creative innovation, and resilience. Professors, students, counselors, and other changemakers report on opportunities and impacts they facilitate through teaching, advising, mentoring, community organizing, and institutional reforms that are learner-centered and transformative. This anthology prompts students, educators, and administrators in higher education institutions and beyond to use existing resources to create new ideas and experiences that address climate instability, call attention to unnecessary suffering, and improve the potential for individual, community, and planetary survival and thriving.