Annie Warren

Building Sustainability Literacy Among Preservice Teachers: An Initial Evaluation of a Sustainability Course Designed for K-8 Educators

In the wake of colleges and universities being criticized for inadequately preparing their students for the grand challenges of the twenty-first-century, the New American University proposes to prepare future leaders to address these challenges and contribute to a more sustainable way of life. One of the major mechanisms to enact lasting and impactful change toward achieving this goal is educating future teachers in sustainability literacy. This chapter describes a newly required hybrid course at Arizona State University titled Sustainability Science for Teachers. The course, launched in the K-8th grade teacher education program in fall 2012, imparts sustainability lessons in meaningful ways by integrating technology and digital storytelling with in-class activities. The goal of the course is to develop sustainability literacy among preservice teachers by providing engaging content-knowledge and enabling them to employ these concepts in their future classrooms. Analyzing pre- and post-tests that capture preservice teachers’ conceptual maps along with preservice teacher feedback provides data for an initial evaluation of this new course. This chapter examines the learning outcomes and lessons learned from creating and implementing a course focused on sustainability targeted to preservice teachers.

Leveraging E-learning to prepare future educators to teach sustainability topics

In support of the urgent call for climate change mitigation and pursuing the vision of sustainable, circular economy, increasing number of universities have been developing courses to prepare students in meeting the growing demand for green and sustainability related jobs, which require systems perspective training in Industrial Ecology (IE) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA analyses emissions and resource extractions from mining and processing of resources (cradle) to disposal of wastes and residuals (grave) and even back to cradle. This paper plans to contribute in developing an online-based information system which provides an interdisciplinary approach to teach IE and LCA for sustainable industrial development. Specifically, the aims of this e-learning project are: (1) To develop innovative teaching and learning materials in line with flipped classroom strategies and (2) To create a one-stop Blackboard in support of learning the principles and concepts of IE and LCA for Sustainable Production and Consumption. Though the developed materials are used first to support faceto- face learning, this is being leveraged to meet demand for distance/online LCA education in the near future..