Peta White

Building Regional Capacity for Sustainable Development through an ESD Project Inventory in RCE Saskatchewan, Canada

The Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development in Saskatchewan (RCE Saskatchewan, Canada) is part of the United Nations University RCE Initiative in support of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–14). With funding from the Government of Saskatchewan’s Go Green Fund, RCE Saskatchewan carried out research identifying education for sustainable development (ESD) projects within six priority areas for sustainability in its Canadian prairie region. This ESD capacity assessment was conducted by eight post-secondary students from late 2007 to 2009 and resulted in a searchable database and visual representation (map) of these ESD projects along with ongoing documentation of project milestones and processes. The database has become a useful tool assisting networking of Saskatchewan ESD providers, researchers and participants. This article describes the importance of the inventory in advancing the RCE, the project conception and management, the processes utilised for its successful completion (including descriptions of the technology utilised), the project findings and their implications. It concludes that for an RCE with minimal resources, an ESD project inventory employing student researchers within a higher education setting using Free/Open Source technologies is a cost-effective way of advancing the networking and capacity-building goals of an RCE.

Walking my talk as an intentional, embodied, (co)constructed environmental educator

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, University of Regina. vii, 248 l.

Embodying Our Future through Collaboration: The Change Is in The Doing.

ABSTRACT Contributors to this special edition have agreed that we want a future of ecojustice and ecological sustainability. Our article unpacks experiences of oppression within the context of middle class academic privilege, undertaking resistances and working, in relationship, learning to live more sustainably in the Year of Living Sustainably. In this writing, we argue the case for activism in the academy and collaboratively build resilience toward more sustainable ways of being. By co-writing and analyzing fictionalized stories, we demonstrate how contemporary universities contribute to the unsustainability of social and ecological systems. This article presents a love story grounded in poststructural ecofeminist epistemology using collaborative autoethnography. Rather than re-presenting a heroic masculinist narrative of transcendence and success, we describe how our loving relationships support our activism.

Enlivening STEM Education Through School-Community Partnerships

A major response to the growing concern with diminishing engagement and participation of students in STEM pathways, in Australia and internationally, has been the involvement of the STEM community in school outreach activities. In Australia there has been a proliferation of links between scientists and schools, with the aim of engaging students in authentic activities and providing models of what STEM work pathways might entail. This chapter will draw on a series of projects studying partnerships between the professional science/mathematics communities and schools, to explore a range of partnership models, the experience and outcomes for students and teachers, and challenges for crossing the boundary between school and STEM professional communities. Such school/STEM community partnerships are particularly suited to studies related to environmental and sustainability issues, a focus explored in the chapter. Further, we will draw on a recent evaluation of the Australia-wide, CSIRO-led Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools (SMiS) program. That study provided insight into the use and outcomes of the SMiS model. We will explore some of the challenges of working across the school-STEM professional practice boundary, implications for curriculum, and differences in partnerships for mathematics compared to science.