Heather Burns

Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy Learning From Ecological Systems and Indigenous Wisdom

Sustainability is becoming increasingly relevant in higher education, as the need to address complex cultural and ecological problems intensifies. How sustainability is taught has a profound influence on the kind of learning that takes place and the impact it has in the world. Sustainability pedagogy is offered as a tool for creating transformational sustainability learning that is thematic and cocreated, critically questions dominant norms and incorporates diverse perspectives, is active, participatory and relational, and is grounded in a specific place. This pedagogical design draws on the wisdom of ecological systems, recognizing that ecological systems are our best teachers for creating sustainable and regenerative systems. This article connects this pedagogical model with Okanagan indigenous teachings about the whole self, to explore how the whole self can be intentionally included in an ecological design process to promote transformational learning.

A transnational comparison of service‐learning as a tool for leadership development

Purpose – This investigation sought to identify learning outcomes for undergraduate students at a US college enrolled in community‐based learning courses. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences between American students and international students development of leadership skills through senior level service‐learning (SL) courses and analyzed the role of teaching methods on those outcomes.Design/methodology/approach – Over 150 SL courses from students representing 30 countries were examined at a major university in the USA. US and non‐US student leadership and learning outcomes were cross‐tabulated with instructional techniques to analyze for statistically significant differences.Findings – Facilitating leadership skill development is a function of utilizing transformational rather than traditional classroom teaching techniques.Practical implications – Transformational teaching and learning methods such as collaborative projects, student‐selected readings, ...

“Radically Different Learning”: Implementing Sustainability Pedagogy in a University Peer Mentor Program

Sustainability education is a growing field within higher education that fosters personal and intellectual engagement with the interconnected tensions of pressing social, ecological, economic, and political issues. Sustainability education aims to prepare learners to become creative problem solvers and active citizens who understand the relationships between and leverage points within complex systems. However, little research has been done to identify how to teach sustainability effectively in ways that prepare emerging leaders to address these complex problems. This paper provides an overview of an action research study that implemented the Burns model of sustainability pedagogy to embed sustainability into a university course on peer mentoring. Results show that implementing this model in the design and teaching of the course changed emerging educators understanding of sustainability by making it more multidimensional, and that students gained an critical theory perspective of sustainability which they applied to their own educational experiences.